BRAHMS' PIANOFORTE Music (Second Series)
Played by HOWARD JONES
Scherzo, Op. 4
BRAHMS' Op. 1 (published in 1853, when he was twenty) was a work for Piano. He began his career as a pianist, and during his early years of composition he tackled the Piano Sonata form several times. He had not yet learnt how to make the best of the keyboard, especially as regards delicacy and colour. His further study of the possibilities of the Pianoforte was made through the medium of Variations, of which he had written some half-dozen sets by 1866. Then, for about a dozen years, he almost entirely ceased to write music for the Pianoforte alone, his next work (Op. 76, in 1879) being a set of eight pieces, four entitled Capriccio and four Intermezzo.
After the two powerful Rhapsodies of Op. 79 there is a gap until the last group of works for Pianoforte - Op. 116, 117, 118 and 119, the splendidly varied collections which round off his career as a writer for the Pianoforte alone. One other piece of work, which only came out in 1893, was the collection of over fifty Studies.
The Scherzo, Op. 4, was one of the very first Pianoforte pieces Brahms wrote. When Brahms, a youth of twenty, first met Liszt, that virtuoso asked him to play something; but Brahms was too nervous, so Liszt sat down and performed this Scherzo of Brahms' magnificently at sight, talking about it as he played. Liszt thought he detected the influence of one of Chopin's Scherzos in the music, but Brahms assured him that he knew nothing at all of Chopin's music.