Few composers felt the anxiety of Beethoven’s influence more than Johannes Brahms. When he met Robert Schumann in 1853, when he was 20 years old, he hadn’t yet composed a symphony. Emboldened by Schumann’s enthusiastic endorsement of his music, Brahms began work on a first symphony the next year—but as he put it, the echoes of the “footsteps of a giant” kept him from completing the piece. He reorganized the material he had written as a sonata for two pianos, and by 1858, the work had been further transformed—much of it written anew—into the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15. The work’s premiere in January 1859 was not the triumph Brahms had hoped it would be, however. After a second performance in Leipzig, the audience’s cold reception caused Brahms to dislike the city for the rest of his life.

While the Concerto is not a symphony, of course, one contemporary critic dubbed the work “a symphony with piano obbligato.” The orchestra plays a vital role in establishing and maintaining the work’s dramatic trajectory. The first movement, aptly marked Maestoso, moves from music epic in its proportions to a radiant, almost chorale-like second theme. The second movement bears the inscription “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domine” (Blessed who comes in the name of the Lord), which has been interpreted variously as an homage to Robert Schumann (whom Brahms apparently called “Meinherr Domini”), a reference to Schumann’s wife Clara, who became one of Brahms’s closest friends, or something entirely different. In the concluding Allegro non troppo—a rondo—the piano grabs the stage at the opening and is even given a cadenza. As he does in other works like his Violin Concerto, Brahms keeps tight control of the balance between solo and orchestra, carefully integrating any virtuosic flashiness with the overall dramatic context of the work.