Joachim's prolonged visit to Austria came to an end in the second week of the New Year with a farewell dinner given in his honour by Brahms, Billroth, Hanslick, and other friends, and a fortnight later he removed with his family from Hanover to Berlin. His residence was permanently fixed in the Prussian capital in the course of the following year by his acceptance of the post of director of the Royal High School for Music (executive art), which was about to be founded by King William of Prussia (afterwards the German Emperor William I.), as an addition to the State department for Art and Science, and in the planning and practical arrangement of which Joachim actively participated. Under his devoted management, it quickly rose to the high state of prosperity for which it has long been famous, and now, after more than thirty-five years of existence, it still enjoys the high advantage and distinction of his personal labour and influence as director, conductor, and teacher. The occasion of the opening in 1902, by the Emperor William II., of the spacious new buildings of the Royal Schools for Art and Science at Charlottenburg, of which the fine new music school is one, must have seemed to the great veteran musician, as he recalled the modest beginnings of his own special department in 1869, as one that included the crowning of much of the activity of his life. Brahms quitted Vienna a few weeks after his friend to fulfil a series of concert engagements, most of them arranged with Stockhausen, for the months of February and March, by which he hoped to make his journey to North Germany on the business of the Requiem answer a practical as well as an artistic purpose. He took up his headquarters at his father's house, and it was the last time that he returned from Vienna to Hamburg as to his nominal home. The post of conductor of the Philharmonic had again fallen vacant in 1867 by Stockhausen's resignation, and again, though Brahms did not apply for the appointment, there was a strong conviction amongst his friends that he would accept it if it were offered him. But it was not to be. Admired and loved as he was in Hamburg by an ever-increasing circle of friends, it was by a circle only. He was not popular with the average musician or the general public, and the Philharmonic committee passed him over a second time, electing Julius von Bernuth as Stockhausen's successor. Brahms said little on the subject, but it is fairly certain that the mortification caused him by this repeated slight from the musical officialdom of his native city sufficed to lead him to the determination at which he soon afterwards arrived, to settle permanently in Vienna.