Johannes Brahms: Quintet in F minor, Op. 34
Maria Ioudenitch, violin
Andrea Obiso, violin
Matthew Sinno, viola
Timotheos Petrin, cello
Chelsea Wang, piano
Performed on Tuesday, April 11, 2017
Field Concert Hall, Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia
0:00Allegro non troppa
16:15Andante, un poco adagio
25:10 Scherzo: Allegro
33:15 Finale: Poco Sostenuto—Allegro non troppo
If Brahms had been less of a perfectionist, it’s very likely that he would have left us a very good string quintet rather than the magnum opus that is his piano quintet. Clara Schumann received Brahms’s string quintet manuscript in the fall of 1862, and responded with unreserved enthusiasm: “What inner strength, what richness in the first movement, with the first subject immediately seizing hold of you! How beautifully written for the instruments … I can’t tell you how moved I am by it, and how powerfully gripped.”
Josef Joachim also gave it a complimentary review, at least at first. He called it “a piece of the greatest significance, full of masculine strength and sweeping design—that much is immediately apparent to me.” After a few performances, however, Joachim expressed reservations: “I can’t be schoolmasterly over the details of a work whose every line shows proof of an almost overwhelming creative strength, and one that is full of spirit through and through. What I miss in it for unalloyed pleasure is, to pinpoint it in a single phrase, an attractive sonority. And I believe that if you were to hear it calmly this is something you would feel too after a while.” Joachim enumerated very specific concerns—enough that Brahms promptly destroyed the string quintet.
The following year, he delivered the same music in a brand-new format: as a sonata for two pianos, which he performed with Karl Tausig in April 1864. This time, it was not so well-received. Clara praised its musical content but argued that it sounded more like an arrangement of a larger work than a full-fledged sonata. Brahms took this to heart, and rather than scrapping both ideas, married them. The result was this piano quintet, still a relatively early work in his oeuvre but one that stands as a towering pillar of the chamber music repertoire to this day.
The quintet draws inspiration from a number of sources. Foremost is Schubert’s String Quintet in C major –– its influence is evidenced not only by the original scoring in which Brahms wrote it, but by specific characteristics shared by the slow movements of both works. A second source could very well be Beethoven’s “Appassionata” sonata. The quintet, like the sonata, begins in F minor, in octaves, and the main theme is interrupted by an exciting flurry of sixteenth notes.
Whatever influenced Brahms in the writing of his quintet, the final result is all his own. This piece is a mountain, to be climbed not only by the performers but the audience as well. As the conductor Hermann Levi remarked upon hearing it for the first time, so do we regard it today: “a masterpiece of chamber music.