'What do the Br.'s matter to me? Brahms, Brahmüller, Bruch, etc. Don't mention them again! Who knows whether a Riehl may not turn up in 1950 to beplutarch them as maestrinelli? The only one who interests me is Braff!' The fact that von Bülow's critical faculty was subject to the disturbing influence of his capacity for warm friendship cannot lessen the admiration inspired by his talents and his generous nature. His severe animadversions on Brahms' works, together with his practical neglect of them up to a period when his opinion as to their merits had become very much a matter of indifference, may be pardoned by the lovers of our master's art, who remember that they were, for the most part, the outcome of his deep personal affection for Liszt, Wagner, and Joachim, and of his long-continued intimate association with the leaders and prominent disciples of the New-German school. Brahms returned to Vienna, after about a year and a half of absence, immediately after his friend's departure from Mühlhausen, and spent the winter quietly at work in his room on the fourth story of No. 6, Poststrasse. The earliest event of any importance to his career that marks the opening months of the year 1867 is the first public performance of the Sextet in G major, which was given at the Hellmesberger concert of February 3. The reader will by this time hardly be surprised to learn that the work was received without enthusiasm. 'The composer was certainly called for and applauded,' says Schelle, Hanslick's successor in the _Presse_, and a loyal though unbiassed supporter of Brahms, 'but it was with a certain reserve. One felt distinctly that the public was not carried away by the work, but desired to do justice to so admirable an achievement.... Brahms may be called a virtuoso in the modern development of the quartet style, ... but only that can reach the heart which proceeds from the heart, and the sextet comes from the hand and the head, whilst the warm pulsations of the heart are to be felt only at intervals.'