The Story of a Masterpiece

I’ve always been fascinated by how music is created – the motivations and influences that shaped sounds into existence. The story of Brahms first Piano Concerto is a tale of talent and ambition, friendship and love, tragedy and the ultimate triumph of ideals and artistic vision.

In 1853 Johannes Brahms was a 20 year old professional pianist and aspiring, young composer. When a friend gave him a letter of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann, it proved to be a pivotal turning point in his career. After listening to him play some of his own solo piano pieces, the extent of his genius impressed them to become not only his mentors, but also close friends who welcomed Brahms into their home. Robert Schumann prophecised in a popular music publication that Brahms was the ‘true heir of Beethoven’, immediately elevating the young composer to prominence and fame overnight.

Only five months later in February of 1854, Robert Schumann attempted suicide and would remain confined in an asylum for the last two years of his life. Consumed with anguish, Brahms reaction was to create a musical response that he originally envisioned as a sonata for two pianos. He rushed to Clara’s aid, who was pregnant with her seventh child. He assisted her with Robert’s affairs and helped look after her large family as she prepared for childbirth. By the time she resumed her own prestigious career, their feelings for each other had deepened into what would become a life long friendship filled with respect, admiration and a very complex, complicated love. 

Within a few months Brahms began to reimagine his sonata for two pianos as a four movement symphony, a work worthy of the promise of Robert Schumann’s prophecy. He confided with Clara and consulted extensively with trusted friends as he worked on the first movement and it’s orchestration. By January of 1855, after a second and third movement had been composed – still only on the piano, Brahms was dissatisfied with his efforts. Almost exactly one year after he had started composing the sonata and then the symphony, he wrote to Clara that he’d dreamt “I used my hapless symphony to make a concerto, and was playing it as such…” He decided the original musical response he had composed to Shumann’s attempted suicide would serve as the opening of the first movement, and disregarded the other two. As he composed the second movement, the adagio, he wrote Clara that he was “painting a tender portrait” of her. For his finale, the rondo, he turned to the final movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.3 as a model, but employing his own original ideas. Brahms essentially completed the concerto in 1856, but continued reworking it until he finally felt it was ready for performance in 1858. He created a two-piano arrangement from the original score as well. In October that year Clara wrote in her diary “Johannes has finished his concerto – we have played it several times on two pianos… “I am delighted with its greatness of conception and the tenderness of its melodies.”

The concerto was premiered on January 22, 1859 in Hanover, with the 25 year old composer as soloist. The audience was unimpressed and responded quite cooly, but not anything like how they would in Leipzig a week later. Serving as soloist in a performance with the distinguished Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Brahms wrote a friend after it’s conclusion “My Concerto has had a brilliant and decisive—failure… with “perfectly distinct hissing from all sides”. Critics wrote that the concerto “cannot give pleasure,” it contained “the shrillest dissonances and most unpleasant sounds.” However in March, the Hamburg Philharmonic performed the concerto with great success and favorable reviews. Encouraged, Brahms reworked parts of the concerto and shared the revised manuscript with Clara. She wrote it gave her “hours of joy”, that the adagio was “exquisite”, and the first movement gave her “great pleasure”. The Hamburg Philharmonic decided to perform the piece again with the new revisions – it’s fourth performance –  but it was met with indifference. They did agree to perform the concerto again in 1861, this time with Brahms conducting and Clara as soloist. Once again it suffered a disappointing response, leading Brahms and Clara to ignore the work for a number of years. Breitkopf and Hartel rejected publishing the concerto due to it’s reception, and it would be years before a Swiss company agreed to publish it. In 1865 Brahms gave a well received and much appreciated performance of the concerto in Karlsruhe. Yet, in 1874, with Clara as soloist, the piece “fared only slightly better” in Leipzig than it had at it’s debacle there in 1859. It wasn’t until 1882 when the prominent pianist and conductor Hans von Bulow asked to perform the concerto at a Rhine Music Festival as a part of his tour that it would begin to gain acceptance and recognition.

It might seem surprising, even unimaginable, that a work of such grandeur and scale could’ve been met with such inauspicious beginnings. Remember, audiences at that time were accustomed to lighter, shorter, ‘concertos as showpieces’. The orchestra was essentially relegated to accompany the soloist and their dazzling – often gratuitous – virtuosity. Brahms intention however was to meld three centuries of musical heritage – including chamber music techniques and the concerto grosso – in a work that would honor Robert Schumann’s prophecy of him. He presented the piano and orchestra as equal partners in the service of expressing musical ideas, as had been the tradition of Mozart and Beethoven. He wrote an intensely emotional concerto born of his deepest personal feelings in a structure of symphonic scale, the longest since Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. Though not highly regarded in it’s day, Brahms Piano Concerto No.1 is perhaps his most personal, powerful and beloved works, and now considered a cornerstone of the classical piano literature.