The composer, however, soon showed that if he had for the moment declined in public estimation, it was only 'pour mieux sauter.' A week later, the Serenade in D was successfully given by the Gesellschaft; on November 29 followed the A major Quartett, far more favourably received than its predecessor; fame, once established, gathered and grew with steady persistence, and at last, in December 1863, opposition itself was silenced by a magnificent performance, under Hellmesberger, of the Sestett in B flat. For once the audience was unanimous; the critics forgot to cavil; even Brahms' old enemy, the _Blätter_, admitted itself convinced, and, in the first flush of enthusiasm, supplied this most rigorous of classical compositions with a romantic programme. 'The opening movement,' it said, 'is a walk in spring when the sky is cloudless and the flowers are blooming in the hedgerows. The second' (_i. e._, the Air with variations) 'represents a gipsy encampment--dark-eyed maidens whispering secrets, and afar-off the subdued tinkle of the mandolin. The third is a rustic dance; and the fourth--well, we suppose that fourth must mean the journey home.' This is not remarkably conclusive as an exposition of the Sestett, but it appears to have been kindly meant, and, at any rate, it succeeded in calling public attention to the work, and preparing, in some measure, for a more adequate discussion of its merits.
Meantime Vienna was shaken to its foundations by another inroad. At the end of 1862 Wagner appeared, gave two or three concerts in the course of the winter, and finally established himself at Penzing, where he worked at Meistersinger, and received his friends with his accustomed Oriental hospitality. His relation with Brahms appears to have been always of the slightest. The two composers met occasionally on neutral ground, but they were never intimate, and it was impossible that they should be attracted to each other by any real artistic sympathy. Wagner, indeed, seems to have looked on his great rival as Victor Hugo looked on Corneille and Racine: Brahms, for his part, was content to avow that he did not understand the theatre, and that for him the magic of Walküre and Tristan had no enchantment. It may be that the sense of contrast gave additional point to a famous and frequently-quoted epigram of the younger artist. One day Hanslick was rallying him on his anchorite habits and suggesting marriage as an antidote. 'No,' said Brahms, 'it is as hard to marry as to write an opera. Perhaps--in both--a first success might embolden one to try again; but it wants more courage than mine to make a start.' The mind naturally reverts to an enthusiastic and rather callow reformer, who had once endeavoured to inculcate a short-service system of matrimony in an opera called Das Liebesverbot.