Johannes Brahms
Piano Concerto No. 2
Just before his 45th birthday, in 1878, Johannes Brahms began sketching out themes for his second piano concerto. His first, completed almost 20 years earlier in 1859, had met with a less than enthusiastic reception, and Brahms had avoided tackling another. However, by 1878 Brahms was a famous and critically acclaimed composer, with two symphonies under his belt (he had just completed Symphony No. 2 in 1877), and perhaps he finally felt that he was up to the challenge.
After working out a few themes following a trip to Italy, Brahms put the music aside to write his violin concerto, then returned to the piano concerto intermittently for the next three years. He completed the piece in 1881, and wrote to his friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg that he had finished “a tiny little piano concerto with a wisp of a scherzo.” This was his joke, of course, since he knew his piano concerto was one of the largest since Beethoven’s “Emperor” concerto. Brahms’s ‘wisp’ of a scherzo made the piece especially unusual, since instead of the typical three-movement form he enlarged the concerto to a symphonic, four-part size. The scherzo, in fact, may have been intended originally for the violin concerto.
Brahms and a friend performed a two-piano version of the new work in a private concert for friends. Conductor Hans von Bülow heard of the piece and invited Brahms to play it in rehearsal with his orchestra in Meiningen, after which Brahms premiered it publicly at the Redoutensaal in Budapest on November 9, 1881. Unlike his first piano concerto, the second piano concerto in B flat was met with popular and critical approval, and soon became part of the standard repertoire. Von Bülow even encouraged Franz Liszt to review the piece. Although Brahms had turned the older composer down when invited to join Liszt’s Neue Deutsche Musik Verein, Liszt apparently had no hard feelings and praised Brahms for a “distinguished work of art, in which thought and feeling move in noble harmony.”
The concerto’s four-part form makes the work especially prob lematic for the soloist, both in endurance and because the second-movement scherzo needs to be energetically offset from the first movement, yet not detract from the first movement’s fire. The soloist performs more as a partner with the orchestra than in some concerti, playing passages of octaves or sixths, huge chords, and complex rhythms along with the orchestra. The work also boasts a significant part for the principal cellist in the third movement.
The first movement, Allegro non troppo, opens with a theme played by a single horn, followed by a piano cadenza that brings us to the exposition. The stormy development segues to the final restatement of the opening theme, with a brilliant maestoso coda. Then that atypical scherzo follows, Allegro appassionatoin D minor. Although offset briefly by a trio in D major, the movement is mainly dark and, yes, passionate.
The Andante finally calms things, opening with a tender cello solo (Brahms later recalled this melody in a song, “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer,” ever softer is my slumber). The piano expands on this in a quiet cadenza. Although the central section is more high-strung, the overall effect of the movement is of peaceful introspection.
The closing Allegretto grazioso is indeed graceful–but quickly evolves into spirited virtuoso work for the piano soloist. The form of the movement is a seven-part rondo, A-B-A-C-A-B-A, and is expanded to huge proportion to balance what has come before. Orchestra and piano share equally in the rousing, brilliant close.