Notes for: August 13, 2019
By the time Elgar wrote the Piano Quintet in A Minor, the self-taught musician from the provinces had turned into a British national icon, acclaimed, knighted, and heaped with honors. Elgar was beloved for works as wide-ranging as the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance marches, and a First Symphony that the conductor Hans Richter called “the greatest symphony of modern times.” Elgar turned to chamber music late in his career. In the summer of 1918, exhausted and depressed by the war, he moved from London to an idyllic Sussex woodlands cottage. That summer he worked simultaneously on three major chamber works: the Violin and Piano Sonata in E Minor, the String Quartet in E Minor, and, most ambitious of all, the intensely Romantic Piano Quintet – a work that, as Elgar wrote to a friend, “runs gigantically and in a large mood.”
Elgar’s wife Alice suggested in her diary that the Quintet was inspired by a local legend about impious Spanish monks who, having engaged in blasphemous rites, had been struck by lightning and turned into a grove of withered trees near the cottage. Alice speculated that the Quintet’s “wonderfully weird beginning” represented those sad and sinister trees. Elgar himself described the first movement as “ghostly stuff.” It begins with an eerie introduction: an austere piano motif that is interrupted repeatedly by muttering strings, followed by a sighing motif and a plaintive rising phrase from the cello. The main body of the movement bursts out with a vigorous march and a lilting, Spanish-sounding dance. Elgar skillfully traverses this rich palette of musical ideas, altering pace and mood to create an unsettling effect. The emotional temperature rises through a powerful fugato at the end of the exposition and a driven, agitated development section. At the end, emotions spent, the introductory material returns and the movement fades away.
The exquisitely beautiful Adagio, which develops from the viola’s spacious opening melody, is as calming as the first movement is unsettling. While the music rises to several impassioned climaxes, for the most part the movement is dominated by the elegance and serenity of its long melodic lines. A striking feature of the Quintet is its variety of textures, which range from the clean lines of the Adagio to a Brahmsian thickness that at times has the first and last movements sounding symphonic. The third movement highlights another distinguishing feature: the Quintet’s cyclical organization, through which Elgar unifies the work emotionally as well as technically. The movement begins with a quotation from the first movement’s eerie opening, and other uneasy references later creep in. But overall the concluding Allegro is splendidly vigorous, noble and grand. Although the ghosts reappear, by the end they are triumphantly banished.