String Quintet in F major Op.88

Before writing a string quintet Brahms had a choice to make. It would basically be a string quartet, but would it follow the Mozart model by adding a viola or the Schubert model with two cellos? In 1862 he decided in favour of the Schubert example but wasn’t been able to make it work and rewrote the draft score, first as the Sonata for Two Pianos in F minor Op.34b and then as the Piano Quintet in F minor Op.34. In 1882 in the Quintet in F major Op.88 he chose to follow the Mozart model and did it so successfully that eight years later he wrote a very different second String Quintet in G major for the same ensemble.

In the Quintet in F major the guest first viola is present more to enrich the texture – the last movement is particularly enterprising in this respect – than to vary the colouring with prominent solo opportunities. Although it adds a contrapuntal line to the first violin’s opening presentation of the main theme of the first movement, it takes a modest place in an extended, energetically rhythmic transition passage. It claims solo attention only when it introduces the second subject in A major where its apparent sextuple time seems to contradict, though politely, the prevailing 4/4 – a rhythmic feature characteristic of Brahms and particularly evident in this movement. After the exposition repeat, the first viola is integrated into the development, often in partnership with the second. It does, however, retain its ownership of the second subject when it is time for its return, not long before the tempo slows down towards the end.

Rather than offer the two separate central movements conventionally expected at this stage, Brahms combines the functions of slow movement and scherzo in a single rondo structure where a slow section alternates with quicker material. The Grave ed appassionato in C sharp minor derives, though now much romanticised, from a piano sarabande Brahms had written when experimenting with baroque forms 27 years earlier. It appears three times with different scoring on each occasion. The melodic interest    is for the most part carried by first violin while the cello, with its arpeggios rising through two octaves, performs a kind of obbligato. The first viola has a not insignificant part to play here, usually in a pair with the second viola or second violin but more prominently in the last slow section of the movement. The intervening Allegretto vivace, which derives from a gavotte of the same period, reappears in a variant form, its dotted rhythms converted to pattering    quavers, in the Presto preceding the closing Grave ed appassionato.

The major function of the first viola is to start the energetic F-major fugue that opens the Allegro energico. The fugue theme is still in evidence, but quietly and mainly in the inner parts, when the key changes to A major for the melodious second subject (marked dolce) introduced by first violin. It gradually disappears in a congenial development section before it reasserts itself to lead into a recapitulation and a Presto coda that begins pianissimo and ends fortissimo.

Gerald Larner © 2018