As a lad of fourteen Brahms played for the first time in public, pieces of his favorite masters, Bach and Beethoven, and original variations on a folk-song, thus showing an early liking not only for popular melodies, but for a musical form which he has cultivated more assiduously and for higher purposes than any other modern composer. Indeed this combination of popular elements with most artistic and complicated forms has perhaps remained the most characteristic feature of Brahms’ music. After giving a few other concerts, Marxsen kept him for several years from appearing in public, until in 1853 he could send him as a master of his instrument upon his first journey with the Hungarian violin virtuoso Remenyi. In Hanover, where he played much before the king, he met Joachim, who became his life-long friend, and Joachim was especially impressed when Brahms, in one of these concerts with Remenyi, transposed on account of the low pitch of the piano, without any preparation and even without notes, a Beethoven violin sonata, raising it a semitone. Marxsen was not surprised; for years Brahms had been accustomed to transpose great pieces at sight into any key, and so astonishing was his memory, that he never carried notes with him upon a concert trip. The compositions of Beethoven and Bach and a long list of modern concert pieces were safely committed to memory by him. Brahms remained several weeks in Weimar as the guest of Liszt, who delighted in playing the young composer’s manuscripts. Then he parted from Remenyi and went with Joachim’s recommendation to Robert Schumann in Düsseldorf. The impression which his personality, playing, and works made upon the latter was profound. Nothing in his later career, rich in honors and triumphs, can be dearer to his memory than the enthusiastic greeting with which Schumann introduced him to the musical world.