Footnotes

¹ Probably Op. 10: cf. January 10.

² Josef Gänsbacher (1829–1911), Viennese singer, cellist, pianist, professor of voice at the Vienna Conservatory 1875–1904; friend of Brahms, who dedicated his E minor Cello Sonata, Op. 38 to him.

³ Schenker’s diary for this day records: “By chance, Miss Kahn amplifies the Brahms-Epstein anecdote with Brahms-Gänsbacher anecdotes. Thus Gänsbacher himself is said to have reported – but how much he must have suppressed, if he could bring himself to recount the following – that during a chamber music rehearsal he cried out to Brahms: ‘Johannes, why are you playing so loud? I cannot hear myself at all.’ Whereupon Brahms replied, ‘You lucky man!’ Gänsbacher also recounted that once Brahms, allegedly out of anger, cried out to him: ‘You're good enough only to study with dilettantes.’ A definition which, as Miss Kahn says, was just as to the point as everything else that Brahms composed!”

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