A Pretty Piece of Fluff: Dvorak's Piano Quintet

I have known and, in opposition to a good deal of critical opinion, loved the Dvorak G Major Quintet since encoun­tering it 35 years ago on an early West­minster record, played by the Vienna Konzerthaus Quintet. I found that re­cording (the first) particularly warm.

Such information as one usually finds about the Quintet dwells on the fact that Simrock, Dvorak's publisher, without a by-your-leave, brought it out in 1888 as Op. 77, suggesting that it was a recent composition. It wasn't. Dvorak had written it 13 years earlier, when he was stripling of 34. It brought him a second consecutive award of 400 gold florins (about $150 at the rates of that time) from a fund set up by the Austrian Im­perial government for "young, poor, and talented" artists. The following spring the piece was premiered at a con­cert of the Arts Society in Prague by an ensemble led by the violinist Frantisek Ondricek, who would later give the first

performance of Dvorak's Violin Con­certo. The Society awarded the compos­er an additional five ducats. At this time the Quintet was labeled op. 18.

The Dvorak work-list in Grove speaks ambiguously of "the original slow" movement, which would lead one to think the poco andante a substitution. But David Hall, in his notes for the pres­ent recording, indicates that it was an additional movement, between the opening Sonata-Allegro and the Scherzo. When Brahms sent the work to Simrock finally in 1888, he excised it because of its checkered history. In slightly abbre­viated form it had begun as the Andante religioso of the unpublished E minor String Quartet of 1870. At some time be­fore 1883 Dvorak converted it into a Nocturne for violin and piano, publish­ing it that year, along with a similarly additional movement, between the opening Sonata-Allegro and the Scherzo. When Brahms sent the work to Simrock finally in 1888, he excised it because of its checkered history. In slightly abbre­viated form it had begun as the Andante religioso of the unpublished E minor String Quartet of 1870. additional movement, between the opening Sonata-Allegro and the Scherzo. When Brahms sent the work to Simrock finally in 1888, he excised it because of its checkered history. In slightly abbre­viated form it had begun as the Andante religioso of the unpublished E minor String Quartet of 1870. At some time be­fore 1883 Dvorak converted it into a Nocturne for violin and piano, publish­ing it that year, along with a similarly named version for string orchestra. Ac­cording to Hall, the first recording of the five-movement Quintet was done in 1972 by a quintet from the Boston Sym­phony for Deutsche Grammophon.

It was once fashionable to dismiss this quintet as a piece of juvenilia. Alec Rob­ertson, in his little Great Composers volume of 1945, likes its spirit, but finds the material variously "undistinguish­ed" or "tortuous and dull." He likens the first and last movements to Lortzing overtures, which, I suspect, is damning with faint praise. (Grove speaks crypti­cally of "operatic associations" --per­haps with the comedy The Pigheaded Peasants written shortly before?). But later commentators are much kinder, and Sourek, Dvorak's chief biographer, calls the fourth movement "one of the most entrancing slow movements in all of Dvorak's chamber music:· William Ober adds that "this quintet helped Dvorak establish his personal identity as a composer."

The filler on this record, published in Mainz as Loiseau des bois, is by Franz Doppler (1821-1883), who, with his bro­ther Karl, played flute and conducted at the Budapest opera houses for a num­ber of years, thus producing the famous Doppler effect. A pretty piece of fluff, it is written for the odd combination of flute and four horns, though Doppler in dicated that the latter instruments could be supplanted in a pinch by a piano or a reed-organ. (They aren't in this instance.)