Piano Quintet in F Minor

Brahms’ magnificent Piano Quintet (composed in 1864) is one of the high points of 19th-century chamber music. Conceived on a grand, symphonic scale, it has a sweeping emotional intensity and superbly engineered dramatic arc that give it a power and immediacy way beyond what one would expect from just five instruments. At the same time, it has the confidential manner and close-knit internal dialogue typical of true chamber music. The Quintet’s architectural strength and the balancing of piano and string quartet exude confidence, so it’s surprising to discover how much struggle it gave Brahms to bring the music to its final form. It started life as a string quintet, then became a sonata for two pianos, and Brahms briefly considered turning it into a symphony before arriving at the lineup we know today. Brahms often revealed his more sombre, melancholic side in his chamber works, but nothing else he wrote has such a Byronic sense of Romantic theatre, and while the dark minor mode prevails at the end, this is tragedy at its most uplifting. The elemental third movement is exactly the kind of thrilling post-Beethovenian scherzo that Brahms always felt unable to write in his symphonies. But there are softer, more mysterious shades, too, reminiscent of the haunted landscapes of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, and the beautiful slow movement could be a confession of secret love.