LDV94

On 22 January 1859, Joseph Joachim premiered Brahms’s First Piano Concerto in D minor op.15 in Hanover, with the composer at the keyboard. It would appear that the majority of the audience was bored. The work appeared ‘incomprehensible, even dry, and sometimes extremely tedious’, wrote the local critic. Five days later, it was given again, with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Ferdinand David. This was a resounding failure, the most crushing in Brahms’s life and career; ‘a brilliant and decisive – flop’, in his own words. The Leipzig critic spoke of ‘desolation and aridity’, ‘a fermenting mass’, without ‘effective writing for the pianoforte’, which was ‘pinned down and squashed under a thick carapace of orchestral accompaniment’. Another reviewer underlined the ‘impression of monstrosity’ given by the first movement, but also noted the new effects of sonority and Brahms’s desire to treat the orchestra on the same plane as the solo instrument – which sounds rather like damning with faint praise . . . How did Brahms reach this point? Let us go back to trace the genesis of the concerto, which was as adventurous as the work itself. Brahms was twenty years old when he met Schumann on 30 September 1853; the latter was enraptured (‘Visit from Brahms. A genius!’, ‘the true Apostle’!) and perceived ‘disguised symphonies’ in his first piano sonatas. Schumann meant this as a compliment, but the much-repeated remark was to be the root of persistent misunderstandings in the reception of the two piano concertos. Projecting his own complexes about Beethoven onto Brahms, Schumann urged the young man to compose a symphony. But the Beethovenian model was as overwhelming for Brahms as it had been for Schumann; he was not to take up the gauntlet for another twenty-two years.