Piano Quartet in E flat major, Op.47

“I’m really enchanted by this work,” declared Clara Schumann, “It’s as fresh and as youthful as a first attempt.” In fact, the Piano Quartet in E flat her husband had completed towards the end of 1842 wasn’t his first score of that kind. The freshness of his interest in writing for the combination of piano and string trio was undiminished, however, by any memory he might have had of doing the same thing, in a Piano Quartet in C minor, during his student days. Although there were precedents by other composers - Mozart had written two Piano Quartets in the mid-1780s and there were three teenage examples by Mendelssohn from the 1820s - no one had composed for the medium on such an ambitious scale before. Clearly, at the end of a period of just five months in which he had written three String Quartets and the first ever Piano Quintet, Schumann felt that he had both the inspiration and the technique to elevate the piano quartet to a new status.

While sketching the work in October 1842, Schumann might well have asked himself what Beethoven would have done in the same circumstances. Certainly, there is a distinct echo of late Beethoven in the brief but significant suggestion of a chorale for the strings in the quietly expectant opening bars. There is something of Beethoven too in the way the slow introduction is not only swept aside by the quicker main tempo of the first movement but also thoroughly integrated with it in the long term. The integration process is more than a matter of converting the violin line of the Sostenuto assai introduction into the brisk main theme of the first movement as the piano effects the change of tempo to Allegro ma non troppo. Schumann also adopts the somewhat riskier strategy of slowing down the movement at a vital structural point - between an eventful exposition and a dramatic development - so as to recall the Sostenuto assai introduction in its original form. He slows the movement down again, though by different means this time, just before accelerating to a faster than ever tempo for the agitated and brilliantly conclusive coda.

Another composer Schumann seems to have had in mind when at work on his Piano Quartet in E flat was his much admired colleague Felix Mendelssohn. The Scherzo, with its lightly pattering figuration in eerie minor harmonies, is a clear tribute to the elfin manner of so many of the older composer’s scherzos (including that of his Piano Quartet in B minor). It is entirely characteristic of Schumann, on the other hand, that there is not just one contrasting trio section here but two, both of them allowing the scherzo material to show through from time to time as though it were still skipping along somewhere just below the surface.

Perhaps the most original and certainly the most personal of the four movements is the Andante cantabile, a series of lyrical variations on the romantic melody anticipated by the violin and definitively presented by the cello in the opening bars. At its heart, however, is a passage which has nothing to do with the cello melody but which recalls and reverentially develops the chorale that had been so influential in motivating the first movement of the work. As the viola and then the violin return to the main theme after that central episode, the cellist takes the opportunity to tune the bottom string down a tone - a manoeuvre required for the low B flat sustained by the cello as a three-note motif passes through wayward harmonies on the other three instruments in the closing bars of the movement.

The three-note motif is immediately adopted as the beginning of the vigorous main theme of the Vivace Finale. With its tail of dancing semi-quavers it makes a natural fugue subject and, indeed, although no full-scale fugue actually materialises, most of the movement consists of more or less elaborate contrapuntal treatment of that theme. Contrasting melodic material is offered at an early stage by the cello in swinging dotted rhythms and, later on, by a lyrical episode echoing the first trio of the Scherzo. Nothing, however, not even a recall of the three-note motif much as it first appeared at the end of the Andante cantabile, can arrest the dynamic progress of the main theme - least of all when it gets involved in a double fugato towards the end.

Gerald Larner©