The piece is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (B♭ and A), 2 bassoons, 4 horns (initially 2 in D, 2 in B♭ bass), 2 trumpets (D), timpani (D and A), piano and strings.

[2] Brahms was himself a professional-level pianist who had first highly impressed the leading violinist Joseph Joachim, who gave him a letter of introduction to Robert Schumann.

[6] He ultimately decided to make the work a concerto for piano, his favored instrument, in 1855–56, still consulting friends about the orchestration.

Avins writes that "In all the many volumes of correspondence to and from Brahms, nothing quite approaches the letters he and Joachim exchanged over his First Piano Concerto (there are more than twenty of them) ... Joachim's answers, lengthy, detailed, thoughtful, and skilled, are extraordinary testimonials to his own talent, and to the awe and admiration he felt for his friend.

As late as early February 1858, Joachim sent the manuscript back to Brahms "completely revised", hoping that he liked the reorchestrated sections.

She wrote in her diary on 1 October 1856 that Brahms had "composed an excellent first movement" for a piano concerto, and "I am delighted with its greatness of conception and the tenderness of its melodies.

[14][15] Clara heard a rehearsal of the concerto in Hanover in March 1858, nine months before the premiere there, and wrote to a friend that it "went very well ...

9 ("Great Symphony"), after Schubert's death; Robert Schumann had unearthed a manuscript in Vienna and given a copy to Mendelssohn.

He thought he had played the concerto "significantly better than in Hanover, the orchestra outstandingly," but at the end only a few in the audience tried to clap and were soon overwhelmed by hissing.

[19] The concerto had only one encouraging review, from the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Robert Schumann's former journal; it was "savaged" by other critics.

The fourth performance of the concerto (and first of the new revision) was with the Hamburg Philharmonic conducted by Georg Dietrich Otten [de] and was not a success.

[24] Another performance came 3 December 1861, again with the Hamburg Philharmonic, this time with Brahms conducting and Clara as solo pianist.

She wrote in her diary "I was certainly the happiest person in the whole room ... the joy of the work so overcame me", but "the public understood nothing and felt nothing, otherwise it must have shown proper respect.

In the summer of 1860 Brahms submitted to the publishers Breitkopf & Härtel five pieces, the Concerto, his first Serenade, two choral works, and "Eight Songs and Romances", Op. 14.

[29] Brahms himself was invited by a member of the Gewandhaus Board of Directors and performed the concerto in Leipzig 1 January 1878.

"[32] Brahms replied "You ... can be proud of yourself ... to bring to a music festival such a work of ill repute as the D minor concerto.

The degree to which Brahms's personal experience is embedded in the concerto is hard to gauge since several other factors also influenced the musical expression of the piece.

The epic mood links the work explicitly to the tradition of the Beethoven symphony that Brahms sought to emulate.

The work reflects Brahms's effort to combine the piano with the orchestra as equal partners in a symphonic-scale structure, in emulation of the classical concertos of Mozart and Beethoven.

Instead, he enlisted both orchestra and soloist in the service of the musical ideas; technically difficult passages in the concerto are never gratuitous, but extend and develop the thematic material.

Such an approach is thoroughly in keeping with Brahms's artistic temperament, but also reflects the concerto's symphonic origins and ambitions.

This first concerto also demonstrates Brahms's particular interest in scoring for the timpani and the horn, both of whose parts are difficult and prominent.

"[36] The first movement of the concerto was used to reinforce particularly dramatic moments in the British film The L-Shaped Room (1962), in a recording by Peter Katin.