Brahms Piano Concerto No 1

As the orchestra hurls itself into the tempestuous opening of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto, it is hard to imagine how the soloist is going to respond. In fact, were there not a piano placed front and centre, we would be forgiven for thinking this was not going to be a concerto at all. Why the opening to this work sounds so symphonic is easily explained. Its historical origins underpin the heart of its emotion and style.

On a cold, wintery night in Düsseldorf in February 1854, the composer Robert Schumann threw himself off a bridge into the river Rhine. He had been mentally ill for some time and, once fishermen had pulled him out of the freezing water, he was taken to an asylum, from where he muddled through the last two years of his life.

Five months before that fateful night, Schumann and his wife Clara had taken under their wings a young unknown German composer called Johannes Brahms and though the elder musician’s statements about Brahms being the heir of Beethoven was a burden Brahms found hard to bear at times, he owed a great deal to the mentorship that the Schumanns provided. As soon as Johannes heard the news of Robert’s attempted suicide, he rushed to offer practical and emotional support. Clara was distraught and the whole household in turmoil.

Brahms had come to help as a friend, but within a few days Brahms the composer could not resist turning his feelings into music. Schumann had recently bought a second piano for Clara and, with two instruments in the same house, Brahms set about writing a sonata for two pianos. But with the intensity of the emotional chaos around him, it did not take long for Brahms to realise that ‘even two pianos aren’t enough’, and he was going to need the sonority of a full orchestra to fully express himself. It was an opportunity to embark on his first symphony.

Brahms, only 21 at the time, had not yet written for an orchestra and he did not find it easy. Quite apart from the musical challenges, the pressure of expectation that Schumann’s very public admiration had created proved prohibitive and he abandoned the idea after only three movements. He was at a loss to know what to do with the musical material he cared so much about. It seemed to defy all attempts to fit it into the boundaries of any one particular instrumental form. But in 1856, Brahms told Clara that he had had a dream in which he was performing his unfinished ‘unfortunate symphony’ as a piano concerto and was ‘completely enraptured’ by it. Overnight, literally, the solution was found. Emotion and form had finally come together. Despite its tortured beginnings, the music from that traumatic time survived and Brahms’ First Piano Concerto was born.

As easy as it is to hear the catastrophic opening music as a man hopelessly flaying around in a dangerously fast flowing river, Brahms was never a cinematically explicit composer. Yet as an expression of the hysteria that Schumann’s suicide attempt aroused in others, it is very credible. And if one is to imagine Brahms the composer as Brahms the soloist (which he was in the work’s first performances), it is tempting to appreciate the pianist’s opening gentle music as a description of the caring and calming influence he sought to be on Clara. Indeed, the whole first movement, one of the longest of any concertos, has so many contrasts and connections that it sounds like a very vivid description of the complex but loving triangle that was Robert, Clara, and Johannes.

We will never know exactly how Brahms and Clara Schumann’s friendship developed. But their emotional and musical closeness is undeniable. ‘I am painting a tender portrait of you,’ he wrote to her. ‘It will be the (concerto’s) Adagio’. When she heard it, Clara replied that ‘the whole piece has something churchly about it.’ She did not know that underneath the movement’s opening melody Brahms had written ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’. (‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’). Given that Brahms had told Clara that ‘I think of you going to the concert hall like a high priestess to the altar’, the connection is undeniable. Clara and Johannes clearly loved each other but as she saw him rather like a son and he imagined her as a priestess, it’s not surprising that the precise nature of this love has confused the world ever since!

One of the reasons that Brahms had abandoned the idea of turning this music into a symphony was because he had not been able to think of a suitably symphonic finale. But the concerto form traditionally uses its last movement to showcase a soloist’s technical brilliance. A symphonic conclusion is not really the point, and to a certain extent the composer is off the hook. With the pressure off, Brahms sought musical inspiration from the past. Though the musical material itself owes much to Bach, the structure of the finale is almost identical to that of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. Maybe in the end Brahms was acknowledging that Schumann was right about him being the next Beethoven. A fitting tribute to the man whose madness had sparked the whole piece in the first place.

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