Piano Quintet (Brahms)

The Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34, by Johannes Brahms was completed during the summer of 1864 and published in 1865. It was dedicated to Her Royal Highness Princess Anna of Hesse. Like most piano quintets composed after Robert Schumann's Piano Quintet (1842), it is written for piano and string quartet (two violins, viola and cello).

The work, "often called the crown of his chamber music," began life as a string quintet (completed in 1862 and scored for two violins, viola and two cellos). Brahms transcribed the quintet into a sonata for two pianos (in which form Brahms and Carl Tausig performed it) before giving it its final form. Brahms destroyed the original version for string quintet, but published the Sonata as opus 34 bis. The outer movements are more adventurous than usual in terms of harmony and are unsettling in effect. The introduction to the finale, with its rising figure in semitones, is especially remarkable. Piano and strings play an equally important role throughout this work, which Swafford notes for its "unity of expression" and a consistently dark mood: "at times anguished, at times (in the scherzo) demonic, at times tragic."

The piece is in four movements:

This movement begins with a unison theme in all instruments. It is in sonata form with the exposition concluding in the major-mode submediant (D-flat), which is approached through a second subject in its enharmonic parallel minor (C-sharp). The first theme's heavy emphasis on D-flat prepares and smooths out this modulation, as well as its reversal with the approach to the expositional repeat. It is notable that Brahms' other F minor sonata-form first movements – from the Sonata Op. 5 and the Clarinet Sonata Op. 120/1 – also have an expositional goal of D-flat major, and both also are followed by a slow movement in A-flat major.

In the recapitulation, the bridge and first half of the second theme are transposed by a fifth, with the latter beginning in F-sharp minor, before the tonic key is restored halfway through. A peaceful post-recapitulory coda in F major is cut short by a return to the stormy first theme.

...
Wikipedia