Brahms began to write the Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1878 during a trip to Italy. After several interruptions of the work, he nevertheless completed it in 1881. Despite the inspiring Italian atmosphere, the concerto is typically German. Brahms was the soloist at the premiere in Budapest in November 1881. Unlike the Concerto No. 1, the Second immediately appealed to the public, and was performed many times by both Brahms and Hans von Bülow. It was composed in the composer’s strongest years creatively, in unison with the Violin Concerto and Second Symphony. Brahms was famous and inspired then. The concerto’s music is grand, with epic sweep, written in the iconic key of B-flat major. Brahms added a scherzo to the classical three-movement. The material in the scherzo is believed to have been dropped from his Violin Concerto and reworked to preserve it.

Despite Romanticism’s pieties towards virtuosic instrumentalism, theatricality and sheer brilliance are alien to Brahms. Nevertheless, the concerto contains some of the most complex writing and is a testament to the pianist’s technical and musicianship maturity. In this respect he has been compared to Beethoven’s Concerto No5 . It is therefore no coincidence that the concerto has been described as a symphony with a piano included. Ironically for the large scale of the work, the Brahms calls his sketches to opus 83, in a letter to his friend Dr Theodor Billroth, as ‘some small piano etudes’. He went further in the definition in the letter to the Elisabeth Von Herzogenberg: “This is a small concert [Konzerterl] with a tiny scherzo [Scherzerl]”. Brahms’s Concerto No 2 rates, then and now, as one of the grandest forms in the piano repertoire.