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The piece begins with a searing, anguished adagio, with relentless pounding timpani. That extended introduction, going through several stages, poses the essential “plot” of the First Symphony: call it fate.44 Brahms added this defining introduction some time after he first showed the movement to Clara Schumann in 1862, when he had a better conception of the overall expressive shape. Besides posing the great question that sparks the dramatic unfolding of the symphony, the introduction lays out much of its thematic material—notably a “fan” of chromatic lines, striving upward in cellos and violins, sinking downward in winds and violas, all pervaded by the ominous pulse of the drum:

It is one of the most spine-tingling beginnings of any symphony, plunging us into a world dark, questioning, shifting, striving toward some indefinable goal. The intensity of its question is carried into the body of the movement, a surging allegro in , scherzo-like in tempo and rhythmic momentum but tumultuous in expression. This is music first sketched in the early 1860s or before; in feel it is the Brahms of the Werther years, the opening of the D Minor Concerto, the passion and frustration of Young Kreisler. Fate! Fate!

In the first movement we hear the fully developed Brahmsian orchestral sound. There are clear connections to the Classical past, especially in the scoring of the winds, but made monumental in sound partly by octave doublings and the steady thickening of bassoons. (As Beethoven did in the Fifth Symphony, Brahms saves the trombones for a memorable entry in the last movement.) Yet for all the richness of sound there is a general clarity of texture that projects a continually contrapuntal conception.

That conception is critical in the beginning of the allegro, in which Brahms departs from the tradition, in a sonata-form exposition, of exposing the principal theme and then a contrasting one. Instead, from the outset there is a double theme, a contrapuntal joining of two ideas from the introduction45: a restlessly surging line in thirds and sixths (b), and under it the rising chromatic “fate” theme of the opening measures (a):

These ideas, plus a rushing figure (c), dominate the movement, in continually new juxtapositions and inversions, here tender, there searing. From these, other ideas grow: racing triplets outline a minor third that dominates the end of the exposition (under them is an inversion of the (b) theme); then those triplets are boiled down to lurching minor thirds. In the storms of the development the racing triplets become imperious repeated notes—the fate-motive of the timpani at the beginning, echo of the four-note fate-motive of Beethoven’s Fifth. At the end of the movement—another innovation—the tempo slows to a pensive coda that looks back to the introduction and the fateful drumbeats. There Brahms in effect reopens the dramatic question of the introduction, and leaves it hanging in the last chords.

The Andante sostenuto provides lyrical contrast to the stormy first movement, as in Beethoven’s Fifth. The essential plot is woven into its main theme with reminiscence of the introduction’s chromatic fan. (This reference—in measures 5 through 8—was added after the first performances, when Brahms also simplified the form of the movement from rondo to A B A.46) This slow movement ends with an exquisitely longing melody in high solo violin, anticipating the intimate, chamber-like scoring that in the later symphonies relieves the monumentality of the full-orchestra writing.

The key of the slow movement is E major, a major third up from the previous C minor/major. The next movement, continuing the pattern of third-relations, is in A♭ major. Marked Un poco Allegretto e grazioso (A little fast and gracefully), short and tripartite, it forms another contrast to the monumental first and last movements. It is one of the intermezzos with which Brahms replaced the scherzo in many later works. (Here the