Schumann: Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44

The Quintet for piano, two violins, viola, and cello by the German composer Robert Schumann (1810–56) is the first significant piano quintet, transcending previous essays in the genre. It was the largest of the works from Schumann’s “chamber music year” of 1842, which, following his “orchestral year” of 1841, represented a massive expansion of his creative ambitions, after a decade of producing piano music and songs. In its great range of Romantic feeling and technical assurance, it established his reputation as a composer of serious, extended instrumental works. And, with it, he brought a new voice into chamber music.

Introduction

As with all his instrumental works, Schumann’s Piano Quintet showed a fundamental loyalty to the outlines of classical form, but, as always, made significant innovations within individual movements, and in the organization of the whole. The work’s impact is in the sheer memorability and contrast of its ideas: the bold energy of its strident opening, the enigmatic, songlike slow movement, the vitality of its scherzo (and extreme surprise of the contrasting trio sections), and the ingenuity of form in the finale, which rounds off the work with a coda combining the themes of the opening and the finale.

History

Written at high speed, in September–October 1842, it had no known creative stimulus. It seems to have burst from a desire to combine piano writing—of which he was an original master by 1840—with string-quartet writing—after having completed three string quartets, consciously following classical models, in September 1842. His wife Clara, to whom Piano Quintet is dedicated, was on hand to inspire and perform the brilliant piano part. However, during various early revisions, he replaced the second trio of the scherzo (originally in A-flat major) with a more spirited version (in F minor), on the advice of fellow German composer Felix Mendelssohn.

Schumann: Quintet in E-flat major for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Op. 44

Premiere

After several domestic performances (at one in Leipzig, in December 1842, Mendelssohn sightread the piano part because Clara was ill), Clara played the first public performance at a Leipzig Gewandhaus morning concert on January 8, 1843, with the Gewandhaus Orchestra concertmaster (and close friend) Ferdinand David and his fellow orchestra members M.G. Klenger, H.O. Hunger, and C. Wittmann. The work gained much quicker appreciation than most of Schumann’s others from this time.

Form

The Piano Quintet’s greatest structural feature is the coda of the fourth movement: effectively a separate section that brings together the themes of the first movement and finale in counterpoint with one another. This helps to unify the extent of contrast and sheer energy in the inner movements. The four movements follow a traditional key scheme of three movements in the home key and a slow movement in the relative minor key, C minor. The first movement (“Allegro brilliante”) is in sonata form; the slow second movement (“In modo d’una marcia”) introspective, and followed by a march-like  “Un poco largamente”; the scherzo (“Molto vivace”), with two contrasting trios; and the fourth movement fast, but not too fast (“Allegro, ma non troppo”). Essential to the effect of the finale is the theme, which sets off in G minor, a major third above the home key of E-flat major, and stays there till the end of the first section. This avoidance of key establishment—typical of Schumann—comes several times. The integration of themes in the middle movements follows the innovations of his orchestral music from the preceding year.

Analysis

Much of the form’s individuality is driven by Schumann’s pervading sense of lyricism. Though the first movement (“Allegro brilliante”) is in sonata form, the sequence is quite different from the Classical evolution of ideas. The exposition has two, large lyrical paragraphs before coming to an abrupt end then regenerating the same idea—now in diminution (a compressed version) of the piano’s opening part—for an ongoing central section before the regular recapitulation. Sudden contrast is another major feature in Schumann’s concept of form. The mysterious second movement—whose questioning character has lodged itself in the collective memory as have few others—is suddenly confronted with a driving, scherzo-like trio that further compounds its mystery. The scherzo itself has an almost manic energy and drive, with a highly animated second trio: Schumann’s powerful response to Mendelssohn’s suggestion.

Constant thematic derivation is also another feature of Schumann’s style prominent in this work. The first movement is effectively monothematic (based on one theme). The outline of the opening chord immediately provides the first lyrical theme, and its coda gives the motive (the defining few notes) of the second group of themes. The development is based entirely on a running figure in the piano which is simply a variation of the preceding theme. Even looking ahead, the apparently independent violin theme of the second trio is simply an inversion (an upside-down version) of the opening theme.

Critical Thoughts

Schumann’s Piano Quintet placed new emphasis on the role of piano in chamber music, reflecting the new power and expressive capacity of the instrument as it had developed by the 1840s. The success of the work lies in the fact that, despite the profusion and intensity of ideas, it never sounds like orchestral music. In contrast, the solo piano music sometimes seems as though it wants to contain too many voices—too many individual lines of notes. The Piano Quintet remains as chamber music that would have been played domestically, in cultured homes (albeit a tremendous challenge to the players).

Legacy

Differences in reception show the beginnings of the modernist crisis. On the one hand, Schumann’s friend the music theorist Moritz Hauptmann saw it, and Schumann’s other chamber works of 1842, as outstanding examples of modern chamber music, and was admiring of Schumann’s quick mastery of the chamber idiom. The composer Franz Liszt, on the other hand, sensing a conservative academicism, enraged Schumann with his barely disguised critical allusion to Mendelssohn’s Leipzig Conservatory, judging the quintet as “too Leipzig-like.”

History has not favored Liszt: Schumann’s work was central to the prospering of chamber music, the intimate interrelation of instruments, and the immediate effects on Schumann’s successors—not merely within his own German culture, as with the piano quintets of Johannes Brahms and Antonín Dvořák, but also, more distantly, in the lyrical chamber works of the French composer Gabriel Fauré, which are unimaginable without Schumann’s Piano Quintet.

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Article by Michael Musgrave