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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Brahms's Clarinet Quintet was immediately recognised as a wonderful achievement on its appearance in 1891 and it has retained the ability to claim the hearts and minds of players and audiences ever since. Nowadays there is likely to be little dissent from the forthright assertion in the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians that ‘for emotional intensity and beauty of tone-colour the Clarinet Quintet may well claim the top-most place in Brahms's chamber music’. Indeed, this observation forms part of an adulatory tradition dating back to the years immediately following Brahms's death in 1897. As early as 1905 his biographer Florence May described it as a beautiful and now favourite work, containing the ‘richest fruits of the golden harvest of the poet's activity’. Her evocative style of writing nicely encapsulates the spirit of the Quintet, though in terms characteristic of the earlier rather than the latter part of the twentieth century:
Here ‘the brooks of life are flowing as at high noon’, though the tone of gentle loving regret which pervades the four movements, and holds the heart of the listener in firm grip, suggests the composer's feeling that the evening is not far away from him in which no man may work. A fulness of rich melody, a luscious charm of tone, original effects arising from the treatment of the clarinet, ‘olympian’ ease and mastery, distinguish every movement of this noble and attractive work, which, taking its hearers by storm on its first production, has grown more firmly rooted to the hearts of musicians and laymen with each fresh hearing. […]
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