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Like most Brahms compositions, this concerto spent several years on the drawing board. He began it in 1854 when he was living in D�sseldorf with the Schumann family. In the previous year, Robert and Clara Schumann had thrown their support behind the youthful composer's career, but shortly thereafter, Robert's failing mental health led him to attempt suicide. He was confined to an asylum. Brahms came to D�sseldorf as soon as he heard the news, and stayed with Clara and the seven children to help them adapt to their new challenges. The trauma of these experiences, and the hidden love which he soon felt for Clara, burst forth in his compositions, notably a two-piano sonata and a symphony. Those two works finally melded into one work, a piano concerto, which was completed late in 1858. Its premiere on January 22, 1859, featured the twenty-five-year-old composer as soloist before a Hanover audience, which gave the work a polite, if not enthusiastic reception. Five days later, a Leipzig audience greeted the same work with scorn and hisses, and though readily Brahms admitted in a letter to his friend Joseph Joachim that, "I am only experimenting and feeling my way," he added sadly, "all the same, the hissing was rather too much!"
What was source of the difficulty? Apparently, it was confusion, for neither the audience nor the performers truly understood what Brahms was trying to do with this new composition. One Leipzig critic summarized the situation by saying, "the public was wearied and the musicians puzzled." It seems that they expected a concerto such as they had heard before, a concerto such Beethoven or Chopin or Liszt would have written, a concerto in which the pianist expounds from center stage while the orchestra submissively minds its own business. Unfortunately, that is not the effect that Brahms intended. He wanted something more integrated, in which the piano would be a part of the orchestral effect, essentially a symphony with piano, and in this case, a very grand symphony. It is not the sort of thing that would have suited Chopin at all, but Beethoven probably would have loved it, and Clara Schumann performed it gladly. Thanks to such devoted champions, and to Brahms' own persistence, the First Concerto gradually won acceptance, until at last even Leipzig admitted that it was a masterwork.