Although Brahms wrote music for piano over the course of his life, he only wrote two piano concertos. Potentially the poor reception of the ambitious first concerto, which he himself premiered in 1859, discouraged him for a while – he was so shaken by the failure, in fact, that he cut off his engagement to his fiancée! Already in his teens Brahms had rejected the career path of touring virtuoso à la Franz Liszt, preferring to focus on composing, although for decades he continued to perform as a means of networking and promoting new works. Through the 1860s Brahms focused on publishing songs and chamber music for the ever-growing market of middle-class consumers, and he ultimately became so successful that he was able to live off the proceeds of his publications. By the time he got around to his second piano concerto in 1878–1881, he was recognized as a master, evidenced in part by that honorary doctoral degree. His friend, the surgeon and amateur violist Theodor Billroth, in fact likened the first and second concertos to “the youth and the man.” Certainly Brahms was enjoying a relaxed period of mature productivity around this time, but he continued performing, playing the concerto over twenty times in a three-month span during the 1881–1882 season.
While the first piano concerto is symphonic in nature, the second piano concerto is somehow even more epic in scope; it follows a four-movement symphonic form, and it requires gargantuan effort from the soloist. It begins with a dialogue between French horn and piano, which soon turns into a solo piano cadenza – the sort of improvisatory virtuosity that should come much later in the movement, but then, Beethoven started his final two piano concertos with cadenzas. In these opening moments we hear the basis for the movement, the first three notes of the horn solo form the motivic backbone of the music, and the dramatic clash between major and minor keys will continue. If that weren’t drama enough, the second movement, in D minor, creates even more tension. Originally Brahms drafted some of this scherzo for the violin concerto (1878) that he wrote for Joachim, which is hard to imagine given the dense writing for the pianist here.
The Andante offers some reprieve, as the main melody first sounds in a beautiful cello solo and then is answered by the full strings and winds. When the piano finally enters it has more of a meditation on that melody than a repetition of it, but dramatic tension returns in a minor-key outburst. The movement winds down with an intimate sound world: the cello’s melody returns with color added by the oboe, flute and piano. The final Allegretto grazioso (Quasi Andantino) features sections of contrasting moods, but nothing so grandiose or serious as the first two movements. In some passages, Brahms borrows stylistically from the Hungarian-Romani music that he would have heard performed often in Vienna, a typical strategy for him to bring a multi-movement piece to a light-hearted close – appropriate that this piece was premiered in Budapest!