Rubinstein composed the D minor Concerto in 1864 and played it himself across Europe and, in 1872 and 1873, on the two-hundred-concert American tour that exhausted him and made him rich. It was for decades one of the most played concertos in the repertoire — Josef Hofmann, Rubinstein's only private pupil, kept it in his programmes into the twentieth century — and it stood as a model for Tchaikovsky when he came to write his own first concerto a decade later. Its scale is large, its finale built on a march-like theme in the minor.