It is easy to see why Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto is one of his most beloved works. At once light and majestic, exuberant and introspective, it is a culmination of Brahms’s art. It lasts nearly an hour, yet it has such variety and richness of invention that it seems to flow by much more quickly. This is the work of a mature master, confident and unhurried, the opposite of the heavy and brooding First Piano Concerto from 20 years earlier, which had a difficult composition process and a disastrous reception.
Brahms conceived the first ideas about the concerto during a trip to Italy in 1878, writing to Clara Schumann, “You can have no conception of how beautiful it is.” Under pressure from violinist Joseph Joachim to write a Violin Concerto, he put the sketches for a piano concerto aside. Then in 1881, he went to Italy again and was inspired to go back to the concerto, which, despite its massiveness, he completed within a few months.
With his usual self-abnegation, Brahms called the concerto “a tiny, tiny piano concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo.” His close friend Clara Schumann wasn’t fooled. “I don’t really trust your word ‘little,’ she wrote. “However, I wouldn’t mind a bit because in that case I might even be able to play it myself.” Actually, the piano part is fiendishly difficult, though it rarely calls attention to itself and often has a chamber-like intimacy. Brahms, a formidable pianist, played the work at its Budapest premiere in 1881 with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. It was an immediate hit, and the concerto has been a favorite of piano virtuosos ever since.
The work is a concerto and symphony in one. (Brahms’s champion Eduard Hanslick called it “a symphony with piano obbligato.”) Its length and ambition forecast the piano concertos of Reger, Busoni, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Like a symphony, it has four movements and is also symphonic in the way it showcases various parts of the orchestra: the horn in the first movement, strings in the second-movement scherzo, cello and clarinet in the third movement, and various wind ensembles in the finale.
The piece opens with a mellow horn theme and a gently rippling piano followed by a massive cadenza—a microcosm of the concerto that right away demonstrates its fusion of intimacy and grandeur. The sonata-form first movement surges ahead with a vigorous statement of the opening motif and a soaring fanfare-like version of it in the development. Some of the most memorable moments are quiet, with misty harmonies that have a Brahmsian impressionism, as in the recapitulation where a horn blends with the rest of the orchestra in a seductive version of the main melody.
Brahms added a second-movement scherzo to broaden the piece and to balance its many moods. (Some believe he originally meant it to be part of his Violin Concerto.) This melancholy movement, which recalls the mood of the First Piano Concerto, follows sonata structure, building to a stormy conclusion.
The nocturnal third movement is intimate and delicate. Its luscious cello melody is among the most memorable songs in Brahms’s slow movements. In the middle, the concerto becomes pure chamber music: The orchestra gradually dissipates and dies away into breathless silence, out of which clarinets arc upward with piano figures high in the treble—a moment as unexpected as it is sublime.
The finale—marked Allegretto grazioso—is pure exuberance, airy and free, full of beguiling tunes yet rigorously constructed in its combination of rondo and sonata forms. It dances along in Brahms’s delectable Hungarian style, an idiom he also used in the finales of his Violin Concerto and later in his Double Concerto for Violin and Cello. At the end, in a final surprise, sonorous piano arpeggios return the work to the grandeur of the opening movement.
Brahms was a painstaking craftsman who fussed over details and often took forever to complete a work. “Music gets yanked out of me,” he once told Clara Schumann. “How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern one evening and writes some fresh music.” For Brahms, the quintessential perfectionist, composition was an arduous, often torturous process. His First Piano Concerto took five years to complete, his Requiem took 10, and his First Symphony close to 20. The Second Symphony, however, was a happy exception. He didn’t toss it off in a tavern, but he did write it in four months on a summer vacation in the town of Pörtschach in southern Austria, obviously an inspiring location: Brahms quickly wrote his Violin Concerto there the next year, describing Pörtschach as “a place with so many melodies flying around, one doesn’t know how to catch them.” The First Symphony finally behind him, Brahms apparently felt such a relief that the Second soared out of his imagination with effortless spontaneity.
The music certainly reflects a confident frame of mind. In contrast to the jagged tension and heroic struggle of the First Symphony, the Second is a continuous flow of lyricism, so much so that Sir Donald Francis Tovey and other early scholars took pains to point out that the ingenious transformation of the work’s opening reveals a rigorous formal design, including adherence to Classical sonata form in the first and last movements. Others have declared the rollicking but tightly written finale to be in the tradition of Haydn’s “London” symphonies.
By the 1877 Vienna premiere, Wagner was all the rage, and Brahms’s classicism was considered old-fashioned. The most memorable advocacy of the symphony—still quoted and anthologized—came from Eduard Hanslick, the vociferous Wagner hater and Brahms promoter, who wrote of the genial, serenade-like quality of the first, third, and fourth movements; the “broad, singing” Adagio, a movement “more conspicuous for the development of the themes than for the themes themselves”; and the “golden sincerity” of the finale, so “far a cry from the stormy finales of the modern school … Mozartean blood flows in its veins.”
Hanslick’s caveat about the Adagio reveals the discomfort of the conservative wing with the ambiguity of Brahms’s slow movements. Today, this Adagio is celebrated precisely for its mysterious, enigmatic atmosphere; its refusal to deliver obvious “themes”; and its sudden tragic outburst toward the end. The dark growlings of the brass in the development section of the first movement also belie the symphony’s reputation for unrelenting sunniness.
Nonetheless, this symphony lifts the listener into a decidedly upbeat mood that keeps rising as the work progresses. The orchestration is transparent and colorful, without the heaviness we stereotypically associate with Brahms; the third movement in particular has delicate, sparkling woodwinds and a chamber-like clarity. In the finale, Brahms leaves a powerful final impression with a triumphant trombone-powered coda that blows us out of our seats—the closest this meticulous craftsman ever came to a bacchanal.
—Jack Sullivan