Piano Quintet (Franck) score open at the piano, a gesture which was interpreted as mark of disdain. The work has been described as having a "torrid emotional power", and Édouard Lalo characterized it as an "explosion". Other critics have been less positively impressed: Roger Scruton has written of the quintet's "unctuous narcissism". There are three movements: The music has a cyclical character whereby a motto theme of two four-bar phrases, used 18 times in the first movement, recurs at strategic point later in the work. Piano Quintet (Franck) César Franck's Piano Quintet in F minor is a quintet for piano, 2 violins, viola,
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