Schumann, R. / Brahms: Piano Quintets

Description

Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856)Piano Quintet in E Flat Major, Op. 44Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34Compositions for piano quintet have their origin in works designed for keyboard and string quartet in the eighteenth century, some of them in the form of chamber concertos. In the nineteenth century the first notable example of the genre came from a musician much admired by Beethoven, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, a nephew of Frederick the Great, whose C minor Piano Quintet was well known to Schumann. The century brought a small but distinguished repertoire in the form, to which Brahms, Dvorak and César Franck made notable contributions.Schumann, born in Zwickau in 1810, the son of a publisher and writer, had early, if undisciplined, interests in a career as a musician, centring at first on performance at the keyboard. His teacher Friedrich Wieck, his future reluctant father-in-law, saw a possible place for him as a concert pianist, once his widowed mother had been persuaded to allow him to leave university and concentrate on music. These hopes were defeated by a weakness in Schumann's fingers, possibly the result of mercury treatment for a venereal infection contracted in the early 1830s. Marriage in 1840 to Clara Wieck, after protracted litigation with her father, led Schumann to turn from composition for the piano to attempts at larger musical forms, encouraged by his young wife. He had won at early reputation for himself as a writer on musical subjects whose sometimes controversial critical opinions were widely read, if not always accepted. His first official appointment as a performing musician, however, came only in 1850, when he became municipal music director in Düsseldorf, a position in which he achieved little practical success before his mental break-down in 1854 and death two years later.Schumann's earlier chamber music had been in the form of attempts at string quartets, but it was only after his marriage that he settled down in 1842 to work on the rapid composition of a group of three string quartets, their completion announced to his wife as the birth of three children, just born, and already completed and beautiful. In August Schumann took a brief holiday with his wife in Bohemia, a change that relieved to some extent the depression he had suffered after a period of elation as he wrote the quartets. On their return to Leipzig Clara Schumann found herself pregnant again, a year after the birth of her first child, and Schumann himself set to work on a new composition for her, the Piano Quintet, a work that was to set a model for later composers. It was followed at once by a Piano Quartet.The Piano Quintet enjoyed an immediate success. Clara Schumann first played it in Leipzig in 1843 and it formed part of the repertoire of her Russian tour of 1844, during which her husband found himself in an uncomfortably depressing position as mere consort to a musician of recognised distinction