'Brahms arrived here a few days ago,' he writes on the 22nd of April to his friend, Professor Lübke of Stuttgart. 'This morning he and Kirchner played some of Liszt's symphonic poems on two pianofortes. Horrible music!... We purged ourselves with Brahms' new sextet that has just come out. Brahms and Kirchner played it as a duet.'[17] The composer became intimate, also, at the house of Herr and Frau Wesendonck, who had been Wagner's great friends during his residence at Zürich, and could not hear enough about the composer of the 'Meistersinger,' of whom the Wesendoncks possessed inexhaustible personal recollections and several valuable souvenirs. Amongst these was the master's autograph score of the 'Rheingold,' an object that was regarded by Brahms with a respect almost amounting to veneration. Traits of habit and character similar to those with which the reader is familiar, and which recall the period of the Detmold visits, are described in Steiner's 'Recollections,' by Capellmeister F. Hegar,[18] who was the inseparable associate of Brahms and Kirchner: '... We were no less impressed by his extraordinarily sound health. He could venture upon anything. How often has he passed the night on the sofa of my bachelor's quarters when he was disinclined to climb the Zürichberg in the late hours of evening. Once indeed, when an older friend less hardy than himself claimed my hospitality, he lay down underneath my grand piano, and declared next morning that he had slept splendidly.' Hegar mentions that Brahms' musical memory and unusually rapid power of apprehension excited the astonished admiration of the Zürich musicians. 'When we played him our compositions for the first time, he would afterwards sit down and repeat long portions note for note from memory, pointing out the weak places.' One or two reminiscences of the summer are to be found in the volume of Billroth's letters from which quotation has already been made. Amongst them is the description of a music-party at his house, at which Brahms was present to hear a performance of his lately-published Sextet in G major. The consciousness of the composer's presence so unnerved Billroth that he was obliged to ask Eschmann, who was amongst the listeners, to relieve him of his part of second viola. 'I have learnt never to play before a composer,' he wrote a few days afterwards, 'unless his work has been well rehearsed. As I was quite familiar with the composition, I could imagine the vexation Brahms must have felt, although he put the matter aside in the kindest way. Kirchner, Brahms and Hegar had been up late together the night before and were tired. Everything contributed to make the evening dull.' Of the sextet he says: 'I think it wonderfully fine; so clear, so simple, so masterly.'