“I should be glad if something occurred to me as a main idea that occurs to Dvořák only by the way.”
-Johannes Brahms
On August 16th, 1887, Dvořák wrote to his friend Alois Göbl a letter that must have been - by Dvořák’s standards - relatively uninteresting. We can imagine that he spent time describing some of the minor details of his life at the moment, such as the weather, his health, and his finances. The Czech composer would almost certainly have let his friend know about a new composition if he had started one, often writing in excited tones about a new idea or a recently finished piece; instead, he wrote “…now I am doing nothing new…”
Fallow periods of an artist’s life are usually followed by fresh inspiration, and Dvořák’s case was no different. Just two days later, a manuscript bearing the date “August 18th” contained the sketches for a new chamber work, a Piano Quintet in A Major, and ten days later the first movement would be finished - the remaining three movements taking only five more weeks to complete. Writing a chamber work of this size in such a short time was not unheard of: Mozart was renowned for how rapidly he could write already-polished music, composing some of his most famous symphonies and operas in a matter of weeks; and Schubert’s prodigious rate led to his composing several dozen bars of music each day, every day, for years on end.
Nevertheless, even by these standards Dvořák managed to compose his new Quintet exceptionally quickly. Even more unusual was that while Dvořák was known to look to other composers’ recent music in order to stimulate new ideas, his latest idea appeared to be inspired by a revision of a previous work. Fifteen years before, he had published one of his first works - also a Piano Quintet, and also in the key of A Major. By requesting a copy of the manuscript from a friend in order to revise it, we can guess that he was unsatisfied with his first try, and that he had carried this dissatisfaction with him for the next decade and a half; nothing chafes more than wasted potential. And so, even after a long period of time which saw his rise to fame with his Slavonic Dances and Stabat Mater, after composing a series of symphonies, concertos, sonatas, and collections of folk music, Dvořák was compelled to return to an unpromising work from the beginning of his career. In a magnificent revision, he created one of the most famous works in the chamber repertoire - a pearl produced by irritation.
The second Piano Quintet is in fact no more a revision than a re-creation; aside from the ensemble and the key, there are few similarities. The opening theme of the first Piano Quintet, for example, is rather square, which is not made the more interesting by its being immediately repeated:
An inauspicious opening is by no means fatal to a work; Beethoven was well-known for working with themes less promising than this. Yet in the meantime Dvořák had developed a more mature and balanced sense of melody, and must have felt the desire to express it. The piano is now introduced as an accompaniment, and the melody is given to the cello, marked piano and espressivo, giving it a warmth and mellowness missing from the earlier version. The opening theme, which used to be declamatory, has been turned here into pure poetry:
This melody, charming and beautiful as it is, should not make us overlook the piano’s part. In fact, upon closer inspection, the craftsmanship is astonishing. This opening accompaniment is one of Dvořák’s most inspired creations - gently rocking, flowing, tender - and the genius lies in its subtlety; the piano’s introduction, lasting only two bars, already imprints on our ear a dotted quarter rhythm, artfully concealed by blending it with the triplet rhythm of the right hand. (This dotted rhythm motif will tie together virtually the entire movement, and also play a prominent role in the Dumka and the Finale.) In Dvořák’s hands, the motif can be either augmented or diminished, giving it an exceptional flexibility to transition between sections, as we will see throughout the rest of the piece.
The theme is then recast in the minor mode, the ending serving as an abrupt transition into a completely different texture that includes all of the players; the piano hammers out clusters of eighth notes with both hands, while the melody is taken over by the second violin. Before the shock of this has fully dissolved, however, there is yet another harmonic shift to the flatted mediant of C Major. Throughout all of these sudden changes in mood - a quasi-episodic structure that was exploited by other east European composers, notably Liszt in his Hungarian Rhapsodies and Kodály in his Marosszek Dances - Dvořák maintains a firm grasp on the dotted rhythm. The C Major section, in particular, is saturated with it by all of the instruments:
Although this type of rhapsodic approach was common in fantasias and other free-form works, few composers used it in as formal a genre as the sonata, and fewer still with such violent abruptness. (A notable exception is Beethoven, particularly in his Tempest sonata, his E-flat major sonata, op. 27 no. 1, and his later works.) By Dvořák’s day the style had become more accepted, particularly as the weakened polarity between the tonic and dominant required a wider range of techniques for creating harmonic interest. One such technique, the mediant shift, has just been illustrated, and, as we will see, mediant shifts will also be used to close the exposition and recapitulation.
The phrase closes with a cadence on B Major, the dominant of the dominant - another abrupt stop, which Dvořák uses as an opportunity to introduce a double-dotted quarter note rhythm, a diminution of the dotted quarter that is still recognizable but has more rhythmic snap:
This is followed by a leisurely transition back to the opening theme, a concerto-like rescoring for the piano and strings, before the theme is passed to the upper registers of the first violin. The melody and harmonies are identical to the opening (as is every note played by the piano), but the character has been transformed: The timbre of the violin, more brilliant than that of the cello, transforms the melody’s tone from mellow to poignant, while a combination of the dotted quarter and the triplet rhythm among the rest of the players creates a delicate, undulating web of inner voices. The effect is that of a pastoral, evoking the landscapes of Dvořák’s beloved Bohemia:
Just as in the opening, the melody closes with an indication of A Minor; and although we are now prepared for a loud shock, our expectations are immediately surprised afterwards with a new texture, marked mezzopiano and leggiero:
We now hear a new rhythmic motif of quarter, two eighths, quarter, which is the last rhythmic ingredient Dvořák will need to compose the rest of the movement. The other rhythms are still present, and in swapping the triplets and the two-eighths rhythm between the strings and the piano, Dvořák uses a common chamber technique of doubling the amount of music from a single idea.
After concluding with a brilliant half-cadence on the dominant of the mediant, we begin a new theme in C-sharp Minor, played by the viola combining the two-eighths rhythm and dotted-quarter rhythm. (The viola, coincidentally, was one of the first instruments that Dvořák played professionally, and led to his penchant for giving long, sustained melodies to the instrument; see the Dumka of this Quintet, or the opening of his famous American string quartet. Not surprisingly, violists, often overlooked by composers and treated in a rather lordly way by other string players, have always held Dvořák in high regard.) This leads to the piano picking up the same melody, and then the violins, in an astonishing synthesis of all of the rhythms we have heard so far - the melodic phrase is composed of the two-eighths and dotted-quarter rhythm as noted before, while the rhythm in both hands of the piano is in triplets, that of the right being a triplet rhythm imposed on the two-eighths. The overall effect is a background accompaniment both subtle and mysterious, and a melodic line that becomes more agitated as the volume increases to a fortissimo:
A bridge passage of arpeggios and twisted, chromatic windings of double notes in the piano leads us to the end of the exposition, another one of Dvořák’s masterly rescorings of the same melody for dramatic effect:
In the second ending, the close on C-sharp minor leads immediately into the development. (The reader is left to analyze the rhythmic sophistication of the first ending, which now uses the cross-rhythms of the two-eighths and triplet rhythms to create an illusion of slowing down to return to the serenity of the beginning of the movement, even though the underlying tempo does not change.) The two-eighths rhythm is now played in the lowest ranges of the cello and viola, while the piano interjects with virtuosic flourishes of arpeggios. The head of the opening theme is then introduced as a subject for development, the minor mode imbuing it with an unexpected pathos:
This sequence, after passing between the viola and cello, is suddenly interrupted by the dance-like theme in C Major heard at the beginning of the piece; however, its character has been radically altered, an elfin pianissimo transposed into the remote key of G-flat Major. This in turn is succeeded by a cascade of octaves by the piano leading into B Minor (the enharmonic of C-flat Minor), while throughout the entire passage the dotted-quarter rhythm is heard in virtually every single bar:
The rest of the development exhausts every permutation of the dotted-quarter and two-eighths rhythm, with Dvořák continually experimenting with different combinations of timbre, dynamic, and register. A particularly ingenious passage consists of the dotted-quarter rhythm in the piano set against its inverse (i.e., an eighth note followed by a dotted quarter) played by the violin:
All of these transformations throughout the development - an immense section consisting of over a hundred and thirty bars - are remarkable for their variety, their charm, and their skillful integration into the basic harmonic pattern of the whole work. Several of the themes from the introduction are fragmented and cast in widely different keys and combinations, but no matter how extreme the transformation, at least one of the rhythmic motifs - usually the dotted-quarter - is present. Dvořák’s command of rhythm was already evident in his earlier works, such as the Slavonic Dances and his symphonies; an equally sophisticated weaving of rhythmic motifs into different textures and dynamics is demonstrated, for example, in the scherzo of his Symphony No. 7 in D Minor. The Piano Quintet represents a further refinement of this technique and stands as one of the high points of his style: The ability to juxtapose diverse sections with little or no transition, while maintaining musical coherence and dramatic interest. This is all done within a sonata form that is very traditional, even academic; the sections of exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda are all clearly defined, with a recapitulation that is nearly an identical repeat of the exposition.
(It is worth noting that Dvořák, unlike his friend Brahms, seemingly never felt the weight of composing in Beethoven’s shadow. This feeling is apparent most clearly in Brahms’s early works, which is the source of much of his music’s struggle and power - and sometimes, especially in the final movements, its pretentiousness. Being unburdened by such expectations is probably what led Dvořák to never feel compelled to fundamentally alter the traditional forms that he worked within, and this sense of naturalness and ease, coupled with his rhythmic genius and a gift for melody, is what has led him to become such a success with connoisseurs and casual listeners alike.)
After a false recapitulation in B-flat Major, we encounter a dialogue between the viola and piano over muted eighth notes in the rest of the strings, and the dotted-quarter and triplet rhythms are again cycled through a sequence of keys before settling on an F-Major dominant seventh chord, a predominant that is clearly related to the movement’s fundamental tonality of A Major. After such a prolonged buildup to this cadence and a mammoth crescendo, the pianist may feel tempted by his besetting vice of drowning out his colleagues with sound; and, like most vices, there are times when it should be indulged. The bridge to the recapitulation furnishes us with a fine example:
The rest of the recapitulation is virtually an identical repeat of the exposition, ending in the submediant of F-sharp Minor. In keeping with the large proportions of the rest of the movement, a gigantic coda follows, with another innovative mixture of the rhythmic motifs, the triplets used by the piano for dramatic surges of arpeggios up and down the keyboard:
And after finally ending a cadence in A Major, the motifs are placed side-by-side in an accelerating swirl:
This is, I imagine, the kind of writing that earned the respect of Dvořák’s most esteemed colleagues, Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim. The ability to sustain the listener’s interest primarily with a handful of rhythms is a rare skill, especially for so long a stretch - the first movement, including the repeat, usually takes twelve to fourteen minutes. Each instrument is exploited for maximum effect, and even for such a large piece, none of the episodes feels wasted or miscalculated. (Incidentally, the piano part is also beautifully laid out for the hands and very gratifying to play.) Throughout it all, Dvořák’s infallible ear for drama and sonority elevates this work to one of the supreme achievements of chamber music. The concept is daring, and the execution is flawless.
If all of this intrigues you, I recommend listening to the first movement in its entirety - and then the rest of the piece, which fully lives up to the promise of the beginning. The Dumka, a Slavic lament, is a statement of profound grief with one of Dvořák’s celebrated viola solos, the Furiant a tour de force of his manipulation of rhythm and hemiola to create exciting climaxes. And there is, of course, the last movement, an energetic and rustic Finale showcasing a fugato with some of Dvořák’s best counterpoint.