XII
(To Boston, U.S.A.)
Vienna, 1881.
DEAR FRIEND:
Accept my best thanks for at last giving me some news of you; it is the least you can do, though it hardly can make up for the fact that you have basely left us. (Henschel’s footnote. I had accepted the conductorship of the newly-founded Boston Symphony Orchestra.) I hope it will fit into your plans that my residence this summer will be Pressbaum, near Vienna. I am sure you will be wanting to show your wife the beautiful old “Kaiserstadt”; I shall be only a short distance away – by rail, which, however, I always travel with great pleasure!
Announce yourselves then, quick and surely!
…I should not like to be persuaded again to arrange Chamber-Music for the orchestra. A few times I have done it, but at once repented and put the thing aside. Were it not that nowadays everything possible is being arranged for everything possible I should be inclined to think we wrote only confusedly nowadays anyhow.
Mind, I do not mean to try and dissuade you from doing it yourself – the thing seems to be the general fashion.
I myself, however, prefer to retain my ears and know what is a pianoforte piece and what an orchestral piece; what a song and what an aria; what a solo-quartet and what a chorus.
But – I have still little leisure (or patience) for writing letters.
Let me soon hear you are coming.
Remember me to your young wife and be heartily greeted by yours.
Notes
The painting of Pressbaum is not in Henschel’s book.
Theory of Music 
I see from Wikipedia that Henschel had married his first wife Lilian Bailey (1860-1901) earlier that year — she was 21, hence Brahms’s description.