The Piano Quartet and Quintet

Designed as a companion volume to the author''s earlier study The Piano Trio this book surveys the development of the piano quartet and quintet from their beginnings in the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Developments during the first four decades of the nineteenth century resulted not only in Schubert''s renowned Trout Quintet but also in works of much brilliance by Dussek Hummel Weber and others in which the piano predominates in a concerto-like role. Subsequently Schumann''s epoch-making quintet of 1842 initiated a broadly symphonic style with large-scale structures and closely integrated textures which was taken up by many later composers including Brahms Dvorak Cesar Franck Faure and Elgar. The author also examines the numerous changes in the nature of the genres which have occurred in recent times and gives special consideration to a number of works by leading twentieth-century composers in which mixed media are formed by combining wind instruments with the normal strings-and-piano ensembles.