It shows influences from Brahms's piano concertos in its four-movement symphonic structure, harmonic progression, and orchestration, and from Schumann's piano concerto in the performance techniques required of the piano soloist.

Schnabel himself premiered it with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1901, but the reception was not very favorable, and thereafter the composer himself never performed this concerto. In the early 1920s, his pupil Eduard Erdmann frequently performed the last two movements of this work, namely the Intermezzo and the Rondo. At that time, this two-movement concerto was marketed as the work of "Leopold Beck," a composer who, despite his gifted talent, abandoned composition at a young age, and it gained considerable popularity. This pseudonym derives from the French "le bec" (meaning "the beak"), implicitly referring to "Schnabel," which means "beak" in German. Since then, this concerto has been known, published, and performed in this two-movement version.

The Rondo theme of the final movement was later used again as the theme for the final movement of Schnabel's Symphony No. 3 (1949). Schnabel's letters reveal that the five-note motif impressively used here—E-F#-D-A-F#—is a metaphor for his wife Therese, and that conductor Artur Nikisch highly praised this Rondo movement, which includes this theme.