LDV94

Brahms finished this composite work – one of the miracles of which is precisely to conceal its composite nature – early in 1858; in the meantime, he had written other music – lieder, a piano trio, a serenade for orchestra (some of whose bucolic strains suggest passages in the concerto) and piano pieces. He gave a private performance of the concerto in Hanover in March of the same year. He and Clara were very pleased. ‘Johannes was overjoyed’, she wrote. The joy was short-lived. After the double failure of its premiere, it would be another fifteen long years before it was heard again; this time in Leipzig, under Clara’s fingers, at Christmas 1873. The work is at once a funerary monument for Schumann and an ode to the creative power of music composed by a genius in the springtime of his art. Within the dauntingly large corpus of piano concertos, it is one of the most atypical, as if set apart; this is especially the case with its vast opening movement, which might be likened to a ghost ship tossed by a stormy sea and captained by an intrepid, haunted composer. No other movement is comparable to this Maestoso (except perhaps the first one of Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ Sonata), an immense oceanic poem, a musical sea with its waves constantly surging back and forth, as if the seawalls of its form would give way under the enormous pressure of the young composer. One has the impression of entering the brain of a German Berlioz! This movement alone is a concerto in its own right, not only in its dimensions but also in its unique intensity. Brahms achieves here what Schumann had called for long before their meeting: ‘something intermediate between the symphony, the concerto and the grand sonata’. 14 BRAHMS ∙ PIANO CONCERTO IN D MINOR OP.15