Brahms and Reményi tour in the summer of 1853

Young Brahms (left) went on his first professional tour when he was just twenty years old with the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi in the early summer of 1853.

Reményi (1828-1898), five years older than Brahms, already had a sketchy past, having been banished from Austria in 1848 for his participation in the Hungarian Revolution. He met young Brahms in Hamburg, but with the authorities searching for him, he fled to the United States and concertized for four years. Returning to Germany, he arranged the 1853 concert tour that would change Brahms's life.

While visiting the Court of Weimar, the pair met Franz Liszt, but Reményi took offense when Brahms, exhausted from all the traveling, fell asleep during Liszt's reading of his new Sonata in B minor and failed to praise Liszt adequately. The tour and the friendship with Reményi ended abruptly.

Had Brahms not slighted Liszt, he might not have had the opportunities to enhance his newly-found friendship with the violinist, Joseph Joachim, and to embark on the complicated and misunderstood relationships with Robert and Clara Schumann that changed his life.

These are some of the characters in my new book, Three Movements for Six Hands, an Historical Novel by Terry Row. To subscribe and reserve a copy today, send a check for $20.00 – to cover the book, sales tax, shipping and handling – to Terry Row, PO Box 1121, Los Alamos, CA 93440-1121. I'll send autographed copies of the finished volume to subscribers around the publication date of May 7, 2015, Johannes Brahms's 182^nd birthday.

Violinist Joseph Joachim introduced Brahms to the Schumanns

The Hungarian violinist, Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) is an important supporting character in the drama that is Three Movements for Six Hands, an Historical Novel by Terry Row. The book is scheduled for release on Brahms's birthday next year, May 7, 2015.

Joachim exploded onto the European music scene as a boy, a protege of Felix Mendelssohn, under whose baton he made his debut, playing the Otello Fantasy by Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst. At the age of 12, he performed the Beethoven Violin Concerto in London, with Mendelssohn conducting, establishing the piece in the standard repertoire. After an association with Franz Liszt that lasted only 4 years, he broke with Liszt and the so-called 'New German School' that included Wagner and Berlioz, and returned to a more conservative approach, aligning himself with Robert and Clara Schumann.

The history books tell us that in the late summer of 1853, Joachim provided his new acquaintance, twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms with a letter of introduction to Robert Schumann, and that on the first of October of that year, Brahms showed up on the doorstep of the Schumann home in Düsseldorf and presented that letter. There may have been more to it. Brahms stayed for a very important month in his young life.

At the end of October, Joachim joined them in Düsseldorf, where Schumann and Brahms and a third composer, Albert Dietrich, presented him with the F-A-E Sonata, a collaborative effort.

From Wikipedia: “The sonata was Schumann's idea as a gift and tribute to violinist Joseph Joachim, whom the three composers had recently befriended. Joachim had adopted the Romantic German phrase "Frei aber einsam" ("free but lonely") as his personal motto. The composition's movements are all based on the musical notes F-A-E, the motto's initials, as a musical cryptogram.”

Subscriptions for Three Movements for Six Hands are being offered at $20, allowing readers to assist in the costs of editing and publishing the book. So far, the cost of editing has already been collected and the book is being sent to the editor on June 14, 2014.

Don't delay. Reserve your autographed copy today by mailing a check for $20.00 – to cover the book, sales tax, shipping and handling – to Terry Row, PO Box 1121, Los Alamos, CA 93440-1121.