Exactly one year after his first piano quartet was premiered in Hamburg with Clara Schumann at the piano, Brahms himself was the pianist in the premiere of his new Piano Quartet in A Major, Op. 26. The performance took place in November 1862 in Vienna with members of the Hellmesberger Quartet. During Brahms’ lifetime the second piano quartet was the more often performed of the two, but in the twentieth century the dramatic and fiery G minor Quartet tended to eclipse it, and the A major Quartet is now one of Brahms’s more neglected major works. Indeed, it is less obviously ‘rousing’ than the G minor—it is an altogether more poised and lyrical conception, laid out on an even broader, more symphonic scale. Three of its four movements are cast in sonata form, and their ‘heavenly length’ and extended melodic ideas testify to the composer’s study of the music of Schubert. Yet this superb work’s melodic richness is only one of its strengths; and the gypsy energy of the G minor, though no longer directed to merely picturesque ends, is still to be felt.

The first movement, one of Brahms’s largest and yet most serene sonata designs, opens with a theme presented in two rhythmically distinct halves (triplets in the piano, followed by more flowing eighth-notes in the cello). These two ideas are apt for separate development, yet in combination they achieve a graceful balance of force, and this double theme easily dominates the movement despite a rich cast of secondary melodies and figures; it has the last word, just as it had the first.

The slow second movement is one of the most glorious Brahms ever conceived, a large but subtle triangular form articulating what Joachim called its ‘ambiguous passion’. The piano’s tranquil, song-like opening theme, and its gypsy-style cadential turn, are developed at length in ever-more extravagantly decorated statements. The piano is mysteriously shadowed by the strings, which Brahms keeps muted until the return of the main section: this throws the piano, with its desolate ‘Aeolian harp’ flourishes and fervent second theme, into unusual relief. There are anticipations here of the slow movement of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2, twenty years in the future. The muted sonorities return in the coda, quieting the openness of Brahms’s lyricism.

At first, the simple quarter-note motion of the third movement seems too mild for a scherzo, too plain for a character-intermezzo like the analogous movement in the G minor Quartet. Yet it proves apt for a relentless build-up of massive melodic spans. A more animated rhythmic interest appears only with the transition passage that leads to the second subject. The central trio is based on a variant of this transition theme, now turned fiery and Hungarian but treated with ruthless discipline as a strict canon between piano and strings.

The last movement is not a rondo but another fully worked sonata form; its first subject, nevertheless, has plenty of the capricious Hungarian color we associated with the alla Zingarese finale of the G minor Quartet. Here, however, the exotic flavor and idiosyncratic rhythms are subordinated to an ample, unhurried overall form that proceeds, Schubert-like, from the sheer size of the melodic paragraphs involved. The Olympian mood of relaxed strength nicely rounds off a work, whose perfect mastery is all the more remarkable for being so consistently understated.