Johannes Brahms
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in D minor, op. 15 Johannes Brahms Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in D minor, op. 15

Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto in D minor is perhaps the wildest, most untamed work in his entire output. Its genesis began at a time when Robert Schumann, in his essay Neue Bahnen, had virtually proclaimed the 20‑year‑old composer-pianist from Hamburg the messiah. Brahms, who until then had made a name for himself only with piano works and as a performer, would, Schumann predicted, achieve great things above all in symphonies. With his First Piano Concerto, Brahms came close to that genre, for during its composition, the piece passed through several stages: first as a sonata for two pianos, then as a symphony. Not long after meeting Brahms, Schumann fell seriously ill with progressive paralysis, the consequence of a syphilis infection contracted in his youth. Brahms was shocked by the misfortune of his friend, who – apparently recognising his incurable condition – threw himself into the ice-cold Rhine in February 1854 and was subsequently confined to an insane asylum. Brahms was also unsettled by his feelings for Clara Schumann, which grew from sympathy into love; after her husband’s death in 1856, she had seven children to support and threw herself with full force into her career as a pianist.

All of this certainly affected the composer. Yet the extent to which his state of mind is reflected in his artistic inventions of this period – particularly in the work’s world-shattering opening – must remain an open question. For by the time of Schumann’s suicide attempt, the music is likely to have been largely sketched already; it may therefore also be an expression of an inner creative crisis in Brahms himself – something he never commented on. The first movement is of unprecedented dimensions and immense emotional range, encompassing catastrophic blocks of sound and unruly harshness as well as the most delicate, even tender passages; it is also studded with formidable technical challenges, such as the dreaded octave trills. Soon after Brahms had played through the three movements in the original version for two pianos with Clara Schumann, he found this scoring no longer sufficient and reworked the first movement into the opening of a symphony. Allegedly, a dream prompted him in early 1855 to transform the work once again into a piano concerto; a year and a half later, Clara Schumann noted: “Johannes has composed a splendid first concerto movement.”

The second movement resembles a meditation or a prayer: in his manuscript, Brahms wrote the Mass text “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini” (“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”) beneath the first line of music. The piano part, dreamily entwined with the orchestral solos, “sings” this section without words. At the end of 1857, Brahms admitted to Clara that the second movement was meant to be “a gentle portrait” of her; the dark passage in the middle section indeed speaks of desperate struggle with a love that could not become reality. In early 1858, the finale was at last complete. With its rhythmically recalcitrant main theme, it makes masterly use of rondo form to create a wide variety of moods, passing through more than one dramatic complication.

The premiere in Hanover was received with respect, but the second performance in Leipzig – again with Brahms at the piano – turned into a debacle: it was precisely the kind of public failure that only great art can provoke. Only after the third performance – in Brahms’s native city of Hamburg – did audiences recognise how groundbreaking this approach to the instrumental concerto genre was: not a display piece for demonstrating fluency, but a quasi-symphonic edifice, in which the solo instrument, intertwined with the orchestra, appears less an all-dominating hero than a first among equals.