A composition for piano and four other instruments, usually, after 1800, string quartet. Along with the Piano quartet, the form was one of a handful of standardized instrumentations that grew out of the accompanied keyboard sonatas or divertimentos during the second half of the 18th century (see Accompanied keyboard music) and is loosely related to the keyboard concerto. Some early concertos (such as the three of Mozart's dating from 1782–3) can be performed ‘a quattro’, which is usually taken to mean by piano and string quartet, but have important formal differences from quintets proper; some quintets however show concerto-derived characteristics. The standard scoring emerged later than for the piano quartet, but some time after the rise of the string quartet in the 1770s and 80s, and it was not until the second quarter of the 19th century that the scoring with string quartet came to eclipse all others.
In all periods, piano quintets were less common than keyboard chamber music for smaller ensembles. Publishers' catalogues issued in the first half of the 19th century list more than twice as many piano quartets as quintets and larger ensembles, and many more piano trios than quartets and quintets combined. The composers of quintets were usually those who also wrote other keyboard chamber music. In the 1770s and 80s piano quintets by J.C. Bach, Tommaso Giordani, Pugnani, Wainwright, Storace and Tindal were published in England; by Tapray and Hemberger in France; and by Giardini and J.S. Schroeter in both. Many of these works, part of the accompanied sonata tradition, were conceived for amateur players and had relatively simple piano parts. As a more elaborate chamber music style emerged and as the piano emerged as the preferred keyboard instrument, the piano quintet increased in difficulty and complexity. Keyboard parts become more demanding in the period from 1780 onwards. Boccherini's two sets, from the late 1790s, show a well integrated style and the standard instrumentation. But instrumentation varied: J.C. Bach called for flute and oboe in one work, oboe and viola da gamba in another; Giardini used no viola, but a double bass; Hoffmeister used two violas; and among the later composers to use wind instruments are Mederitsch and Bachmann (flute), Triebensee and Eberl (oboe) and Brandl (bassoon). Some composers wrote works exclusively with winds instruments, notably Mozart (k452) and Beethoven (op.16) as well as Grund and Danzi. After 1800, a double bass was sometimes used rather than a second violin, most famously in Schubert's ‘Trout’ Quintet d667 but also by J.L. Dussek, J.B. Cramer, Hummel and Kalkbrenner. Fewere than half the piano quintets in this period used the scoring of piano with string quartet; most of the composers writing piano quintets were successful as pianists.
By the middle of the 19th century, however, works by Schumann, Spohr and Berwald followed what is now the conventional instrumentation, and the genre took on some of the seriousness of the more prestigious chamber music genres as composers who were not necessarily pianists themselves contributed to the genre. These included works by Borodin, Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov (for piano and wind instruments), Dvořák, Anton Rubinstein, Saint-Saëns, Franck, Chadwick, Sibelius, Bruch, Stanford, Fibich, Suk, Dohnányi, Vierne, Arthur Foote, Granados and Reger. During this period the model exemplified by Schumann's op.44 or Brahms's op.34, substantial four-movement works, came to be the norm. The perennial challenge of the genre was the relationship between piano and strings, even more so than in the case of the piano quartet with its smaller group of strings. In Brahms's op.34, which had originated as a string quintet and was then arranged as a two-piano sonata before it found its ultimate form, all the instruments are treated as equals, with constant exchange of material and roles, and the piano part has equal weight with that of the string group. Extended solo passages are seldom found, either for strings or for piano.
The Brahmsian, post-Wagnerian style predominated into the early years of the 20th century, with works from Reger, Bartók, Fauré (two), Rheinberger, Webern, Pfitzner, Amy Beach, Dohnányi, Bax and Elgar. Out of the welter of styles that emerged from the experimentation after World War I, a new kind of style divorced from the traditional piano quartet emerged. This is exemplified by Ruth Crawford Seeger's 1929 Suite for Piano and String Quartet, a post-tonal work spare in its writing both for strings and piano, often integrating the piano as just another instrument within the ensemble by using it to declaim only a single line.
More traditional quintets continued to be written, as exemplified in works by Frank Martin, Bloch, Korngold, Goossens, Martinů, Roy Harris and Shostakovich, and after World War II by Piston, Medtner, Bacewicz (two), Leighton, Milhaud (two), Persichetti, Ginastera, Tcherepnin and others. Most of these works departed from the late 19th-century norm in some way, especially in harmonic language, but in some cases also in the adoption of modernist instrumental techniques such as the incorporation of quarter-tone scales and harmonies and an increase in rhythmic complexity.
In the last quarter of the 20th century, the piano quintet was fertile ground for individual artistic expression, ranging from Rochberg's 1975 quintet, notable for its inclusion of a movement for piano alone (an extreme rarely seen elsewhere in the repertory), to Schnittke's 1976 quintet, which makes significant departures in its harmonic language. The extensive use of quarter tones and closely spaced chords in the strings serves to heighten the contrast between the softer sounds of the strings and the clarity of tone and fixed pitch of the piano. Further still from 19th-century norms is Morton Feldman's 1985 quintet, explicitly identified as for ‘Piano and String Quartet’, which stretches out over more than an hour, consisting entirely of sustained chords in the strings (often with harmonics), juxtaposed with crystalline rolled chords on the upper two-thirds of the piano keyboard. The musical motion unfolds over so long a time-frame that even the smallest alterations of the harmony and rhythm take on great significance.
W. Altmann: Handbuch für Klavierquintettspieler (Wolfenbüttel, 1937)
M.M. Fillion: The Accompanied Keyboard Divertimenti of Haydn and his Viennese Contemporaries (c.1750–1780) (diss., Cornell U., 1982)
N. Simonova: Fortepiannïy kvintet: voprosï stanovleniya zhanra [The piano quintet: questions on the formation of the genre] (diss., Gosudarstvennaya Konservatoriya, Kyiv, 1990)
B. Smallman: The Piano Quartet and Quintet: Style, Structure and Scoring (London, 1994)
D.W. Fenton: The Piano Quartet and Quintet in Vienna, 1780–1810 (diss., New York U., in preparation)
DAVID FENTON