Johannes Brahms's Piano Quartet in A Major, Op. 26, is among his least played and analyzed chamber works, and relatively few connections have been drawn between this work and music by his predecessors. But the third movement, a scherzo and trio, turns out to be rich in such associations, and these can be traced in various ways to the performance activities of Brahms and his friend Joseph Joachim.

In the 1850s, Joachim persistently advocated to the less-experienced Brahms for the importance of physically playing and hearing compositions. Joachim's comments were often colorful. On first seeing Brahms's D-minor piano concerto in manuscript, he wrote: “What is it to see music, and to write about it! Stuffed birds in artificial trees!” Joachim encouraged physical encounters with music: “Playing and hearing—breathing out and in!” In a letter written around the time of Brahms's relationship with Agathe von Siebold, Joachim chided: “What is seeing as opposed to hearing! The greeting of a beloved, instead of a look and a kiss!”

The idea that playing and hearing music is an essential part of composing extends naturally to all music that a composer might perform. The influence of music Brahms knew through his fingers can be found in many of his works, both early and late. For example, the harmonic outline at the beginning of his Piano Sonata Op. 1 is probably related to that of Beethoven's “Waldstein” Sonata, which Brahms had played as a youth in Hamburg. The form of the great chaconne in Brahms's Fourth Symphony was based closely on the overall design of Beethoven's 32 Variations in C Minor, WoO 80, a work Brahms played fairly frequently, both privately and in public. What concerns us here is a hitherto unnoticed example: the motivic and design-level correspondences between the trio of the third movement of Brahms's Op. 26 and the trio of the third movement of Beethoven's Sonata for Violin and Piano in C Minor, Op. 30, No. 2, a work Brahms played repeatedly with Eduard Reményi in 1853, and that he was later to perform also with Joachim.

The trios’ head-motives (marked with brackets in Examples 12-1 and 12-2) strike the ear as related because of their similar tonic arpeggiations and nearly identical rhythms and articulations.