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Exhausted and near the end of a career making new music and being more often pilloried than acclaimed for it, Berlioz was not phrasemaking when he wrote to Joachim of suffering for art.

Letters between the friends tracked back and forth, each with exciting news. Brahms wrote that Liszt wanted Joachim to send the Hamlet Overture for a performance.47 The sage of Weimar continued to try everything he could think of to keep his violinist in the flock, but Joachim was inching away from him. Nor, for all the pleasantries and his attempts to court the powerful, could Brahms see Liszt’s music and ideals as anything but a fraud. Over the years, that shared enmity was to be one of the things that held Brahms and Joachim together. The violinist required a hero, a cause, and now that wedded him to Johannes. Brahms understood that, counted on it, and over the years took ruthless advantage of it.

On the earlier Leipzig stay, Brahms had played his A Minor Violin Sonata in a private concert with Ferdinand David. It was the last time that work was heard of. Liszt borrowed and perhaps lost the sonata or, more likely, Brahms got it back and destroyed it. (The publisher Senff, to whom it had been offered, received the F Minor Piano Sonata instead.48) On December 17, Brahms made his public debut in Leipzig, playing the C Major Sonata and E Minor Scherzo at a concert of the David Quartet, in the Gewandhaus. The reception was mixed, but the Neue Zeitschrift critic ringingly concluded that Brahms “will, advancing steadfastly and safely along his ‘new paths,’ someday become what Schumann has predicted of him, an epoch-making figure in the history of art.”49 Brahms had gotten through his first trial as Messiah in one piece.

In Leipzig, however, the pleasant words did him little good. In addition to the radical Weimar/conservative Leipzig dichotomy, a liberal-conservative split had developed within the city itself. These factions divided over Brahms only a little less bitterly than over Liszt and Berlioz. Brahms was willing to court powerful individuals if he respected them, but declined to align himself with any party. With one disastrous exception, he would always stand apart from factional confrontation in public. So in the political ferment Brahms was left outside: if he detested everything to do with Weimar, he still never really reached out to the logical alternative, the Leipzig conservatives. In any case, they hated him. (A group sympathetic to Brahms did accumulate in Leipzig, but for years remained marginal.) Through it all, Neue Zeitscrift editor Franz Brendel, for all his New German sympathies, struggled to build bridges between the parties and in the process would do Brahms several good turns.

Yet ultimately Brahms remained solitary. As man and artist, his own company suited him best. Naturally there were costs to pay for that. When the time came, Leipzig’s conservatives would strike back, devastatingly.

Brahms had been reporting the excitement of the last seven months to his parents in Hamburg. As the Christmas season approached, homesickness overtook him in Leipzig. To Schumann he wrote, “I shall probably get copies of my first works before Christmas. Imagine what my feelings will be when I see my parents again after almost a year’s absence. I cannot describe the feeling in my heart when I think of it.”50

Brahms took the train from Leipzig on December 20 in the company of new confederate Julius Otto Grimm, to whom he gave the manuscript of the Opus 6 Lieder with the inscription “In remembrance of Kreisler.” Grimm, wry and spirited if something of a pedant as composer and teacher, was perhaps the friend who most enjoyed the Kreisler side of Johannes—more than did the melancholic Joachim. Leaving Grimm in Hanover, Brahms arrived in the Hamburg station that night. Johannes the Fair had returned home in triumph.

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HE BROUGHT HOME WITH HIM new printed copies of the C Major Sonata and Opus 3 Lieder. Music engraving moved fast in those days;