On today’s date in 1853, expectations both on stage and off must have been pretty high when a 20-year-old German pianist and composer named Johannes Brahms made his public debut in Leipzig. Just two months earlier, the older composer Robert Schumann had published a glowing prediction that young Mr. Brahms was going to turn out to be the bright hope for the future of German music.

Brahms played his big Piano Sonata in C, his Opus 1, no. 1, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, on a concert program he shared with members of the David String Quartet. Brahms also met the great French composer Hector Berlioz, who wrote: “Brahms has had a great success here and made a deep impression on me... this diffident, audacious young man who has taken into his head to make a new music.”

It was an especially exciting time for Brahms, who looked forward, as a kind of Christmas present, to seeing his music in print for the first time: both his Piano Sonata No. 1 and a set of Songs were due at any moment from Breitkopf & Haertel.

When the music appeared, he immediately sent copies off to Schumann, with this note: “I take the liberty of sending you your first foster children (who owe to you their citizenship of the world). In their new garb they seem to me too prim and embarrassed—I still cannot accustom myself to seeing these guileless children of nature in their smart new clothes!”