Piano quintet Piano quintet In classical music, a piano quintet is a work of chamber music written for piano and four other instruments. The genre particularly flourished in the nineteenth century. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the instrumentation most frequently consisted of piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass. Following the phenomenal success of Robert Schumann's Piano Quintet in E major, Op. 44 in 1842, which paired the piano with a string quartet (i.e., two violins, viola, and cello), composers began to adopt Schumann's instrumentation. Among the most frequently performed piano quintets, aside from Schumann's, are those by Franz Schubert,
String Quintet (Bruckner) In a letter to the Florian priest and Regens Chori Ignaz Traumihler Bruckner reports on the completion of his string quintet) and at the same time hopes for the premiere by Josef Hellmesberger: "My quintet is ready! Hofkapellm (dialect). Hellmesberger is completely out of joint with joy, u wills perform. He's totally changed, u is huge." In fact, Hellmesberger had hesitated with the premiere. The Bruckner biographer August Göllerich notes: "As with the genius of any impression is converted into a gigantic, Bruckner seems to have taken even some authoritative words of Hellmesberger on the now completed quintet too seriously."