Brahms was supporting a special relation with Clara Schumann, wife of the composer and pianist Robert Schumann and she itself a perfect pianist. The friendship began when Brahms helped the family Schumann during the hospitalization of the composer and after his death. Often, Brahms was asking for advice to Egg white with regard to the music that it was composing or his opinion about newly completed pieces. The Second Symphony was not an exception to the rule.

Difficult comprehension is cabalmente the nature of the feelings that Brahms was sheltering with regard to Egg white. When he was in his twenty and was still protected from Schumann, it loved to Egg white at a respectable distance. While Schumann was interned in a mental hospital, for his last years, Brahms expressed his affection more openly, but it controlled itself as for acting as consistent with him. He wrote: "Me very dear Clara, he would want to be able to write to you as tenderly as I love you and to do for you all the good and affectionate things that I would like. You are so infinitely a darling for me that I cannot express it in words. He would want to call you my darling and many other names, you without never stopping adoring."

After the Schumann death, Brahms was in conditions to think in a more realistic way with regard to an union with Egg white. But it did not seem correct to him. She was his friend and he loved it, but also she was the Schumann widow. Also, Brahms knew that the domestic life would interfere with his creative work. He wrote to his friend Joachim: "I believe that I do not respect it and admire so much how I love it and am a prey of his charm. Often I must control myself strongly not to surround it with my arms in silence and even... I do not know, it seems so natural to me that she would not take it to evil. I believe that I will not be able already to love a girl, at least I have forgotten completely them. They do not make but to promise the sky, while Egg white reveals it to us."

Egg white and Brahms had been in permanent daily contact, but later she changed Berlin and he returned to Hamburg. They supported a supported mail and Brahms was sending him each of his compositions so that she was giving him his opinion. But one was not commenting on the love openly. Brahms was never interested so deeply by any other woman, but it did not manage to decide to establish a decisive commitment with Egg white. Many years later he insisted that should return themselves the letters and should destroy them. Egg white accepted with lack of appetite, but he managed them to preserve some of his favorites. Because most of the mail was burned, probably we will never have information as to understand completely the strange relation that existed between these two artists.

After years of struggle to compose the First Symphony, with many preliminary versions sent to Egg white to receive his suggestions, Brahms discovered that it was much easier to compose the Second one. It was working better far from the city, during the summer, and it is so he wrote the Second Symphony in a few months, in a small city on the banks of the Wörth lake. When it was ready, he sent to him to Egg white the first movement, which she praised. He predicted that this work would have a more immediate success with the public that the one that the First one had achieved, and it was in the true thing. The third movement was received so well the day of the premiere that was necessary to repeat it.

The Second Symphony presents an interesting parallel with Beethoven. Brahms was bearing permanently in mind the previous composer, whose music was for him a model and inspiration. Beethoven had written his very nearby Fifth and Sixth Symphonies one of other one and the same did Brahms with his First and the Second one. The Fifth one is pensive but passionate, emotional but triumphant and she is in the appropriate tonality, the minor Do. The First one of Brahms shares the tonality and the frame of mind with the Fifth one of Beethoven. The following Brahms symphony shares the frame of mind (but not the tonality) with the later Pastoral one of Beethoven. Both are idyllic, without problems and pacific (although there is greatly interior drama in both works).

Brahms, who did not believe in the program music, had never called Pastoral to a symphony and undoubtedly it had bothered with any commentator who was detecting in the Symphony in major Re reflexes of the rural and pacific ambience where he had conceived it. But it is not possible to deny that, if any of the symphonies of Brahms deserves to be considered to be pastoral, it is this. To big features, inside the Brahms production, it occupies the same place as the Sixth one of Beethoven, the First one of Schumann, the Eighth one of Dvorak, the Fifth one of Schubert, the Fourth one of Mahler, the Fourth one of Bruckner and the Third one of Mendelssohn in the respective lists of the above mentioned composers. It would seem that to write a pacific symphony was something that was forced to do every romantic composer that it was respected. The Second one of Brahms is a work of art of compact construction and rhythmic inventiveness, qualities not necessary related to the pacific music.

Brahms was a strange combination of humility and self-confidence, of reservation and honesty. He could speak straight neither about himself nor about his work, but it was ready to communicate across puzzles, ambiguities or false modesties. So it was capable of calling to the Second Symphony a waltzes collection. His underlying self-assurance sometimes was beginning to show behind his feigned modesty: he said to his friend Schubring that the symphony was a very innocent and happy "obrita". Brahms kept on comparing it favorably, to his reticent typical way, with the music of other composers: "You do not wait for anything and for one month earlier you do not touch but Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner; later his tender amiability [that of his symphony] will do a big good." After the big success of the premiere of the Second one, the composer said, with his habitual pseudo autodenial: "I do not know if I have or not a nice symphony. I will have to ask the more wise people." Of course, there were no more wise people, as well Brahms knew it. Also he knew that the symphony is really "nice", as we know it all the not so wise lovers of the music.