Piano quintet

In classical music, a piano quintet is a work of chamber music written for piano and four other instruments. The genre particularly flourished in the nineteenth century.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the instrumentation most frequently consisted of piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass. Following the phenomenal success of Robert Schumann's Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44 in 1842, which paired the piano with a string quartet (i.e., two violins, viola, and cello), composers began to adopt Schumann's instrumentation. Among the most frequently performed piano quintets, aside from Schumann's, are those by Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvořák and Dmitri Shostakovich.

While the piano trio and piano quartet were firmly established in the eighteenth century by Mozart and others, the piano quintet did not come into its own as a genre until the nineteenth century. Its roots extend into the late Classical period, when piano concertos were sometimes transcribed for piano with string quartet accompaniment.

Not before the mid-nineteenth century was music ordinarily composed expressly for this combination of instruments. Although such classical-era composers as Luigi Boccherini composed quintets for piano and string quartet, it was more common in this period for the piano to be joined by violin, viola, cello and double bass. The Piano Quintet in f minor, Op. 41, of Jan Ladislav Dussek (1799) is an early example of a piano quintet written for piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass; other works for the combination were composed by Franz Schubert (the "Trout" Quintet (1819)), Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1802, 1816), Ferdinand Ries (1817), and Louise Farrenc (1839, 1840).

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