Piano Quintet (Schumann) in a double fugue. This coup may have been inspired by a similar confluence of themes in the E flat quartet op. 12 of Felix Mendelssohn. Schumann's piano quintet was widely acclaimed and much-imitated. Its success firmly established the piano quintet as a significant, and quintessentially Romantic, chamber music genre. The Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34 of Johannes Brahms, reworked from an earlier sonata for two pianos (itself a reworking of an earlier string quintet) at the urging of Clara Schumann, was one of many significant Romantic piano quintets that show Schumann's influence and adopt his choice of
Piano Quintet (Schumann) and dynamic range. Bringing the piano and string quartet together, Schumann's Piano Quintet takes full advantage of the expressive possibilities of these forces in combination, alternating conversational passages between the five instruments with concertante passages in which the combined forces of the strings are massed against the piano. At a time when chamber music was moving out of the salon and into public concert halls, Schumann reimagines the piano quintet as a musical genre "suspended between private and public spheres" alternating between "quasi-symphonic and more properly chamber-like elements." The piece contains four movements in the standard fast-slow-scherzo-fast pattern: The tempo