He must have arrived [a Lipsia] in a state of very overwrought nerves, for on New Year's Eve an episode happened which nearly brought about a complete rupture with Henri Petri. There had been a party at Petri's house in honour of his old teacher Joachim. Petri, who was always anxious to do his best for Ferruccio, pressed him to play his Chopin-Variations to the great man. Ferruccio had taken an antipathy to Joachim and flatly refused to play at all; there was a somewhat painful scene which was made all the more painful by Petri's good manners and Joachim's perhaps rather condescending kindness. Ferruccio went home and sat up for what remained of the night writing an acrimonious letter to Petri. After he had written it he re-read it, thought better of it and refrained from sending it off. The quarrel was averted, and he joined Petri's Quartet in a concert at Halle a week later; but it required all Petri's kindness of heart to heal the breach. As Ferruccio admitted in his letter, the affair of the party for Joachim was merely the last drop in the cup. The letter might well give a reader the impression of nothing more than an outburst of wounded vanity. Petri was a man who had a wife and children to support; he was one of the finest violinists of his day - Reinecke told Ferruccio that he considered him the obvious successor to Joachim - but he was also a Dutchman who valued the comforts of life and was extremely glad to have reached comparatively early in his career an eminence which enabled him to maintain his household in a good social position. No man was more ready to be kind to rising talent, but rising talent, when it had risen to a certain height, was apt to find Petri too conventional and too desirous of standing well with persons of influence. Ferruccio did not take criticism with humility, and what roused him to even more fury than the criticism of his own work was Petri's respect for Reinecke and Joachim as composers and his condescending disparagement of Ferruccio's own contemporaries Sinding and Richard Strauss. The letter was the expression of a noble and generous temperament; but Ferrucao was wise not to post it. [DENT, pp. 79-80]