Johannes Brahms
Sonatas

About Johannes Brahms's Sonatas

When the 20-year-old Brahms met Robert and Clara Schumann, he played a number of his keyboard works for them. Among these were both the first and second piano sonatas, which Robert hailed as "veiled symphonies". Although published as Op. 1, the sonata No. 1 in C major is actually the fourth piano sonata Brahms is known to have composed; the third was published as Op. 2, and the first two were evidently destroyed.
The series culminates with the epic F minor sonata, one of the defining piano sonatas of the mid-nineteenth century. Its hauntingly beautiful slow movement was described by Claudio Arrau as “the greatest love music after Tristan".