Brahms was only twenty when he finished the first version, in January 1854. Thirty-five years later, in 1889, he went back to it and rewrote much of it, keeping the long opening tune but replacing large stretches of music and making it much shorter. Groups today nearly always play the revision, and the notes here are for that one. The revision was first heard in Budapest in January 1890, and Simrock published it in 1891.
Among the things Brahms took out were a fugue in the first movement, a quotation from a Schubert song in the slow movement, and a cello theme in the finale that seems to echo Beethoven’s song cycle “An die ferne Geliebte”. What remains begins in a broad, warm B major and ends, unusually, in a stormy B minor.
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