Piano Quintet in E‑Flat Major

Schumann’s Piano Quintet is undoubtedly among his most finely wrought and best-loved works. The crowning achievement of his phenomenal “chamber music year”, it was composed in September and October 1842, after the three string quartets that summer and before the Piano Quartet and the Phantasiestücke for piano trio, which were both completed by Christmas. Previous works for piano and string quartet had tended to be lighter, often conceived for domestic rather than professional performance. Schumann, however, at last created a work in which piano and strings are pitted against each other in truly virtuoso writing that nevertheless admits an intimacy and equality between the five voices; this perfect marriage established the quintet as the Romantic combination par excellence, closer to the integrated symphony than to the one-against-many concerto. Later examples by Brahms, Franck, Dvořák and others inescapably took their cue from Schumann’s Quintet but without aping its sound or style. The Piano Quintet’s range is remarkable, the vitality of the first movement contrasting with the halting funeral march of the second. The rippling ascending and descending scales of the “Scherzo” give way to not one but two trios—the first sustained and lyrical, the second agitated and insistent. The finale opens with an insistent minor-key theme, which builds to a magical coda in which the principal tunes of both the first and last movements are combined in an exhilarating contrapuntal display of breathtaking ingenuity.