BRUCKNER AND BRAHMS QUINTETS IN F

Abstract

THE string Quintet in F major is usually called Bruckner's only contribution to chamber music. This is historically inaccurate, for the Qjiintet had a modest forerunner in a string Quartet in C minor, which has come to light only quite recently.1 However, the Quintet remains the only mature composition of Bruckner's to challenge Brahms in the domain of his own undisputed supremacy. With the third Symphony (second version, 1877-78) it belongs to the first major works by Bruckner to be published at all and thus to reach a wider public than any of his earlier compositions. The composition of the Quintet was suggested to Bruckner in I878 by Joseph Hellmesberger, sen., then director of the Vienna Conservatory, to which Bruckner had been appointed ten years earlier. Hellmesberger wanted new music for his excellent quartet, which had by that time been in existence for nearly thirty years. Bruckner seems to have been unwilling or unable to write a string quartet, perhaps because he instinctively felt the need for a medium allowing for a more ample polyphony suited to his particular instrumental style. Yet it is a gross exaggeration to call this work, as has so often been done, a symphony in disguise. Much rather is it a genuine attempt on Bruckner's part to adjust his symphonic style to the requirements of this, to him, uncongenial medium. This is borne out by a comparison of its four movements with the types of movement found in his symphonies. The first movement of the Quintet (Gemassigt=Moderato) bears the time-signature of 3-4, a very unusual one for an initial movement in any instrumental work by Bruckner, whose symphonies invariably begin in common time or alla breve. His choice of this unaccustomed metre is a sure indication of a deliberate change in style, and so is the use of fugal technique for the third episode of the finale (cf. Eulenburg miniature score, p. 60, bar 5 ff). The happiest balance, surely, is struck in the serenely beautiful Adagio, one of Bruckner's supreme inspirations.2 Here for once he manages to fuse the seraphic 'It was composed in 1862, most probably while Bruckner was studying composition in general and the handling of sonata form in particular with Otto Kitzler. It received its first (posthumous) performance in 1951 at Hamburg. Since then it has been heard at several Bruckner festivals in Germany, but no score has been issued as yet. 2This is the third movement in the Eulenburg score, but in the autograph it takes second place, and it was made to change places with the scherzo in the course of the revisions to which the Quintet was subjected. Robert Haas (' Anton Bruckner ', Potsdam, 1934, P. 136 ff) shows that the work was repeatedly revised up to 1884 and that the score published that year differs in many instances from the autograph. A revision of this published score, based on a collation with the autograph byJ. von Woess, was issued by Universal Edition in Vienna in 1922 (1927).