Brahms composed his Piano Quintet in F minor in 1862-64, when he had already decided to leave his hometown of Hamburg and move to Vienna. The first public performance took place at the Leipzig Conservatory on 22 June 1866.
The piece was originally written for string quintet with two cellos. It is this instrumentation that Brahms sent out the first three movements to his friends for evaluation in late August 1862. “I simply have no idea how to express my joy at your string quintet. I have played it many times and it has filled my heart entirely,” Clara Schumann wrote. Violinist Joseph Joachim, on the other hand, had his reservations: “the individual movements perfectly combine into a whole… but it is difficult and might sound unclear if the performance is not expressive enough”. As a result, in February 1863, the composer modified the quintet into a sonata for two pianos, which he then performed with Carl Tausig at a concert in Vienna on 17 April. The cool reception of this version made Brahms once again revise the score in the summer of 1864 and adopt the final instrumentation: piano with string quartet.
Quintet, now regarded as the most significant chamber work of Brahms’s early Viennese years, is an excellent example of his composing style: the combination of classical formal rigour with romantic emotion. The four movements are constructed according to the classical model of the cycle.
• The tempestuous Movement One (Allegro non troppo, F minor), written in sonata form, is permeated with extreme passions. The main theme, intoned by the violin, the cello and the piano, first appears in octave doubling and then, powerfully reiterated by the entire ensemble, it reveals its dramatic character. A more subdued and lyrical second theme is a persistently repeated rhythmic figure.
• The slow middle movement (Andante, un poco Adagio, A flat major) is constructed in ternary recapitulative form. Its first and third fragments develop a mild melodic line from a single motif balancing between the major and the minor modes. The culminating middle part (E major) is based on broad and melancholy melodics doubled with sixths or thirds.
• The turbulent third movement (Scherzo. Allegro, C minor) has been structured of three thematic ideas that emphasize the motoric features characteristic of a scherzo. Its central trio (C major) is a lyrical transformation of one of the scherzo’s themes.
• The finale opens with a pensive and slow introduction (Poco sostenuto, F minor), followed by a rapid Allegro non troppo in the form of a sonata rondo. Although the rondo’s refrain contains merry tones of gypsy music, the narration reverts to the stormy character of Movement One and leads to a dramatic climax at the end (Presto, non troppo).

Ewa Siemdaj