Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15

Program notes

About the Work

Few concertos have had so painful a birth. Brahms’s First Piano Concerto did not begin life as a concerto at all. In the spring of 1854 the twenty-one-year-old composer started a sonata for two pianos; within months he was trying to turn it into a symphony; and only after that attempt stalled did the material find its final shape as a concerto for piano and orchestra, completed in 1858. The backdrop to those years was the great crisis of Brahms’s early life. In February 1854 Robert Schumann, the older composer who had hailed Brahms in print only months before as the coming genius of German music, threw himself into the Rhine. He was rescued and committed to an asylum at Endenich, where he died in July 1856. Brahms moved to Düsseldorf to support Clara Schumann and her children, and the turbulent first movement has long been heard as a response to that catastrophe, though Brahms himself never said so.

What he did say concerned the slow movement. In a letter to Clara he wrote that he was “painting a gentle portrait” of her, and that it was to be the Adagio. In the manuscript that movement is headed with the words of the Mass, Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini (“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”), which many have taken as a private reference to Robert Schumann.

The premiere, on 22 January 1859 in Hanover, with Brahms as soloist and his friend Joseph Joachim conducting, was respectable. Five days later in Leipzig, the citadel of German musical taste, it was hissed. Audiences expected a concerto to be a vehicle for pianistic display; Brahms had written something closer to a symphony with piano obbligato, in which the soloist does not even enter until the orchestra has spent several minutes on its own. Brahms reported to Joachim, with rueful wit, that the concerto had been “a brilliant and decisive failure”. It took decades for the work to be recognised for what it is: one of the grandest and most searching piano concertos of the nineteenth century, in which the symphonic ambition that Brahms would not realise on its own terms until his First Symphony in 1876 is already fully present.

The three movements are laid out on a huge scale. The opening Maestoso, in D minor, is about as long as the other two combined. The Adagio is a hymn-like meditation in D major. The finale is a Rondo whose Allegro non troppo drive owes something to the finale of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, but whose fugal episode and exultant close in D major are pure Brahms. It makes a formidable opening for this programme, and the work that Petrenko and the orchestra have chosen to carry to Carnegie Hall and South America in the weeks that follow.

What to Listen For

First movement (Maestoso). Listen to the very opening: a long trill rumbles in the timpani and double basses on a low D while the violins and cellos hurl out a jagged theme full of wide leaps and wrenching trills. The harmony is deliberately unstable; the music seems to start in the wrong key. After this storm, a gentle, almost consoling second idea emerges in the strings. The piano, when it finally enters, does not compete with the orchestra; it slips in quietly with a tender, reflective phrase, as though it had been listening. Notice how often the soloist plays in heavy double octaves and thick chords, doubling or opposing the full orchestra rather than decorating it: this is the symphony-concerto that confused its first audiences. Listen, too, for the radiant F major theme that the piano introduces alone, a moment of calm at the heart of the storm, before the trills and leaps return for a coda of real ferocity.

Second movement (Adagio). The “gentle portrait” of Clara. Muted strings and bassoons open a slow, chorale-like melody; the piano answers with a meditative line that seems to think aloud. Listen for the long passages where the soloist plays almost alone, very softly, and for the moment near the end when the piano spins out a quiet cadenza-like reflection before the orchestra returns. It is music of hushed devotion, and Brahms asks the pianist for restraint rather than display.

Third movement (Rondo: Allegro non troppo). The piano launches the finale alone with a vigorous, stamping theme in D minor, which the orchestra takes up. Listen for the contrasting episodes (one lyrical and warm, one a busy, closely argued fugato in the strings) and for the short cadenza in which the soloist seems to test the main theme from new angles. In the closing pages the music turns from D minor to D major, and the horns lead a triumphant, pastoral coda: the struggle of the first movement is finally resolved.