The noise level of Brahms’s childhood house is something of a guess. The dwelling, in no way a slum, was one of a row of small houses on the edge of the city on what we would now call a tree-lined boulevard. It was in the old part of town and was half timbered. I once stayed in that neighbourhood in a little hotel which had just been renovated in the old manner, and was astonished at how disturbingly well sound travelled through the walls. In later life Brahms would sometimes refer to the lack of quiet and privacy in his parental home, which led him on occasion to practice the piano away from home. If he advanced enough in a few years under these circumstances to play any of the Romberg concertos, one has to tip one’s hat at his diligence and powers of concentration.

That a cello sonata (Sonata in E minor for Cello and Piano Op. 38) should be the first of his seven duo sonatas to be published is not really a surprise. A look at Brahms’s output over the course of his life will show that he has a history of cutting his teeth, so to speak, on musical combinations personally familiar to him. Indeed, Op. 38 may not even have been his first attempt to write for these two instruments. Among many pieces lost or destroyed by the young Brahms is apparently a Duo for Cello and Piano. When Brahms was 18, he appeared in a private concert at the home of a well-to-do Hamburger. On the program were two pieces by “Karl Würth”, the Duo and a piano trio. A bit of detective work revealed that Karl Würth was the pseudonym used by the young Brahms when he wanted to present his work without the danger of being identified with it. The detective was Max Kalbeck who is often, but not always, correct in his findings. As he rarely gives us the opportunity to verify his conclusions (so too in this instance), the best one can say is that there is a strong possibility that the young Brahms wrote for cello and piano as early as 1851. Neither the Duo nor the Trio survived, leaving us uninformed about how Brahms might have conceived the possibilities of the cello at that time. But by the time of the Op. 8 Piano Trio in 1854, we have full-blooded Brahmsian writing, lyrical, luscious, and commanding.

The original version of Op. 8 is considerably more demanding technically than the revision of 30 years later, the cello given an even more prominent role than in the later version (including a lovely fragment of a Beethoven song, possibly as tribute to Clara Schumann). Brahms’s writing for the instrument is fearless. It is also awkward at times. Indeed, when Brahms revised the work, he commented that although he would agree to allow the first version to remain in print, no one would play it because “so much of it is unnecessarily difficult.” It is a telling choice of phrase. In the intervening years, Brahms had been in close contact with the best cellists of the day, and had paid attention.

His early contact with fine cellists came, not unexpectedly, through Joseph Joachim. At the start of their friendship Joachim, who had been the leader of Liszt’s orchestra in Weimar until recently, was still in close touch with his former colleagues there. They included Bernhard Cossman, first cellist of Liszt’s orchestra and a member of Joachim’s quartet at that time. Now that Joachim was Kapellmeister in Hanover, the virtuoso August Lindner was his preferred cellist. Brahms met both men and played with Lindner. Furthermore, in Düsseldorf during Brahms's very first journey away from Hamburg in 1853, he had been befriended enthusiastically by Christian Reimers, a fellow Hamburger who was first cellist of Schumann’s orchestra. “Reimers is here,” Brahms wrote to Joachim in 1854, from Düsseldorf. “We are rehearsing my Trio, which Frau Schumann feels the need to play again.”