Piano Concerto No. 1 (Brahms)

The Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15, is a work for piano and orchestra completed by Johannes Brahms in 1858. The composer gave the work's public debut in Hannover, the following year. It was his first-performed orchestral work, and (in its third performance) his first orchestral work performed to audience approval.

This concerto is written in the traditional three movements and is approximately 40 to 50 minutes long.

The piece is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (B♭ and A), 2 bassoons, 4 horns (initially 2 in D, 2 in B♭ bass), 2 trumpets (D), timpani (D and A) and strings.

Brahms was himself a professional-level pianist who had first highly impressed the leading violinist Joseph Joachim, who gave him a letter of introduction to Schumann. Brahms and Joachim became close friends for life. In 1853 Brahms had aroused the greatest admiration from Schumann and his wife Clara, a turning point in Brahms's career, by playing for them some of his own solo piano pieces. Clara was a leading concert pianist and a composer. She and Brahms began a lifelong friendship, which became more important when Robert was committed to an asylum in 1854 and died in 1856. Clara, 14 years older than Brahms, wrote of him in her diary in 1854 "I love him like a son." Brahms's love of her was respectful, more complex and conflicted, but he much valued her opinions and advice.

During the course of composition, the work passed through different forms. In 1854 it began as a sonata for two pianos. By July 27 of that year it was being transformed into a four-movement symphony. Brahms sought advice from his close friend Julius Otto Grimm. "Brahms was in the habit of showing his orchestrations to Grimm, who, with his conservatory training, was better schooled in orchestration." After incorporating some of Grimm's suggestions Brahms then sent the orchestrated first movement to Joachim. Evidently Joachim liked it. Brahms wrote to him 12 September 1854 "As usual, you've viewed my symphony movement through rose-coloured spectacles – I definitely want to change and improve it; there's still a great deal lacking in the composition, and I don't even understand as much of the orchestration as appears in the movement, since the best of it I owe to Grimm." By January 1855 Brahms had composed second and third movements, for piano. He ultimately decided to make the work a concerto for piano, his favored instrument, in 1855–56, still consulting friends about the orchestration. Avins writes that "In all the many volumes of correspondence to and from Brahms, nothing quite approaches the letters he and Joachim exchanged over his First Piano Concerto (there are more than twenty of them) ... Joachim's answers, lengthy, detailed, thoughtful, and skilled, are extraordinary testimonials to his own talent, and to the awe and admiration he felt for his friend." Brahms only retained the original material from the work's first movement; the remaining movements were discarded and two new ones were composed, a second movement adagio, which Gál called "calm and dreamlike", and a third movement rondo, in which Gál heard "healthy, exuberant creativity". The result was a work in the more usual three-movement concerto structure. As late as early February 1858, Joachim sent the manuscript back to Brahms "completely revised", hoping that he liked the reorchestrated sections. Brahms did not complete his First Symphony until 1876.

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