Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 (1854-8)
1 Maestoso
2 Adagio
3 Rondo: Allegro non troppo

  Brahms was only twenty-five when he completed his First Piano Concerto in 1858. Its gestation had been long and difficult. In March 1854, shortly after Schumann's attempted suicide and subsequent incarceration in a mental asylum, Brahms began a two-piano sonata which soon started to turn into a four-movement symphony. The work was sketched in two-piano score, but the finale was never finished. Virtuoso piano writing kept intruding into the conception, and though Brahms did score the first movement for orchestra, he was still inexperienced in this field and dissatisfied with the result.

Only in 1856, shortly before Schumann's death, did Brahms hit upon the solution of combining the resources of piano and orchestra in a concerto. The symphony's incomplete finale was discarded, as was the slow scherzo in sarabande tempo (years later he used its main theme as the basis of the second movement of the German Requiem) and the original slow movement; the first movement was rescored (with the benefit of advice from Joseph Joachim) and united to a new slow movement and finale. The premiere took place in Hanover on 22 January 1859 under Joachim's baton, with Brahms as soloist. Despite its teething troubles the work emerged with a grandeur and scope that no concerto had attained since Beethoven's 'Emperor', and accordingly its public reception was puzzled and cautious - indeed a second performance in Leipzig was a critical disaster. But performances continued, and within Brahms's own lifetime the concerto was recognised for its true worth.

The huge first movement is nearly the biggest, probably the most dramatic and certainly the finest sonata-design since Beethoven. The terse yet stormy opening theme, in a gaunt D minor with prominent chilly tritone over a rumbling D pedal, reflected (according to Joachim) Brahms's state of mind after hearing that Schumann had thrown himself into the Rhine. Undoubtedly the Sturm und Drang passion of the concerto's first movement must draw much of its power from the traumatic events of early 1854. The movement is rich in thematic ideas; it is noticeable that the piano at first propounds only the emotionally soothing ones (in its meditative, Bach-like first entry, and solo statement of the grand, assuaging second subject), in contrast to the fevered passion of the orchestra. Not until the moment of recapitulation does Brahms allow the piano more than a glance at the opening theme: and then, in the movement's most dramatic stroke, the piano blazons it forth over the pedal D from the unexpected and choleric region of the dominant of A minor.

In his autograph full score of the slow movement, Brahms underlaid the words 'Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini' ('Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord'), beneath the serene violin/viola theme in the opening bars, syllabically broken in the manner of a singing text. The music is closely akin to the sacred choral works he was writing in 1856, which included a project for a Mass. Taken together with the 'slow sarabande' that was later found appropriate in the German Requiem, this seems to constitute some evidence that the original symphony/sonata may have been conceived as a kind of instrumental 'Requiem for Schumann'. But 'Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini' is also the inscription over the door of the Benedictine Abbey where Kreisler, the hero of E. T. A. Hoffmann's novel Käter Murr, finally gains some peace after his romantic tribulations. Käter Murr was one of the young Brahms's favourite books, and he often used the pseudonym of'Johannes Kreisler Junior', so the music here has a possible literary (and autobiographical) origin. Then again in a letter Brahms also spoke of the Adagio as a portrait of Schumann's wife, Clara. Whatever the basis of its inspiration, this slow movement stands at the furthest possible remove from the first-movement Maestoso as one of Brahms's profoundest evocations of a withdrawn, almost mystical, spirit.

The thrusting, energetic main theme of the Rondo returns us at once to the physical world. There is no attempt to escape the profundities of the first two movements: rather the sense that they can only retain meaning through a continuing commitment to vigorous action. This strongly rhythmic and contrapuntal music engenders its own exhilaration; the broader, grander tunes of its episodes (which recall in outline the first movements second subject) introduce the concept of hope; a brilliant fugue turns the energy to precise, constructive use; and the start of the coda, with bagpiping oboes and drone fifths in the cellos, affords us a brief glimpse of pastoral paradise regained before Brahms brings the concerto to an end in a mood of fierce triumph.

Programme note © copyright Calum MacDonald