Double Concerto for Violin and Cello in A minor, op. 102

Brahms’s Double Concerto, Op. 102, was his last symphonic composition. The cellist Robert Hausmann had long asked him for a cello concerto, but the decisive impulse was personal: Brahms wished to restore his damaged friendship with the violinist Joseph Joachim. The concerto became a gesture of reconciliation, and scholars have heard Brahms’s own voice in the cello’s timbre. Joachim and Hausmann gave the première in Cologne on 18 October 1887, with Brahms conducting. The reception was divided; Clara Schumann admired its intelligence but missed the warmth of some earlier works, while Joachim considered it more inward and spiritual than the Violin Concerto. The estrangement had followed Joachim’s divorce, in which Brahms took the side of Joachim’s wife; when the score was finished Brahms handed him the manuscript inscribed “to him for whom it was written”. He composed it in the summer of 1887 and admitted to some unease at writing at length for two instruments he did not play himself. One of the principal motifs of the first movement is drawn from the notes F, A and E — Joachim’s motto Frei aber einsam.