Piano Concerto No. 2

If one could choose a handful of works to exemplify why Johannes Brahms has captivated listeners over the years, that list would include the Second Piano Concerto, completed in 1881 at the height of his maturity. Here, all the elements of Brahms’s art come together. There is the joining of the grandly Olympian with the intimately songful. There is the virtuoso command of large-scale musical architecture, for a composer, one of the rarest gifts in the world. More subtly, in this work one finds on display the singular mysteriousness of Brahms — music at once powerfully communicative and elusive. 

For soloists proposing to master this gigantic concerto, it lives up to one of Brahms’s puckish nicknames for it: “the Long Terror.” Pianists speak of the exquisite anxiety of stepping onto the stage with the Alpine steeps of the first movement in your head, wondering how you’re going to find the place in your mind and fingers to attack it. 

For Brahms himself, the Second Piano Concerto was probably, from its first inspiration during a sunny vacation in Italy, one of the most untroubled major efforts of his life. No composer had ever faced greater expectations, starting from when Robert Schumann declared the 20-year-old Brahms to be the virtual messiah of German music. From then on, Brahms had to live with that forbidding prophecy hanging over him. But by the time of the Second Concerto, he had more or less fulfilled Schumann’s prophecy and had little left to prove — though he never rested on his laurels. One by one, he had painstakingly mastered most of the traditional genres and produced historic masterpieces in each. 

Already in the First Piano Concerto, the essential elements of the Brahmsian concerto were in place. The scale and style are symphonic as much as concerto-like, with the soloist less the heroic voice of Romantic concertos and more a participant in a symphonic dialogue. The structural approach of these two works is also distinctive, particularly in the Second Concerto, which is set across four movements rather than the genre’s traditional three. 

The Second Piano Concerto begins with one of the most beautiful movements of Brahms’s output, its expressive import without any of his familiar touches of tragedy or fatalism. The piano textures range from massive to delicate, interwoven with rich orchestral textures. The soloist steadily changes roles, their music moving from long, unaccompanied solos to lacy filigree accompanying the orchestra. While there are towering proclamations and moments of drama, the overall tone is lofty and magisterial. The opening horn call reminds us of Brahms’s love of the outdoors, of climbing Alpine peaks. Perhaps the whole first movement can be heard as music of rocky summits and spreading forests — and in that respect, a complement to the composer’s idyllic Second Symphony. 

Next comes the movement Brahms described to a friend as a “tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo.” When Brahms said things like that, he was usually joking; this D-minor movement (the only one to depart from B-flat major) is immense, dark-toned, and impassioned. It brings to the concerto a new emotional gravitas and a relentless rhythmic drive. In fact, this movement was originally drafted for the Violin Concerto, but Brahms may have jettisoned it because that work needed the opposite — something lighter. 

The slow movement begins with one of those sighing, exquisite melodies that Brahms invented and owned. Here we witness one of the innovations of this concerto: a slow movement in which the first section is dominated by a solo cello; only in the middle does the piano come to the fore, spinning out languid quasi-improvisatory garlands. The scoring is intimate and chamber-like — another kind of contrast to the first movement. 

The concerto comes to rest on a rondo finale of marvelous lightness, whimsy, and dancing rhythms. British musicologist Donald Francis Tovey caught the effect of the finale in programmatic terms: “We have done our work — let the children play in the world which our work has made safer and happier for them.” For the listener, the charm of the finale is its glittering instrumental colors and its ravishing melodies. 

Brahms dedicated the Second Piano Concerto to Eduard Marxsen, his childhood piano and composition teacher in Hamburg. After the premiere in Budapest in 1881, Brahms and conductor-pianist Hans von Bülow took the piece on the road. The composer’s old friend Clara Schumann wrote in her journal: “Brahms is celebrating such triumphs everywhere as seldom fall to the lot of a composer.” To keep themselves amused, Bülow and Brahms gave concerts that included both piano concertos, switching off at piano and podium as the mood struck them. Despite the decline of Brahms’s once-brilliant piano skills to what Clara bemoaned as “thump, bang, and scrabble,” somehow he was always able to play — or at least fake — his way through his concertos, which remain among the most beloved but also most difficult in the repertoire. 

— adapted from a note by Jan Swafford 

Jan Swafford has written biographies of Ives, Brahms, and Beethoven and contributes regularly to Slate. He is a long-time program writer and pre-concert lecturer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.