String Quintet in G Major, Opus 111
JOHANNES BRAHMS

On a vacation trip to his much-loved Italy in the spring of 1890, the 57-year-old Brahms decided to retire. He had made preliminary sketches of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, but now he abandoned those plans and destroyed a good deal of manuscript. But before he quit, Brahms wanted to complete one last work. That summer at Ischl, high in the Austrian Alps, he wrote a string quintet, and when he sent a final correction of it to his publisher in December Brahms proclaimed: "With this note you can take leave of my music because it is high time to stop."

Brahms, of course, would come out of retirement the following year when he was inspired by the playing of clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, but at this point he wanted to go out on a cheerful note-his Quintet in G Major, written by a man just back from a relaxing trip to Italy, is one of his sunniest and most relaxed scores. Brahms' longtime friend Elizabeth von Herzogenberg, now seriously in decline with heart disease, saw the score and gauged this music perfectly: "Reading it was like feeling spring breezes," she wrote the composer, "He who can invent all this must be in a happy frame of mind. It is the work of a man of thirty."

Despite its youthful surface, the Quintet in G Major is very much the work of an experienced composer, particularly in Brahms' subtle extension of his themes and in the music's harmonic freedom. Curiously, this quintet has also struck many as Brahms' most cosmopolitan work, and various critics have heard Italian, Hungarian, Viennese, and Slavic influences here. There are those, too, who think it sounds like Brahms in every measure.

Brahms' friend and biographer Max Kalbeck claimed that the very beginning, with its sweeping cello melody, was originally going to be the opening of Brahms' Fifth Symphony. Certainly this impassioned opening sounds orchestral, and it has presented problems of balance ever since, for the cellist must cut through the busy accompaniment of the upper voices. The second theme-group-this is the one invariably thought "Viennese"-waltzes agreeably, and Brahms extends it with a lovely violin melody marked dolce. The development begins in a dreamy haze of sound, but Brahms quickly brings back the energy of the opening and drives the movement to an exciting close.

The Adagio takes much of its character from the dark sound of the movement's dominant instrument, the first viola, which introduces the opening melody (with its characteristic turn), leads the way much of the time, and has a cadenza-like outburst just before the quiet close. The third movement, Un poco allegretto, is a wistful little waltz, enlivened by a syncopated accompaniment. One of the glories of the quintet is the G-major trio, where the dolce melody slides smoothly between duets for the violins and violas. The cadences of this movement are especially interesting: the trio simply trails off into nothing before the opening section resumes, and at the very end Brahms brings back a bit of the trio to close out the movement. The finale, inevitably considered the "Hungarian" movement, rips along on a main theme that has been compared to the csardas. The movement is in sonata-rondo form, with a second theme-group built on flowing triplets, and the dazzling coda is full of gypsy fire.

The first performance was given in Vienna on November 11, 1890, by the Rosé Quartet, which would later give the premiere of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. At the rehearsal Max Kalbeck, noting the music's genial atmosphere and thinking of Brahms' love for Vienna's main park, nudged the composer and suggested: "Brahms in the Prater?" And the composer replied: "You've hit it! And all the pretty girls there, eh?"