The Second Sonata was written at the urging of Brahms's favorite cellist, Robert Hausmann, a member of the Joachim Quartet. It was first performed by Hausmann and Brahms from manuscript in Vienna shortly after its completion. Hausmann came by train from Berlin to Vienna, used a day and a half for rehearsal, performed it that evening, and returned home the next day. The difference in technical bravura and conception of this sonata as compared to the first one has to do, surely, with the different cellists and circumstances of the moment. Op.38 was written with the notion of the skilled amateur still in Brahms's mind. By Op.99, Brahms was writing for one of the great professional artists of the day.

Hausmann is also the cellist who had to struggle with the impossible opening of the Second String Quintet, Op.111. Reinhold Hummer, the cellist of the Rosé Quartet in Vienna which premiered the work, had mutinied on that occasion; Brahms was forced to agree to instruct the upper strings play the first 6 bars mf ("but only for Herr Hummer, and only this time".) Houseman and the Joachim Quartet, in contrast, tried to accommodate to Brahms's desire that not all solos be accompanied by other instruments playing softly, but rather that the total effect be one of a vigor. Joachim's solution -- a diminuendo and then a crescendo -- should be respected. It is printed in the string parts, but not the score, of the first edition and of the new complete edition; but the real solution comes from a letter Brahms sent to Adolph Brodsky, when Brodsky wrote to say how Klengel was complaining. Brahms wrote: "Just have the violins pretend to play f. He [Klengel] will be able to repay you in the course of the movement with a most beautiful p" [near the end of the work]. And may that serve as a lesson to us all to let common sense prevail!