Brahms's career does not fit a standard early/middle/late paradigm, in part because it had not two but three significant points of internal articulation: the death of Robert Schumann in 1856, which triggered a four-year publication hiatus; the success of the German Requiem in 1868, which thrust Brahms permanently into the public eye; and his premature retirement in 1890, which preceded an unanticipated final compositional burst. The terms with which musicologists reference these four stages fluctuate, yet one marker has achieved some measure of permanence. It was evidently Donald Francis Tovey who attached “first maturity” to the compositions of the 1860s. The term was appropriated by James Webster and Walter Frisch, and eventually canonized in George Bozarth's contribution to the New Grove Dictionary in 2000.

The canonized term casts a shadow on the earlier music, as it leaves little room to escape its cardinal implication: that the music of the 1850s is immature, premature, juvenile, or some other similarly deprecatory term. That response is in acute tension with Robert Schumann's famous judgment that the twenty-year old Brahms, “like Minerva, sprung fully armored from the head of Zeus.” The same tension is internal to a claim of Michael Musgrave: “the early works presage virtually all of the elements of the mature style.” If the elements are present, then why does Musgrave sense the absence of the quality constituted by them? Perhaps Brahms had acquired the armaments by age twenty, but not yet mastered their deployment in compositional combat.

This paper seeks to stimulate a re-evaluation of these implications, focusing on the first movement of the early composition that has the best claim to an enduring position in the concert repertory: the Piano Sonata no. 3 in F minor, op. 5. Composed at the Schumann home in Dusseldorf during October 1853, just a few weeks after Johannes first met Robert and Clara, this movement evinces five characteristics that were integral to Brahms's compositional personality throughout his career. More than local elements, features, or “devices,” each of these five characteristics involves some measure of ordering, pacing, and large-scale planning. To that extent, the characteristics are worked into the bones of the movement.