String Quintet No. 2 (Mozart) standard four movement form: String Quintet No. 2 (Mozart) The String Quintet No. 2 in C minor, K. 406/516b, was written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1787, a transcription of his earlier Serenade No. 12, K. 388, for wind octet. Like all of Mozart's string quintets, it is a "viola quintet" in that it is scored for string quartet and an extra viola (two violins, two violas and cello). Unlike his other string quintets, however, the work was not originally written for strings. It is Mozart's own transcription of the Serenade No. 12 for Winds in C minor K. 388/384a.
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