If the canon of the four Brahms symphonies cannot quite claim equal stature to that of Beethoven's nine, they do at least stand as the worthy and natural successor to them. Each is (like Beethoven’s) a masterpiece in its own right; just one thing sets them apart. Beethoven's antecedent was Haydn, for whom a symphony was more or less an everyday affair; but ever since Beethoven – more specifically, perhaps, ever since Beethoven's Eroica – no composer could again face in the same way the responsibility of writing a symphony. Brahms wrote embryonic symphonies which became the Piano Concerto No.1 and the D major Serenade; the first movement of the First Symphony was essentially finished already in 1862; but he continued to agonise and postpone until he was 43 years of age before finally in 1876 declaring that he had a symphony worthy of the name. He was evidently satisfied, for hardly had it been performed when he started work on the Second.

Textually the Brahms symphonies are among the least problematic works in the repertoire, due to the fact that Brahms was also a careful and assiduous editor of both his own and other composers’ music. But a few material details did slip through the net, especially a couple of wrong notes in the first movement of No.4, while for an apparently small detail the later start of the hairpin in No.1 IV 2 is of unexpectedly momentous significance.

Symphony No.1 in C minor, op.68

sources

A  Autograph score (1876/7): the first movement is lost, but II, III and IV, of which II and III were the Stichvorlage for E, survive in the Morgan Library, New York (viewable online at IMSLP). A facsimile was published by them, in association with Dover, in 1986

B  Copyist's score of I and IV, Stichvorlage for E, in the Brahms Institute at the Musikhochschule, Lübeck

E,P  First edition score and parts, published by Simrock, Berlin in 1877

EE  Miniature score, published by Eulenburg c.1920

Br  Full score and parts, edited by Hans Gál and published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1926

Uh  Urtext edition, edited by Robert Pascall and published by Henle in 1996; in this edition all the errata below are corrected