Piano Concerto N° 2

Abstract

In July 1881 Brahms wrote to a friend that he had composed 'a tiny piano concerto with a tiny, dainty scherzo'. Behind the rather ponderous jest- for the B flat Concerto is, as Brahms fully recognised, one of the longest in the repertoire - lay a certain defensiveness. This frequently surfaced and was the result of the deep scar left by the utter failure of his First Piano Concerto (over which he had agonised for several years when in his mid-twenties, casting it first as a two-piano sonata, then as a symphony, before settling on its final form). At the age of fortyeight, however, he was no longer poor and unknown but much honoured, with two successful symphonies and a controversial violin concerto behind him. The Second Piano Concerto is an immensely powerful work of epic proportions that sets the soloist great challenges .in both technique and interpretation, since the piano part, though extremely demanding, is not showily brilliant. Brahms dedicated the work to his 'dear friend and teacher Eduard Marxsen' and himself played the solo part at the premiere in Budapest in 1881, when it was an immediate success. It opens in deceptive calm with two romantic phrases for solo horn- each echoed reflectively by the piano - and a pastoral-seeming woodwind theme, before the piano storms in with what might be called an introductory cadenza (none occurs later), making it clear that this is to be a movement ona massive scale, a movement of passion, nobility and intellectual questioning. The principal ideas, heard at the outset, are discussed and developed even in the exposition, and vanous other themes add their contribution to the closely-reasoned but emotionally intense working-out of the movement, which ends emphatically with a figure denved from the opening. Traditionally a slow movement should then follow, but as Brahms wrote to his publisher, 'You ought to be enormously pleased with me: not only, for a trifling sum, are you getting four movements instead of three - you're getting metronome marks too'; and the second movement is his 'dainty scherzo', which proves to be a fiery Allegro appassionato in D minor -its pungent start contrasting with a more peaceable, questing subject on the upper strings - followed by a trio in the major. After this the mam scherzo section returns, somewhat embellished, with the roles of orchestra and soloist reversed.