15 The string quartet as a foundation for larger ensembles

Colin Lawson

Introduction

Ensemble combinations based on the string quartet have inspired some of the most expressive and intense pieces of all chamber music. The various genres examined in this survey attracted a remarkable array of composers, so their vast field of work can only be given a brief overview here. There is no space for detailed musical analysis or even a listing of every work of notable significance. Such enduring masterpieces as Mozart’s G minor Quintet and Schubert’s C major Quintet are illustrations of the inspiration afforded by the addition to the quartet of just one stringed instrument. However, the necessity to integrate extra players within an established quartet means that such works have tended to find their way into the concert hall only on an occasional basis. Long before these pieces were familiar through recordings, Walter Cobbett in 1929 went so far as to advocate the formation of string quintets specifically for touring purposes, as a way of doing justice to both the quality and the quantity of the repertory. The age of recording has consolidated the reputation of many of the pieces discussed below, including larger-scale string pieces such as Brahms’ sextets and Mendelssohn’s Octet, whose live performance has continued to be inhibited by practical and economic considerations.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century the medium of the piano quintet has become established as an important element in the repertories of both pianists and string quartets, with masterly contributions from such front-rank composers as Borodin, Brahms, Dvoák, Elgar, Fauré, Schumann, Shostakovich and Schnittke. Their various solutions to the balance of form, content and texture illustrate the distinctive versatility of the medium. Many of these composers also wrote for the closely related piano quartet, representative of a large body of chamber music which dispenses with a second violin and thus strictly lies outside the scope of this chapter.

Among wind instruments, the clarinet has been the string quartet’s most regular partner ever since Mozart created the clarinet quintet medium in 1789. A century later Brahms won the hearts and minds of players and audiences with his Clarinet Quintet, widely regarded as pre-eminent among his chamber music in terms of emotional intensity and beauty of tone-colour. Its success was immediate and from the beginning it was played much more often than Brahms’ fine late String Quintet Op. 111 which preceded it. Other wind instruments have been less richly served, notwithstanding such fine music as Mozart’s Horn Quintet, as well as oboe quintets by Bax, Bliss, Finzi and a number of others.

The twentieth century explored quartet-based ensembles in a variety of new and effective ways, such as Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro (with harp, flute and clarinet), Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro (with orchestra), as well as song cycles by Vaughan Williams, Warlock and others. The medium of the clarinet quintet has proved congenial to the avant-garde, while the combination of quartet and string orchestra has found its way into minimalist activity at the hands of John Luther Adams and others.

Music without keyboard

The eighteenth century

In the string quartet’s infancy it was common for one of the violins to be replaced with a wind or keyboard instrument. The celebrated orchestra at Mannheim was at the forefront of the development of wind repertory, inspiring chamber music as well as concertos featuring its principal players. Mozart had already composed chamber music with flute and with oboe when he composed his Horn Quintet in 1782, a concertante work which employs the natural horn to ingenious effect. Mozart achieves an appropriately dark texture from the replacement of second violin by second viola. The Clarinet Quintet K. 581 of 1789 remains his only work with a wind instrument in which the usual quartet combination forms the basis for a larger ensemble. Mozart contrived to integrate the clarinet with the strings and yet incorporate many elements reflecting the virtuoso playing of his friend Anton Stadler. His vocal style of clarinet writing features wide leaps that no singer could ever produce, the thematic substance wholly idiomatic and seemingly unconfined by the character of the wind instrument. The work as a whole makes use of a wide range of textures and colours and was to have a seminal effect on later composers, radically enhancing the profile of the clarinet for years to come.

The string quintet with two violas was one of the many ensembles cultivated by Michael Haydn in Mozart’s home city of Salzburg. He was probably the inspiration for Mozart’s early Quintet K. 174 of 1773, a somewhat experimental work in a mixture of styles culminating in an elaborate, quasi-contrapuntal finale. It was much later, in 1787, that Mozart turned again to this relatively unfamiliar form, which was highly personal and more suited to his current mood than the symphony or concerto. In the spring and summer of 1788 he attempted to sell on subscription three quintets, in order to repay one of his many debts to Michael Puchberg. One of these was the arrangement K. 406 of his C minor Serenade K. 388, in which the pungency and varied colour of the wind octet is not quite compensated by the richness of the inner part-writing for the two violas. He entered the C major Quintet K. 515 in his catalogue on 19 April 1787 and the G minor K. 516 on 16 May, a contrasted pairing which finds a parallel in other genres, including the late symphonies. The addition of a second viola opened up for Mozart a new world of expression, offering tonal and contrapuntal enrichment and the opportunity to plan the music on a much enlarged scale. The five instruments could be grouped more flexibly than in the quartet. Both the cello and the inner parts could move with greater freedom, within outer parts that were spaced more widely. Mozart succeeded in preserving the proportion and balance of all five parts, while maintaining their full equality. He did not, like so many of his successors, rely upon mere brilliant and concertante effects. The C major Quintet K. 515 moves away from the taut melodic material of the ‘Haydn’ quartets towards divergent yet organised structures. Scholars have drawn attention to the quasi-symphonic nature of the material within its chamber environment. Whilst the sonata rondo finale of K. 515 is the longest of any of Mozart’s instrumental movements, the G minor Quintet K. 516 is altogether more compact and motivic. The rich inner parts are used to sustain emotional tension, with melodic material often overlapping or in imitation. Chromatic language contributes to the music’s violent intensity, which (as scholars from Abert to Hyatt-King have detected) inhabits the world of Tamino and Pamina in Die Zauberflöte.

Mozart’s last string quintets date respectively from December 1790 and April 1791, thus written after the ‘Prussian’ quartets, many aspects of whose exploration of sonority and technique they share. K. 593 in D major balances lyricism and tension, inspiring Alfred Einstein to remark upon its wild, disconsolate, mirth. K. 614 in E is even more original, the warm vitality of the first three movements finally giving way to the finale’s sardonic humour and caprice.

One of the most prolific composers to take the string quartet as a basis for larger ensembles was Luigi Boccherini, who wrote quantities of flute quintets, piano quintets and string sextets, some of which post-date Mozart’s career. Notwithstanding his c. 100 string quartets, it is the quintets that have attracted scholarly attention. The vast majority of these hundred or so works are scored with two cellos and remain little known. Boccherini’s flexible and virtuosic compositional technique played an important part in the establishment of classical chamber style. Intensity of the moment rather than intricate development in his music meant that his reputation quickly went into decline with the rise of Haydn and Mozart. Although Gerber’s Lexicon (1791–2) called him the greatest of Italian instrumental composers, many nineteenth-century writers cited the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of 1779, which declared that Boccherini never achieved the ‘complete fulfilment of a bold genius’, but was ‘superficial, monotonous and unimpressive’.¹ However, the brilliance of his string writing is reflected in his realisation of the potential of the cello within the ensemble.

The early nineteenth century

The early years of the nineteenth century were a glorious period in the promotion of wind instruments and their repertory. In an age devoted to virtuosity the clarinet achieved a natural pre-eminence, inspiring a large number of concertante quartets and quintets with strings. Contributors in Vienna included Leopold Kozeluch, Peter von Winter and Franz Krommer;² one of the most integrated works is Hummel’s Clarinet Quartet of 1808, whose string parts carry much of the rhythmic and melodic interest. Of clarinettist-composers, Bernhard Crusell takes pride of place with his three imaginative quartets. The quintet by the Nuremberg virtuoso Heinrich Backofen is unusual in opting for a second viola rather than a second violin, a preference found also in the quintets by Krommer and Andreas Romberg. Weber’s clarinettist Heinrich Baermann was a seminal influence on the genre, writing quintets with virtuoso solo parts, of which his Op. 23 includes an emotive Adagio long attributed to Wagner; he was also the inspiration for Meyerbeer’s Quintet.

Weber’s Clarinet Quintet was to find a place in the repertory alongside the Mozart and Brahms works, although it is essentially a miniature concerto, with a wide range of expressive devices that are overtly theatrical. The strings contribute occasional dramatic touches and are assigned an important imitative episode in the finale. Reicha’s Clarinet Quintet is still occasionally heard, although its invention is less obviously dramatic than Weber’s. Reicha contributed much else to the medium of solo wind plus string quartet, including works for flute, oboe, horn and bassoon. Beethoven’s Sextet Op. 81b for two horns and string quartet is another important contribution to this virtuoso tradition, reflecting his early appreciation of the respective roles of high and low horn players. As the art of natural horn playing declined, the Sextet retained a formidable reputation, the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary in 1879 stating baldly that it was so difficult as to be never played.

Beethoven’s Septet Op. 20 established a model for many of his contemporaries, including Franz Berwald, Conradin Kreutzer and Friedrich Witt. The origins of the medium lie with the serenades and cassations of the eighteenth century, which had often combined winds and strings in a relatively free sequence of movements. Beethoven’s lucid structure and distinctive themes contributed to the Septet’s popularity and wide influence. His use of the double bass is an especially important feature borrowed from contemporary Harmonie bands. The octet medium (with the addition of second violin) had already been established by Reicha when Schubert turned to it in 1824. With consistent quality of invention Schubert’s Octet contrives to invest an old-fashioned divertimento form with the new spirit of chamber music, delighting in instrumental colour in a quintessential Romantic manner.

During the second half of the nineteenth century wind instruments fell from favour within solo or chamber music. Hanslick may have spoken for a large element of the public when in 1870 he advised the Italian clarinet virtuoso Romeo Orsi to ‘join an orchestra – that is the place where we know the value of clarinettists, flautists, oboists and bassoonists; the times are past when crowds of these wandering musicians came to give recitals on their boring little pipes’.³ In Grove’s Dictionary Philipp Spitta wrote in 1889: ‘Wind-instruments are now out of fashion for concert playing, and one seldom hears anything on such occasions but the piano and the violin, instead of the pleasing variety which used to prevail with so much advantage to art.’⁴

In this context Brahms’ encounter with the Meiningen clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld towards the end of his life is especially remarkable, because at the time he had already announced his retirement from composition. Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet was immediately recognised as a wonderful achievement on its appearance in 1891. The sheer novelty of the reinstatement of the clarinet within chamber music is reflected in a letter of 1 December 1891 written from Hamburg to Hanslick in respect of the Joachim Quartet’s Berlin concert series: ‘Joachim has sacrificed the virginity of his Quartet for my newest things. Hitherto he has carefully protected the chaste sanctuary but now, in spite of all my protestations, he insists that I invade it with clarinet and piano, with trio and quintet.’⁵

Although Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet is traditionally regarded as an autumnal and even nostalgic work, its formal architecture is in no sense reactionary. Furthermore, Brahms’ integration of clarinet and strings is a substantial achievement in its own right, with fewer opportunities for bravura than for refined musicality. The clarinet’s large effective range, tonal flexibility and dynamic variety enable it variously to merge with the strings and to stand out clearly as soloist. The Quintet’s mood is markedly influenced by the degree to which the tonic key of B minor prevails. Thematic material is equally characteristic, with a falling motto theme permeating each of the four movements to produce a cyclic effect. In each of the movements there are some important structural and thematic parallels with Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. As Walter Frisch has recently observed, musical analysis and criticism too often fall short of communicating either a conscious intellectual admiration for Brahms’ technical achievement or a less voluntary enchantment with the aesthetic experience.⁶

A rich century of string ensemble music began with Beethoven’s String Quintet Op. 29 (1801), which forms a bridge between his Quartets Op. 18 and Op. 59. Its orchestral richness and weight have been reckoned to show the influence of Aloys Förster rather than Mozart, combining breadth with an economy of line even more marked than Op. 18 no. 1. It exhibits a formal expansiveness often associated with the middle-period quartets, characterised by a leisurely pacing and unfolding of ideas. Among early Romantic works for enlarged string ensemble were Mendelssohn’s Octet and Schubert’s String Quintet. Mendelssohn’s youthful Octet was written in 1825, thus post-dating the first of Spohr’s Double Quartets by a couple of years. The experience of his early string symphonies must have enabled Mendelssohn to produce the Octet’s effortless fluency and exhilaration; he left careful instructions that all the instruments should play in symphonic style, with particular attention to dynamics. The Octet was dedicated to Mendelssohn’s violin teacher Eduard Rietz, whose playing is reflected in the soaring violin phrases from the outset. The Scherzo evokes a world of spirits characteristic of the composer, while the finale is a compositional tour-de-force. A significant number of octets was to follow in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though none at quite the same level of inspiration.⁷ Mendelssohn’s amiable String Quintet Op. 18 (1826) is milder and less adventurous, charming and more diffuse, although its finely judged proportions and texture match those of the contemporary Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. The much later Quintet Op. 87 (1845) is stiffer and more pompous, its energy expended on more trivial material.

In his C major Quintet D. 916, Schubert followed Boccherini rather than Mozart in opting for a second cello. Its presence seems to have inspired the composer to his most intimately compelling utterance, with a richness of material handled with skill rather than academic learning. The two cellos enable reinforcement of the bass by occasional unison or octave passages and Schubert also takes the opportunity to use the first cello as a solo instrument in the upper part of its compass, sometimes doubling the first violin at the octave. In general, the textural contrasts which pervade Mozart’s quintets are less significant than Schubert’s attachment to a characteristic richness of texture. The particular sound-world of the five instruments is especially evident in the slow-moving Adagio and in its subsequent turbulence.

Surprisingly, Schubert’s scoring inspired few successors, notwithstanding some little-known examples by such diverse figures as Glazunov, Taneiev and Milhaud, amongst others.⁸ George Onslow (1784–1853) left a total of thirty-four quintets, mostly scored with two cellos though playable on a variety of instruments (for example, with second viola or double bass instead of one of the cellos). A French composer of English descent, Onslow was one of very few of his countrymen to produce a large quantity of chamber music; its elegance and grace belie thematic material which is commonplace rather than inspired, consigning his reputation to history books rather than the concert hall. In 1829 he was made partly deaf in one ear by a stray bullet during a boar-hunt; he recorded this incident in his String Quintet No. 15, Op. 38, which attempts to portray the various phases of his illness and recovery.

For thirty years after the death of Beethoven, Onslow’s contemporary Louis Spohr (1784–1859) was regarded by many musicians as the greatest living composer. Yet within a quarter of a century of Spohr’s death, the bulk of his music had disappeared from the repertory and the extent of his undoubted influence was largely forgotten. The history of music provides no parallel case of a composer upon whom posterity has so decisively reversed the judgement of his contemporaries. In the twentieth century, writers drew conclusions without a knowledge of his music or his nineteenth-century status. Yet for any student of the violin and its chamber music he remains an important figure, leaving in addition to his many quartets a number of ensemble pieces for larger string-based combinations. The Octet and the Nonet for mixed winds and strings have enjoyed a modest revival in recent times. A total of seven quintets (with two violas) reveal at their best a balance between brilliance and a true chamber-music idiom. Op. 33 no. 2 in G won immediate acclaim from the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, which praised the variation movement as ‘a model for all time, so long at least as the taste for true art does not perish; Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven themselves have created nothing more magnificent of this kind’.⁹ The outer movements respectively reveal Spohr’s ability to make a movement grow almost entirely from a single idea, or to create a structure teeming with thematic material. Another successful work is the B minor Quintet Op. 69 of 1826, whose sense of the dramatic never gives way to the familiar formulae and lack of distinctive material which often afflict his later pieces.¹⁰

The qualities of the Sextet in C Op. 140 (1848) were immediately recognised in The Musical World, which described it as ‘a work which, while showing all the experience of age, displays in an astonishing degree that freshness and spontaneity which are supposed only to belong to youth. One of the last chamber compositions of Dr Spohr, this sestet is equally one of the finest and most captivating of them all.’¹¹ Spohr’s thematic expansiveness surely provided Brahms with an important influence.¹²

In 1823 Spohr wrote to Wilhelm Speyer, ‘I have already completed three movements of a double quartet. This is a wholly new kind of instrumental work which, so far as I know, I am the first to attempt. It is most like a piece for double chorus, for the two quartets who co-operate here work against each other in about the same proportion as the two choirs do. I am very eager to hear the effect and am consequently hastening to finish.’¹³ As Clive Brown observes, Albrechtsberger had published three sonatas for double quartet, each comprising an Adagio and Fugue, as early as 1804. But Spohr derived the idea from Andreas Romberg who at his death had completed two movements of a projected double quartet, which the two composers had discussed together. In Spohr’s first Double Quartet Op. 65, the second quartet acts essentially as accompaniment and the work was even arranged by his pupil Hubert Ries as a concerto for string quartet and orchestra. This transcription must in turn have been the inspiration for Spohr’s original concerto Op. 131 for the same medium. Op. 65 was well received and Spohr continued to develop the unusual combination, eventually producing in Op. 136 a more integrated work in which the quartets are treated more equally and more subtle use made of the antiphonal possibilities of the ensemble.

The first important nineteenth-century Dutch composer, Bernardus van Bree (1801–57), wrote an Allegro for four string quartets which illustrates his preference for the German tradition at a time when Amsterdam showed a strong predilection for French music.

Brahms revitalised instrumental genres whose profile had recently been overtaken by a Romantic emphasis on programme and text. His links with the past and developing compositional processes may be observed in the two string sextets of 1860 and 1864–5, a medium which he effectively inaugurated, naturally surpassing Spohr’s mild and scholarly approach. As Michael Musgrave has observed, Brahms must have known Schubert’s Quintet from the time of his first Viennese visits and a copy of the first edition of 1853 remained in his library.¹⁴ In the B Sextet Op. 18 Schubert’s intense lyricism is an obvious influence, yet Brahms’ first mature chamber work combines a Classical surface with new possibilities of instrumental sonority. Technical challenges arise from the pervasive role of counterpoint and use of high, exposed registers, especially for first viola and cello. At the same time, the variation slow movement betrays Brahms’ preoccupation with Baroque style and language, especially the chaconne. The greater subtlety and personal Romanticism of the G major Sextet Op. 36 has led at least one writer to regard it as ‘surely the greatest successor to the Schubert String Quintet in the nineteenth century’.¹⁵ Brahms develops a rich variety of colouristic effects, including tremolando and the combination of arco and pizzicato, whilst utilising a more developed contrapuntal technique involving inversion, stretto and diminution. His Scherzo moves away from tradition to a new type of 2/4 movement in the minor mode.

In the 1880s Brahms turned to the string quintet, producing a pair of radically contrasted works. The F major Quintet Op. 88 is the more classically orientated, with a fugal finale recalling Beethoven’s C major Razumovsky Quartet. The G major Quintet Op. 111, on the other hand, combines gypsy and dance music with a sophistication of melody and harmony. The cello solo with which it begins caused its first performers considerable strain, though Brahms retained his original dynamic markings against the advice of Joachim. Equality of voices even outside contrapuntal contexts is an important feature, as is the forward-looking economy of means, worked fluently and spontaneously. The slow movement shows a special harmonic individuality that was immediately noted by Joachim.

Bruckner’s string quintet of 1879, premiered by the Hellmesberger Quartet, brings religious overtones into the sphere of chamber music. Bruckner’s musical language recalls Schubert in its shifting harmonies, modulatory charm and broad sense of tonality. Schubert’s promotion of semitonal relationships is evident in Bruckner’s Adagio, couched in G within the overall main key of F. Its spiritual dimension gives way to an orchestrally conceived finale, whose structure is enhanced by ingenious contrapuntal workings.¹⁶

Pre-eminent among nationalist composers of chamber music was Dvoák, who brought a highly personal flavour to his harmonic language and rhythms, often literally adopted from popular music of the day. While seldom polyphonic in texture, his music abounds with imaginative accompaniment figures. His works for extended string ensemble are perhaps not his most characteristic. Dvoák’s Op. 1 (1861) was a quintet, characterised by confident sonority rather than nationalist tendency. Of mature works, the Quintet in G Op. 77 (1875) pre-dates his real freedom of lyrical expression. Because of some operatic associations, its unusual textures for quartet and double bass and the casual arrangement of keys, it is nevertheless rather exceptional for a chamber work.¹⁷ The Sextet Op. 48 is at once Slavonic, fully representative of his nationalist style and Schubertian. The themes are developed with delightful ease, with his practice of generating ideas from a phrase of his main theme most happily in evidence. The slow movement is marked ‘dumka’, incorporating gypsy music and also a lullaby. Local colour also appears in the furiant scherzo. The String Quintet Op. 97 has an exoticism that derives from Dvoák’s interest in the Iroquois Indians. This includes transformed fragments of Indian song. The variations of the Larghetto follow Haydn’s example in having a double theme. Some writers have suggested that Dvoák was beginning to exhaust his American sources of inspiration: ‘the end of the Quintet with its ponderous descending bass – which cries out for the brass – and orgy of triplets and dotted quavers is perhaps the worst bit of chamber music writing Dvoák ever perpetrated’.¹⁸

At the end of the century, programme music found itself harnessed to the chamber tradition in Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht; the scoring of string sextet for such a work is highly unusual. Schoenberg was particularly attracted by the poems of Richard Dehmel (1863–1920). The first three of the Four Songs Op. 2 (1899) are settings of his work, as is the third of the Six Songs Op. 3. Verklärte Nacht, Schoenberg’s major work of 1899, composed in three weeks in September, is also based on a Dehmel text, but now used as a programme for a symphonic poem. The basic form of words and music is very simple. Three stanzas descriptive of the forest and of the lovers’ progress frame the two more extended statements of the woman and the man. Yet simple descriptive means are turned to sophisticated musical ends. The large-scale musical edifice is built by transformation motifs that serve every conceivable expressive purpose. They graphically depict the initial, trudging depression, the woman’s agitation, the man’s calmness and the ultimate transfiguration of doubt into serenity. The score is a miracle of clarity, despite the often elaborate contrapuntal textures, and Wagnerian and Brahmsian modes of thought meet in harmonious accord. But Schoenberg’s distinctive themes, instinct for polyphonic potential and harmonic vocabulary are masterly. The work shows Schoenberg’s irresistible instinct to build on the essence of the musical past. A knowledge of this unlikely tale is of secondary importance to the listener because the lack of action enables the work to be understood as a single-movement abstract composition.

The string sextet has attracted other composers of varying significance, including Tchaikovsky, D’Indy, Kornauth, Bridge, Roy Harris, Martin , Milhaud, Glière and Korngold. These works tend to shy away from radical elements, although they take advantage of the expanded medium in a variety of imaginative ways.

The twentieth century

At the beginning of the century the most enduring works were often associated with new instrumental combinations. Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet moved far away from previous models, combining brilliant harp writing with sonorous yet delicate ensemble. In 1919 the harp literature was further enhanced by Arnold Bax’s Harp Quintet, whose varied themes and conciseness may well have been connected to wartime events some three years earlier. Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro Op. 47 (1905) finds a rich fund of beauty from within the string ensemble in a manner reminiscent of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Its variety and contrast belie its simple yet original design that is illuminated by a mastery of idiom and compositional technique. No other twentieth-century work for the medium of quartet and orchestra achieved remotely comparable status, despite representation by Conrad Beck (1929), Virgilio Mortari (1938), Benjamin Lees (1964), Alvin Etler (1968), and Lyell Cresswell (1996). The concerto (1930) by Erwin Schulhoff has the string quartet as soloists against a background of a fifteen-strong wind orchestra. This original if daring experiment in instrumentation may well have been inspired by the scoring of Kurt Weill’s Concerto for Violin and Wind orchestra, written some five years earlier.

The string quartet has impinged on the world of song to considerable effect. In On Wenlock Edge (1909) Vaughan Williams makes atmospheric and elaborate use of a string quartet accompaniment in addition to the piano. The composer’s poetic impulse and audible country imagery illuminates and transcends Housman’s epigrammatic texts. Written just after his studies with Ravel, the work includes consecutive triads as well as old-fashioned chromaticism in its harmonic language. More than one commentator has judged that the cycle’s total powerful effect is greater than the sum of its parts. The quartet made some further significant forays into the song repertory, for example Finzi’s cycle of Hardy settings By Footpath and Stile published in 1925. Peter Warlock’s The Curlew combined flute, cor anglais and string quartet to accompany the tenor voice with original textures and harmonic colours. The young Samuel Barber entertained the notion of pursuing a singing career, having studied at the Curtis Institute and in Vienna. He recorded his own Dover Beach (1931) for baritone or mezzo-soprano and string quartet. Though he was still a student when the work was composed, it is remarkably assured, with the long lyric lines and idiomatic text-setting that were to remain a feature of later compositions.

The success of these works, together with other examples by Arthur Bliss and Ivor Gurney in England and Chausson and Jongen in France, tend to disprove the celebrated assertion by Frank Howes that the string quartet, ‘contrary to expectation, hardly ever makes a good accompaniment for the human voice’.¹⁹ The very year that those words found their way into print, further contradictory evidence appeared in the backing arrangement for the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby (1966), where the idiomatic string writing is à 4, though for eight players. The arranger George Martin credited the influence upon him of Bernard Herrmann’s score for the film Fahrenheit 451. Against a warp of mechanical and strident chords (played non-vibrato in short, choppy down-bows near the frog and close miked) is woven a series of continuously varied and syncopated melodic counter-figures in the cello or violin. The continued attraction of the medium within pop culture is illustrated by the collaboration between Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet, which dates from 1992. Costello’s The Juliet Letters, a song sequence for voice and string quartet, gave rise to a highly successful world tour; his current projects include a work for Anne Sophie von Otter and the Brodsky Quartet, entitled Three Distracted Women.

Traditional larger combinations of wind instruments and string quartet tended to discourage progressive styles of writing. For example, Schubert’s octet medium did not survive changing musical tastes despite some occasional examples by Badings, Ferguson, Françaix, Hindemith and Wellesz. In the arena of the clarinet quintet Brahms’ intoxicating cocktail of lyrical and dramatic elements within a closely argued structure eluded many of his successors. Reger’s Clarinet Quintet is widely regarded as his crowning achievement, though the wind writing is less idiomatic than Brahms’. Motivic ideas form part of a densely integrated texture, without the overt lyricism of his predecessor. Another original though conservative quintet is by Robert Fuchs, friend of Brahms and teacher of Mahler, Schreker, Schmidt, Sibelius and Zemlinsky. This work inhabits a sound-world related to Brahms and Reger, but distinguished noticeably by his use of the B rather than the more mellow A clarinet. It nicely illustrates Fuchs’ lyrical gifts, allied to a strong grasp of harmonic and contrapuntal texture, enabling him to continue the tradition of Brahms without the stylistic innovations wrought by many of his contemporaries. The substantial list of Austro-German clarinet quintets written before 1945 (as well as examples from other parts of Europe and from America) contains few of lasting significance.²⁰

Brahms’ influence upon English composers was of special significance. After a performance of Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet in 1895 at the Royal College of Music, Stanford challenged his composition class to write a similar work. The twenty-year-old Samuel Coleridge-Taylor rose to the occasion with his highly individual and rhythmically complex Quintet Op. 10, which won him wide recognition. Stanford became interested in the revival of the Elizabethan ‘fancy’ and this rhapsodic form inspired many of his pupils, notably Herbert Howells. Howells’ Rhapsodic Quintet is one of his finest pieces, though (as Marion Scott observed) it remains difficult to interpret because the characteristic traits of several styles of writing are closely combined. The lyrical yet dramatic potential of the clarinet quintet medium manifestly suited the style of English music. Late in life Stanford was finally tempted to the genre in his two Fantasies of 1921 and 1922, which lay unpublished until relatively recently. Other British composers for clarinet quintet included Somervell, Holbrooke, Scott, Bowen, Wood, Reizenstein and Ruth Gipps. None reached the level of the Quintet by Bliss, a work of striking personality written at a time when he was rediscovering the forms and idioms of established tradition. The heart of the work is its third movement, whose central section has an intensity and idiomatic language comparable with Brahms.

The oboe also proved a particular attraction to the same generation of British composers, for whom Leon Goossens was a special inspiration. Arnold Bax introduced genuine Irish material into his Oboe Quintet of 1922, where, despite his declared dislike for Brahms and Stanford, he contrived to quote from Stanford’s 1882 collection Songs of Old Ireland. Bliss wrote his Quintet for the 1927 Sprague-Coolidge festival in Venice, where he was pleased to receive the congratulations of Alban Berg. He later wrote, ‘It is always a joy to write with a superlative artist in mind, and besides the sound of the oboe with strings is exquisite.’²¹ In 1931 Gerald Finzi heard the first performance of Imogen Holst’s Oboe Quintet and produced his own Interlude (1936), probably also inspired by Bliss. Its sinuous, Baroque sensibility – of chromaticism, agility and virtuosity – shows flexibility if a shortage of thematic material. Rubbra and Howard Ferguson immediately approved, Vaughan Williams observing that it was ‘rather different from your style as I know it – but all you all the same’.²²

The post-war years brought further clarinet quintets from Jacob, Wordsworth, Bush, Frankel, Cooke, Maconchy, Simpson, Hamilton and many others. The fluent French tradition is especially well represented by the Quintet by Jean Françaix. The 1980s alone saw significant contributions from Harrison Birtwistle, Morton Feldman and Isang Yun. Birtwistle’s title Clarinet Quintet denotes a decidedly anti-Classical impulse, and a purposeful tension between the title and the music. The work involves short musical statements analogous to postcard messages or diary entries. Birtwistle added links that simultaneously join and separate the main modules. He also cross-related the links both to each other and to the original ‘statements’. The outcome of these compositional stages is a work in which the modular and the continuous are indissoluble – a paradox in words, but not in Birtwistle’s musical imagination. The clarinet quintet has continued to prove itself a vibrant medium at the hands of such significant figures as Magnus Lindberg (1992), who has written of attempting to imitate the tutti of a full orchestra through the five instruments. His Finnish compatriot Jouni Kaipainen introduced a doubling contrabass clarinet to the ensemble in his polished yet expansive four-movement quintet (2000). Elsewhere, the combination has moved in yet other directions at the hands of Milton Babbitt (1996).

Music with piano

By comparison with the string quartet, chamber music with piano was scarcely developed by the 1770s, lacking four-movement structures, closely-wrought sonata schemes and a great degree of instrumental parity. Whereas the string quartet offered the potential for perfect blend, keyboard ensemble music was altogether more diverse, often involving amateur string players in accompanying roles. From the 1760s larger ensembles might involve three or four accompanying strings in the music of Mannheimers such as Filtz, Holzbauer and Richter, Viennese such as Wagenseil, Vanhal and Monn and immigrants to Paris such as Cambini. Expatriate Germans in Paris included Johann Schobert, an important influence on Mozart and composer of four quartets for harpsichord, two violins and bass. In London around 1770 the Neapolitan Tommaso Giordani produced Six Quintets Op. 1 for the combination which would become the piano quintet; their sharing of material among keyboard and strings is a significant stylistic feature.

Mozart’s Quartets in G minor K. 478 and E K. 493 radically advanced the combination of piano and strings in their balance of style, structure and content. The initial resistance which the Hoffmeister edition of the G minor Quartet encountered has been variously attributed to the unfamiliarity of the genre, the depth of expression which greatly exceeded popular taste and the fact that the work proved too difficult technically for amateur purchasers.²³ Mozart’s integration of texture had little effect on the next generation of virtuoso pianists, for whom the piano quartet (sometimes expanded to include double bass, as in Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet) was little more than a vehicle for virtuoso display.²⁴ Boccherini’s six Quintets Opp. 56 (1797) and 57 (1799) for piano and string quartet have been cited as an exception to this general rule.²⁵ Other early Romantic composers for piano quintet included Dussek and Louis Ferdinand, whilst Onslow, Ries, Glinka and Sterndale Bennett all wrote sextets with piano, string quartet and double bass.

As the genre developed, blend and balance were explored in a variety of ways. Themes and accompaniments were often exchangeable between strings and piano, the latter frequently of motivic significance. More homophonic or theatrical styles could involve more extended solo writing and often a larger amount of doubling. The future history of the piano quintet would produce a variety of relationships of style to scoring, since the distribution of themes and their accompaniments and true integration of forces would present the greatest technical challenges to the composer. Among effective types of scoring are those in which themes and accompaniments can be exchanged, immediately or at long range between the different ‘sides’ of the ensemble, and those in which the accompaniments are of genuine motivic significance. Yet more homophonic, theatrical writing requires more extended solo writing, more antiphonal display and even a larger amount of straightforward doubling. Style, therefore, cannot be judged in isolation, but only in relation to the wider musical style that it serves. There are some important differences in the approaches of Schumann, Brahms and Dvoák, and also between those of Franck and Fauré.

In terms of sheer quality of invention, Schumann’s Piano Quintet of 1842 represents a watershed in the history of piano and string quartet collaboration. The organic development of material allows for integration of all the voices, though the piano writing is sometimes athletic and allowed to dominate. Doubling of voices is a much more pervasive feature in Schumann’s sonorous textures than short-scale exchanges, with accompaniments largely of a neutral character. Thematic transference between movements is a particular feature of the Quintet, which Smallman attributes to a widespread vogue among chamber composers of the period, for example Spohr in his Piano Quintet in D minor Op. 130 of 1845.²⁶ Schumann’s Quintet enjoyed immediate success, his wife Clara taking part in many early performances.

Schumann established the quintet as a vehicle for Romantic expression, to which his successors brought their own national dialect. For example, Franz Berwald’s two poetic and original piano quintets, written in the 1850s, received a mixed critical reception, doubtless partly because of their structural unorthodoxy. Significantly, he echoed eighteenth-century writers in wanting his pianist interpreters to play from the heart and not merely the fingers. Folk elements with modal colouring and note-patterns transferred from one movement to the next are features of Borodin’s C minor Quintet of 1862.

Dvoák had already attempted a piano quintet in 1872 and had written a successful Piano Quartet Op. 23 in 1875 when he produced his Quintet Op. 81 of 1887, one of the most original yet accessible works for the medium. It is distinguished by melodic beauty and workmanship, with a new-found appreciation of the piano. Many generations of scholars have expressed admiration for the work, noting the way in which it epitomises the quintessential features of Dvoák’s music: melody and countermelody, vital rhythm, varied and colourful scoring, a kaleidoscope of moods ranging from sorrow to gaiety. Among many instances of textural skill is the opening of the ‘dumka’, where the tune is for the high register of the piano while the strings’ countermelody (viola/first violin) is placed low down. The approach to the recapitulation in the first movement gradually grows in intensity and power until the main theme bursts out tutti. As a viola player Dvoák was strongly drawn to the chamber music of his Classical precursors. By the time he reached the piano quintet, his keyboard writing was confident and effective, with a genuine appreciation of the vast range of mood and expression of which the piano is capable. His own viola playing was a considerable advantage in that it helped him to write idiomatically for the strings. It does not, however, explain fully why his chamber works possess an indefinable quality, more apparent to the players than to the listener, which is due largely to their strikingly individual textures.

Brahms’ Piano Quintet Op. 34 is a highly important work from early in his life, combining motivic and lyrical impulse. Having begun life as a string quintet with two cellos, it was first recast for two pianos, at Joachim’s suggestion. The final version combines elements from both, exploiting an especially resourceful and varied texture drawn from the piano and strings, while confining his keyboard part to the style and pitch-range of the strings, unlike the piano quintets of some of his contemporaries. The first movement has a clear formal outline, with many thematic links and fluid phrasing which mark it out as his most sophisticated sonata structure to date. Immediate and long-range thematic exchange within the ensemble reflects Brahms’ motivic approach. Transformations of material are occasionally supplemented by barely disguised cross-references across movements.

In contrast to Brahms’ Classical restraint comes César Franck’s Romantic rhetoric, adopting freer formal procedures and a highly coloured harmonic palette. His Quintet of 1879 is more overtly theatrical, beginning with dialogue of strings and piano before the exposition proper and proceeding with cyclical and motto connections. Such instrumental contrasts have often been associated with his half-conscious leaning towards organ registration rather than a personal association with strings or piano. Soon there followed a flood of French symphonic chamber music with piano, including quartets and quintets by Chausson, Roger-Ducasse, Fauré, Schmitt, D’Indy, Pierné and Vierne, with emphasis on thematic unification and extreme richness of texture.²⁷ Chausson’s Concerto Op. 21, published in 1892, is scored for the unusual combination of violin, piano and string quartet. Its cyclic form, ambitious modulatory patterns and intensely expressive lyricism betray the overwhelming influence of Franck, while at the same time signalling certain more innovative directions. On the other hand, Fauré’s two piano quintets Opp. 89 and 115 pursue a more classically poised and delicate approach to the medium. He often has polyphonic strands in the strings and only occasional melodic input from the piano.

Brahms provided an inspiration to Dohnányi’s C minor Quintet Op. 1 (1895) and to early works by Bartók, Berg and Webern. Reger and Pfitzner also brought their own characteristic musical personalities to bear on the medium. In 1914 Dohnányi returned to the piano quintet for his Op. 26, opting for lighter scoring and more restrained keyboard writing. The refinement of each of the three movements is illustrated by their quiet concluding bars. As with the clarinet quintet, piano chamber music in England came under Brahms’ influence, for example, Stanford’s Quintet Op. 25 of 1886, with its juxtaposition of Irish and German Romantic elements. British composers subsequently contributed substantially to the medium of the piano quartet and quintet, among them Bridge, Bax, Howells, Elgar and Walton. Bax’s Quintet in G minor (1915) shows a luxurious Romantic warmth, a rich harmonic palette and a rhapsodical manner. Elgar’s late Piano Quintet in A minor is also ambitious in scope, with a quasi-orchestral approach to the medium. By now, chamber music for strings and piano had acquired a somewhat conservative profile, far from major developments such as impressionism, jazz, atonality and serialism. Exceptionally, Koechlin’s First Quintet Op. 80 uses a modern dissonant style within a controlled musical structure to portray the experience of war. Bloch’s First Quintet Op. 33 (1923) is eclectic, drawing on a variety of influences, including his own Jewish heritage, expressed partly in quarter-tone language. His sharp contrasts of mood and dynamics emerge from an especially evocative handling of the medium. Bloch returned to the medium in 1957, making use of twelve-note themes for purely melodic purposes, without adhering to any dodecaphonic conventions. During the intervening period, a number of composers with (like Bloch) links in Paris and the USA were attracted by the combination of piano and strings, among them the Americans Copland, Piston and Harris, the Czech Martin and the Frenchman Milhaud. Martin ’s two Quintets of 1933 and 1944 betray his native roots, as well as the influence of his teacher Roussel. His polytonality and leaning towards Baroque models owe something to his contacts with ‘Les Six’, as do the jazz and blues elements in his music.²⁸

Lying outside the mainstream outlined above is the creative use of quartet-based ensembles by Charles Ives during the first dozen years of the twentieth century. These include Fireman’s Parade on Mainstreet from Op. 70 (string quintet, piano), Hallowe’en Op. 71 (string quartet, piano, optional drum), as well as In Re Con Moto et al Op. 72, Largo risoluto no. 1 Op. 74 and Largo risoluto no. 2 Op. 75 (all piano and string quartet).

Of mixed wind and strings with piano, Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes has the clarinet (like the piano) ulfilling accompanying roles of some intricacy. The work shows a deep and keen sense of the specific beauty and originality of Jewish music. The combination of lyric and grotesque elements, the sparkling wit and the fine detail contribute to the originality of the piece. The same combination recurs in Sextets by Roy Harris and by Copland, the latter’s an arrangement of his ‘Short Symphony’ for the Orquesta Sinfonica de Mexico. Latin America is an important influence throughout, the rhythms of the finale close to the Afro-Cuban danzón and (in the piano part) agitated jazz. The music is a highly sophisticated and yet authentic stylisation of primitive rhythmic and melodic patterns.

The Piano Quintet Op. 57 (1940) by Shostakovich was perhaps the most significant work of this period. At first it divided opinion, drawing sharp criticism from Prokofiev for its innate conservatism, though in fact marking the beginning of a clearer but highly individual musical language. The Quintet’s variety of moods ranges from rhetoric to comedy, unified by thematic cross-reference and enriched by colouristic effect. The lightweight finale evokes Classical rather than Romantic influence, perhaps (as Smallman suggests) modelled on Mozart’s G minor Quintet. Like the Fifth Symphony, the Quintet is predominantly lyrical, yet profound and philosophical, alternating poetry and zest. The fugue in the second movement has the piano entering quite late in the proceedings, and relates emotional content with intricate structure.²⁹

Characteristic of more recent works is Shostakovich’s inclusion of separate extended sections for each side of the ensemble and the adoption of lean piano writing. Textural simplicity of great imagination may be found in both the Shostakovich and Schnittke quintets. The latter also illustrates the use of microtones already found in Bloch’s earlier Quintet, as well as keyboard effects such as silent touch and creative use of sustaining pedal. Indeed, Schnittke’s Piano Quintet must be regarded as one of the most significant recent works in this survey. Begun in 1972, it marks a move away from the techniques and aesthetic of the post-war avant-garde, evolving a simpler musical language away from what Schnittke had come to see as the artificial nature of serial writing. This working through complexity towards musical essentials accounts for some similarities with late Shostakovich, an affinity reinforced by Schnittke’s capacity for brooding meditation and anguished yet economically designed lament. His basic musical elements avoid technical virtuosity, although his Quintet needs intensive rehearsal and empathy between the players. Schnittke’s third movement opens for strings alone with three short sections of canon in progressive augmentation, recalling the practice used by Ockeghem in his Missa prolationum. As Alexander Ivashkin has observed, ‘The way in which the final movement sets what happened earlier into a new perspective, and resolves the accumulated intensity, is something audiences can’t easily find in everyday life, so they respond to the way in which Schnittke is seeking to communicate with them.’³⁰ Gidon Kremer adds that the Quintet can be understood intuitively by listeners with no background or previous experience of Schnittke’s music, its polystylistic aesthetic allied to deep emotion.

Like the clarinet quintet, the medium of the piano quintet shows every sign of continued good health, on more than one occasion having broken free of the conservatism that has often been its hallmark. The contribution by Elliott Carter (1997) for the occasion of his ninetieth birthday attracted immediate critical acclaim. At least one reviewer has already felt moved to nominate it as the greatest piano quintet of the century, drawing attention to the truly Beethovenian conflict between the percussion instrument that is the piano and the string parts, in which the composer outshines himself in melodic lyricism. Though part of Carter’s Indian summer, the Quintet makes for challenging listening. Like Birtwistle, Carter makes concessions neither to his audience nor to his performers. We must be grateful that the quartet-based ensemble within a contemporary context is still capable of engendering such a level of inspiration.