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her, likely came together more easily. Malcolm MacDonald writes that the slow movement has “something almost numbed about its lyricism, as if the experience of the first movement had left it in shock.”14 The tone of the music—gently spiritual, hymnlike—conjures the idealized Clara to whom Young Kreisler wrote early in his infatuation: “I think of you as going to the concert hall like a priestess to the altar.” The descending scalewise lines of the main theme, subtly derived from the opening theme of the first movement, feature the characteristic Brahmsian chains of parallel thirds (as does much of the piano writing in the first movement). The middle section heightens the intensity, but in this music there is none of the anguish of the opening movement, nor any reflection of the suffering Clara. Only the vestal, pure and chaste. At the beginning of the manuscript, not for publication, Brahms placed a phrase from the Latin mass—Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domine (blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord). The phrase remains cryptic but suggestive: of the religious tone of the movement; of Robert Schumann whom Brahms jokingly called Mynheer Domine after his Dutch tour; of Clara herself, the high priestess of her husband’s music.15

When he came to the last movement Brahms faced a quandary. He had been experiencing chronic finale problems. Since the B Major Trio in 1854 he had written none—the D minor symphony and C# minor piano quartet both collapsed when he got to the last movement. That he could not finish those pieces may have been partly because in those years his sense of the tone, tempo, and purpose of a finale was in flux. The last movements of piano concertos were traditionally light, brilliant, vivacious. Eventually most of Brahms’s orchestral finales, and some of his chamber ones as well, were to be serious and monumental, as in Beethoven’s Ninth. But Brahms had not yet arrived at that conception. Meanwhile, as of 1856, if he still did not know what to do when he got to the end, he was also grimly determined not to drop the piece. Now he got out of his quandary by cribbing: for the finale he stole from someone else’s concerto—not unscrupulously but creatively, as true artists steal.

First, he followed a traditional form to the letters—the A B A C A B A of many rondo finales—and incorporated the driving rhythm characteristic of the genre. More specifically, he modeled the movement almost phrase by phrase, and even some of the gestures, on Beethoven’s C Minor Piano Concerto. “The two finales,” Charles Rosen writes, “may be described and analyzed to a great extent as if they were the same piece.”16 This borrowing solved for the moment his last-movement block and, perhaps most importantly, finished a piece that had become a gorilla on his back. Certainly the result is a fine, enjoyable, vivacious minor-key movement. It is also arguable that it fails to bring to resolution the expressive scope and intensity of the first movement, as Beethoven had accomplished in the Ninth. Hans Gal writes: “The Titanic struggle unleashed in the first movement does not in the [finale] lead to anything more than a devil-may-care, now-let-us-live attitude.17

Brahms would have put the inadequacies of the concerto in his own way, but he knew them and they tormented him. Surely he realized that he had created an extraordinary work; but it was not unassailable, not perfect, and moreover he found he could not resolve all the insufficiencies mocking him. That gnawed at his pride and his confidence—there are few things more unpleasant for an ambitious craftsman than to discover glaring holes in his technique. We see Brahms’s uncertainty in his tinkering through 1857–8, and in his letters. As late as the end of 1858, shortly before the premiere, he was writing Joachim, “I’m still far too ignorant about it and don’t know how to help myself. I’ve even gotten confused by the horns. Does it have to be deep B[] horns [at the beginning] … and perhaps at the end use D-horns?”18

He had stumbled into excruciating scoring demands in the first