The tour opened on October 24 in Schaffhausen, and included Winterthur, Basle, and finally Mühlhausen in Alsace. An interesting incident of the visit to Mühlhausen was the renewal of friendly relations, after ten years of estrangement, between Joachim and von Bülow, who was resident during the season 1866-67 at Basle, and gave Trio concerts there with Abel and Kahnt. No communication took place between the former Weimar intimates during the week passed by Brahms and Joachim at Basle, but Bülow's affectionate nature was strongly stirred by seeing his old friend again on the concert-platform and hearing his public performances, which he describes as 'ideal perfection.' The sequel may be told in the words of his letter to Raff, dated Basle, November 22.
'And now, a great piece of news. On Sunday the 10th I travelled to Mühlhausen for the Brahms-Joachim concert, and the relation of friendship between Joachim and me was renewed on French soil after ten years' interruption. This will lead to no results of a positive nature, but a stone has been taken from my heart, and from his also as he has assured your sister-in-law. For my sake Joachim returned to Basle for a few hours and then took the night train to Paris.'[21]
Some years were yet to elapse before Bülow could pretend to any cordiality of feeling towards the art of Brahms. In another letter of 1866 we read:
'I respect and admire him, but—at a distance. The Pianoforte Quintet seems to me the most interesting of his large compositions.... Kiel is much more sympathetic to me.'[21]
He prevailed upon himself, indeed, to play the Horn Trio at his Basle Trio concert of March 26, 1867, when his colleagues were Abel and Hans Richter, who commenced his artist's career as a hornist, and was at this time living in Switzerland in the enjoyment of Wagner's intimacy; and he included Joachim's Variations for viola and pianoforte in the same programme; but as late as 1870 he wrote to Raff:
'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.'