Farrenc: Piano Quintet No.1, OP.30
Louise Farrenc (1804-1875), already an accomplished pianist, earned a coveted slot at the Paris Conservatory when she was 15. Female students were barred from training as composers, but the composition teacher Anton Reicha recognized Farrenc’s talent and gave her private lessons that continued after she got married at seventeen and left the conservatory.
Marriage often spelled the end of a composing career for even the most talented young women of her century, but Farrenc married a man who encouraged her to keep writing, and who was able to use his access as a music publisher to advance her interests. The publishing firm’s own small concert hall hosted the first performance of Farrenc’s Piano Quintet No. 1 (Op. 30) in 1840, featuring Louise’s talented 14-year-old daughter at the piano. The publication of the score in 1842 helped further cement Farrenc’s reputation, and soon she became the first woman named to the permanent faculty of the Paris Conservatory.
Farrenc’s Quintet is scored for violin, viola, cello, bass and piano, just like Schubert’s Trout Quintet. (Quintets featuring a second violin instead of bass caught on later, starting with Schumann.) Anyone at that time who might have expected a female composer to limit herself to mild-mannered salon music would have been surprised to discover the rich and nuanced emotions of the quintet’s first movement in the key of A-minor, which gains extra energy every time the three-beat tempo switches from even eighth-notes to flowing triplets.
The slow movement arrives with the distinctive tone color of the cello voicing the melody near the top of its range, playing dolce cantabile (sweet and in a singing manner). The rapid Scherzo combines the punch of Beethoven with the effervescence of Mendelssohn, and the finale has a Mozartean glint in how the main theme crests and tumbles across the minor scale of the home key—all proof of how well Farrenc integrated lessons from beyond her Paris orbit to craft a new approach to French chamber music.
Schubert: Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 “Trout”
When Franz Schubert (1797-1828) turned 20 in 1817, he had not yet seen his music published, mentioned in a newspaper, or performed publicly a single time, even though he had already composed some 300 songs and a large body of orchestral and chamber music. That year he wrote one of his most memorable songs, The Trout, which transports the listener to a babbling brook from the very first notes of the piano accompaniment. In a later stanza, minor-key music and thicker textures capture the muddied waters and the spectator’s “raging blood” at seeing the fish hooked. With its earworm of a melody and an uncanny sense of drama for such a simple little tale, The Trout has always been a favorite within Schubert’s incomparable songbook.
Schubert had occasion to revisit The Trout in 1819. While traveling in upper Austria that summer, he met Sylvester Paumgartner, a friend-of-a-friend and amateur cellist who asked for a new quintet. Paumgartner specified the instrumentation of violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano, a format favored by Hummel and other composers before Schubert. (The more familiar quintet of two violins, viola, cello and piano caught on later, starting with Schumann.) Paumgartner also requested a theme-and-variations movement based specifically on The Trout.
This Piano Quintet in A Major (D. 667) offers many pleasures beyond its signature movement. The opening Allegro vivace plays with a rising arpeggio gesture that interjects and comments around the singing themes, setting up the same kind of active discourse between melody and accompaniment found in so many of Schubert’s songs. (The rising arpeggios also foreshadow the “Trout” music still to come.) The Andante movement makes exquisite use of the quintet’s available textures, including tender duets for viola and cello, surrounded by a multilayered accompaniment. In the Scherzo, the heft of the double bass makes the speedy music all the more muscular.
The fourth movement jumps straight into the “Trout” theme, outlined by the strings in a simple Andantino treatment. The piano’s sparkling octaves and trills add an element of kinetic motion, and the variations continue to intensify the rhythmic and harmonic elements at play. The variation closest in character to the original song comes last, with the telltale rippling patterns shared between the piano and the strings. Related gestures continue to arise in the enigmatic finale, unifying this very grand quintet around ideas that began with a humble little fish.
