Piano Quintet in A minor op. 14

Louise Farrenc and George Onslow had both composed piano quintets during the 1840s. However, in 1855, it was Saint-Saëns who wrote the first significant work for these forces in France. Barely twenty years old, the young musician dedicated this piano quintet to his great-aunt, Charlotte Masson, who had been very involved in his upbringing and of whom he was still very fond. His ambitious aims are clear from the first gravely majestic pages of the score and are borne out by the work in its entirety, which is rich in minor modes (even in the F major Andante sostenuto), modulations into remote keys and counterpoint: the finale begins with a long fugato passage played by the strings alone, unexpected in a habitually ebullient movement. By recapitulating some of the quintet’s thematic elements in this final Allegro, Saint-Saëns attempts here a somewhat hesitant cyclic form. On the other hand, however, he is bolder in his treatment of the Presto, a fantastic, headlong flight towards destruction which concludes with the disintegration of the musical material. Although the work was not published until 1865, it had been performed (apparently for the first time) at the Salons Érard on 10 April 1860, by the Quatuor Armingaud and the composer. Adolphe Botte, in the Revue et Gazette musicale of 15 April 1860, drew attention to Saint-Saëns’ “serious bent” and raised the concern that: “There are, in Paris, about ten young musicians like this, all of whom express themselves only with a certain gravity and whom the public do not know and may well never know.” The future, fortunately, has proved him wrong.