Cello Sonatas

Johannes Brahms had been fascinated since his youth by the "masculine, serious character" of the cello, when he himself had taken lessons and made great progress on the instrument. Initially, however, he entrusted the cello with some of the most beautiful cantilenas in larger chamber music works, such as the first piano trio and the first string sextet. Only after these and the first two piano quartets with their sonorous cello parts did he turn to a cello sonata in 1862. Its deeply melancholic character became so paradigmatic for the instrument that he only ventured to a second cello sonata decades later, in 1886.