Brahms: Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34

The Piano Quintet in F minor for piano, two violins, viola, and cello is the crowning work of German composer Johannes Brahms’s first chamber music phase, which lasted up to, and around, the age of 30. Completed in 1864, the piece transcends even the expansive two Piano Quartets of 1861, and established Brahms as the leading young composer of instrumental music—effectively offering a challenge to claims of orchestral music’s modernity by the so-called “New German School,” which was then centered on the programmatic music by Franz Liszt. The Piano Quintet provided a newly commanding and expansive view of chamber music as a vehicle for powerful musical expression.

Introduction

The impact of the work is one of goal-direction and intensity. It is laid out very broadly, with a symphonic scope and a climax that looks forward to the composer’s First Symphony, whose ideas also began around this time. (Clara Schumann said the ideas deserved an orchestra.) But it also looks back to Brahms’s youthful style, especially in the driving C-minor Scherzo, with its resolution to a big, singing trio theme, reminiscent of his “F-A-E” Violin Sonata (1853). The Piano Quintet was the last work in which Brahms confronted his youthful problem: the relation of ideas to medium.

History

The Piano Quintet has a complex history. Originally conceived as a string quintet with two cellos, it is mentioned in a letter from Clara to Johannes in August 1862, and was circulated among friends, such as the famed violinist Joseph Joachim, who wanted revisions of instrumental balance because the tone of the strings was insufficient to carry the weight of the climaxes’ rich textures. By March 1864 it emerged that Brahms had already made a version for two pianos. And, by October 1864, with a prompt from various friends including the conductor Hermann Levi, it had turned into a quintet combining piano and strings, and was quickly published. The sources of the string-quintet version are lost.

Brahms: Quintet in F minor for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Op. 34

Premiere

Preliminary performances and rehearsals of the Piano Quintet’s earlier forms were given in 1862–64, and the first public performance of the final Piano Quintet was given on June 22, 1866, at a Leipzig Conservatory concert.

Form

The work is laid out in a traditional form, with a first movement in sonata form (“Allegro non troppo”), a slow movement in ternary (three-part) form (“Andante, un poco Adagio”), a scherzo and trio (“Allegro”), and a finale in a modified sonata-form, with characteristics of a rondo (“Poco sostenuto” – “Allegro non troppo”); the middle movements are in expected keys—the second in the relative major key of A-flat major and the third in dominant minor key of C minor.

The defining structural feature of this work is the relationship between the first and last movements. The powerful first movement ends as it began, in a dour F-minor mood, leaving its consequence for resolution wide open. But after the buoyant scherzo and trio, the finale responds in total contrast: a mysterious, slow introduction resolving to a rondo theme—deceptively simple and folklike, yet disguising increasing intensification—and a  coda of immense power, still ending in F minor.

Analysis

The expansiveness and feeling of conclusion in this finale come from its unusual handling of the form. The first theme returns in the home key after the exposition, like a rondo, but the development then proceeds without any recapitulation, shifting the weight directly to the coda; and this is approached not through the expected tonic (F minor), but from D-flat—a major third below F—in its minor mode, more conveniently notated as C-sharp minor. Brahms uses this major-third relationship at several points, in preference to the conventional key sequences. Even the second movement—in the more conventional relative major key, A-flat major—yields to F-flat major, notated for convenience as E major. It is difficult to disassociate this relationship from the one earlier work closest to Brahms’s quintet in spirit: Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op. 95 (“Quartetto serioso”), likewise in F minor with a D-flat-major second theme, though Brahms goes much further in expanding the opportunities for modulation.

Much of the work’s cumulative effect lies in its sense of growth and expectation, with a questioning, understated beginning in even the most powerful movement. At the very opening, Brahms’s preoccupation with motivic transformation—the evolution of certain notes that define the theme—is a major contributor. Right from the start, the first motive of the first theme contains its own insistent repetition in diminution (the motive played twice as fast at the same tempo) to launch the theme fully; and it remains part of an ongoing sequence of distinctive ideas. Soon, the cadential (ending) figure of the first thematic section is immediately turned into the second theme—a typically Brahmsian device. At the end of the repeated exposition, Brahms plays around with the cadence motive so cleverly as to disguise its basic accent so he can set up a delay of the downbeat which lasts right into the development section, launched by the restored accent.

Critical Thoughts

For all its traditional heritage, the Piano Quintet has no one precursor. It has an entirely different lineage than that of the greatest preceding work in the genre, Robert Schumann’s E-flat-major Piano Quintet, because of its origin as a string—not piano—quintet. Its obvious precursor was Franz Schubert’s great work in C major for the two-cello medium (the String Quintet of 1828), which had clearly influenced Brahms’s choice of string sextet with two cellos and two violas in his first purely string chamber work (the String Sextet No. 1 of 1859–60). It seems no coincidence that the broad layout of Brahms’s finale is prefigured in the Schubert finale. One other clearly connected Schubert work (Brahms was deeply immersed in Schubert’s music in the early 1860s) is the Grand Duo for piano four-hands (1824), also in C major: a work of symphonic proportions that Brahms knew well. (The theme of Brahms’s finale seems to quote the main theme of Schubert’s finale.) But, as with Brahms’s first orchestral Serenade (1857–59), which was first conceived as chamber music, his friends quickly recognized that his ideas needed more than just strings alone. The piano was to be essential in the most powerful of Brahms’s future chamber works.

Legacy

The Piano Quintet influenced Brahms’s followers within his tradition of serious, large-scale chamber writing. The most apparent immediate recipient, despite many differences in style, was the comparably expansive and intense Piano Quintet by César Franck, written in the same key. Brahms’s admirer Antonín Dvořák inherited the genre in two works, while in the early 20th century, the young modernist Anton Webern continued to inherit Brahms’s progressive thematic language. The two-piano version of the quintet—though published later, in 1871, as Op. 34b—has never lost its popularity, and remains a major challenge in the piano four-hands repertory. But, in due course, an interest in the possible sound-world of the string-quintet original has encouraged various reconstructions that have been recorded. They help to focus the musical imagination on just how Brahms transformed his inspiration into its final form.

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Article by Michael Musgrave