Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor

The genesis of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 is intimately bound up with the composer Robert Schumann. The friends’ first encounter in September 1853 left Schumann grasping for superlatives, predicting (rightly, as it turned out) that Brahms was Beethoven’s natural successor. Just three years later, following a half-hearted attempt at drowning himself in the Rhine, Schumann passed away, incarcerated in a mental asylum. Deeply affected by his friend’s predicament, Brahms had meanwhile begun work on a sonata for two pianos that morphed rapidly into a symphony and then, fusing both soundworlds, a piano concerto. Only the original first movement made it into the final version, a 23-minute symphonic blockbuster in D minor whose anguished intensity and heightened emotionalism encapsulate Brahms’s turbulent state of mind at the time. To this he added a heartfelt “Adagio”, intended (he later confessed) as a musical portrait of Schumann’s widow, Clara (to whom he had grown very close), and a blazing “Allegro non troppo” finale, whose main theme pays homage to Mozart’s equally harrowing D minor Concerto (No. 20), K. 466. The Concerto fell initially on deaf ears—following the 1859 premiere, Brahms (as soloist) recalled a limp attempt at applause being hissed down—but is now widely considered a classic of the genre.