The Romantic Piano Quintet
Not until the middle of the 19th century did Robert Schumann's Piano Quintet in E-Flat Major (1842) firmly establish music for piano and string quartet as a significant, and quintessentially Romantic, chamber music genre.
By 1842, the string quartet had evolved into the most important chamber music ensemble, and advances in the design of the piano had expanded its power and dynamic range. Bringing the piano and string quartet together, Schumann's Piano Quintet took full advantage of the expressive possibilities of these forces in combination, alternating conversational passages between the five instruments with concertante passages in which the combined forces of the strings are massed against the piano. In Schumann's hands, the piano quintet became a genre "suspended between private and public spheres" alternating between "quasi-symphonic and more properly chamber-like elements."
Schumann's quintet was immediately acclaimed and widely imitated. Johannes Brahms was persuaded by Clara Schumann to rework a sonata for two pianos as a piano quintet. The result, the Piano Quintet in F Minor (1864), is one of the most frequently performed works of the genre. Piano quintets by Louis Spohr, Franz Berwald, Joachim Raff, Alexander Borodin, César Franck and most notably Antonín Dvořák further solidifed the genre as a quintessential "vehicle for Romantic expression."
Read more about this topic: Piano Quintet
Famous quotes containing the words romantic and/or piano:
“As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of.... In literature, as in all things, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“It is not always possible to predict the response of a doting Jewish mother. Witness the occasion on which the late piano virtuoso Oscar Levant telephoned his mother with some important news. He had proposed to his beloved and been accepted. Replied Mother Levant: “Good, Oscar, I’m happy to hear it. But did you practice today?””
—Liz Smith (20th century)