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."
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