In his work, the years, in which he concerned himself with the form of the symphony, occupy just one decade. It is true that the first attempts at the first symphony date from the mid-fifties, but he rejected his composition drafts again and again. At the end of his life, Brahms destroyed most of his preparatory works and composition drafts. Therefore it is hardly possible to duplicate the course of his compositional working process.

 Brahms did not feel able to cope with the requirements to compose a symphony after Beethoven. As he was working on his First Symphony at the beginning of the seventies, he wrote to the conductor Hermann Levi: „I will never compose a symphony! You have no idea how the likes of us feel, when you hear always such a giant marching behind you." In 1876, already before the completion of the composition, Brahms set a date for its first performance (November 4th) with the conductor Otto Dessoff from Karlsruhe. The correspondence of the two friends illuminates Brahms' efforts to keep the deadline and his iron work on the composition. After breaking the spell in a way with the First Symphony (C minor, op 68), he composed the next symphonies in a relatively short time.
 
 

In June 1877, he started working on the Second (D major, op 73) in Pörtschach am Wörthersee, in September the first movement was finished and three months later the whole symphony was finished. On December 30th, it was performed for the first time in Vienna, Hans Richter (1843-1916) conducting, the future Viennese court conductor and conductor of the Bayreuth Festival. He premiered also the Third Symphony in F major op 90, which was composed six years later during a summer stay in Wiesbaden. The first performance in a philharmonic concert on December 1883 in Vienna was followed by another performance four weeks later in Berlin, Joseph Joachim conducting.
 
 

During the summer stays 1884 and 1885 in Mürzzuschlag on Semmering, Brahms composed his Fourth Symphony (E minor, op 98). On October 25th 1885, he conducted himself the first performance in Meiningen with the court orchestra of Meiningen. Since 1881, he had worked time and again with this excellent orchestra.

 Altough Brahms enlarges the classical orchestral instrumentation in his symphonies just with trombones and the double bassoon and uses occasionally the bass tuba, he gets an unmistakable orchestral sound: A peculiar warmth shines out of its more dark colors. The variative technique, that Brahms developed masterly in several works, had also determined the thematic work in his symphonic music. The finale of his Fourth Symphony is not without reason a large-scale succession of variations about an ostinato bass (theme and thirty coherent variations).

In 1856, he composed the "variations about a Hungarian song" (op 21 No. 2), in 1857 the „variations about an own theme" (op 21 No. 1), in 1861 the Händel variations op 24 and in 1862/63 the utmost virtuoso Paganini variations op 35. Later, Brahms composed exclusively thematically free piano pieces such as rhapsodies, fantasies and intermezzi.

The villa Joachim in Aigen near Salzburg
Here, Brahms and Joachim worked together on the violin concerto

 Only twenty years later, Brahms set about the composition of his Second piano concerto in B major (finished in June 1881). With the four movements and the renunciation of the traditional solo cadenzas he puts an approach to the symphony into effect - Eduard Hanslick called the work a „symphony with piano obbligato".