By the time Elgar wrote his Piano Quintet in A minor – with World War I just ended and an uneasy peace just beginning – he was, for all intents and purposes, at the end of his career. It had begun slowly and sporadically enough: Elgar was forty-two when the Enigma Variations vaunted him, finally, to the front rank of European composers in 1899. And, in just twenty-one years, he made up for much lost time, with the triumphant receptions of the first Pomp and Circumstance Marches, the Cockaigne Overture, and, especially, the Symphony no. 1 and Violin Concerto.

But his popularity faded almost as quickly as it had flared up, brought on, first, by the upheaval of the Great War, and, after it, by the combination of a creative drought that followed the death of his wife, Alice, in 1920, and a critical consensus that his music was, stylistically, out-of-step with the Roaring ‘20s. Still, before that happened, there was one last, brilliant flowering of creative work.

The last set of major pieces Elgar composed – beginning with the Violin Sonata and String Quartet and ending with the famous Cello Concerto – all bear the scars of a world irrevocably changed by a terrible war. From the beginning, Elgar seems to have viewed the conflict with a measure of dread and depression; by the time it ended, his mood was justified – and gloomy, indeed.

His Piano Quintet was composed, then, in a dark psychological state. He wrote it over the last part of 1918 and the beginning of 1919, mostly in a country cottage in Sussex called Brinkwells he and Alice had rented. A macabre association near that location also played a part in the score’s development: a cluster of trees in a park near the cottage, legend has it, are actually the remains of Spanish monks struck dead by lightening for engaging in sacrilegious rituals.

Whatever the story – and there’s no record of a Spanish settlement anywhere near Brinkwells, ever – the image conjured up some of Elgar’s most “ghostly” music in the Quintet’s first movement. The movement itself opens with an expansive piano melody – perhaps a reference to the monks’ plainchant – that’s accompanied by a focused, rhythmic tattoo from the strings; after a fragmentary, questioning string figure, the tempo shifts into a brooding, martial Allegro. This driving music is interrupted, suddenly, by a reprise of that inquisitive string melody; shortly thereafter a warm, typically Elgarian refrain in E major crops up, marking the music’s first turn from the minor mode.

These three primary ideas – the expansive opening tune, its rhythmic counterpoint, and the major-key episode – are treated to a series of involved, developmental procedures. After building to a furious climax that, essentially, pits the strings against the piano, the recapitulation, with its serene reiteration of the major-key material returns, fading, at the end, softly away.

The second movement forms the Quintet’s emotional heart. It’s built around a touching melody first played by the viola, and later taken up by the violins. The spirit of Brahms is never far off, at least as far as the music’s harmonic language is concerned. But the melodic writing, which builds to a moving, soaring apex, is pure Elgar – possessing “something of Nimrod,” an early critic wrote.

The finale begins with a melody that hints at the first movement’s introduction before eliding into a gracious, triple-meter theme in a brisker tempo (Allegro). A second motive, syncopated, that we almost might call “jaunty,” provides a contrast that, thanks to episodes of increasing rhythmic dissonance, fast becomes more emotionally complex. Eventually, after a reprise of the slow, opening melody, and a final battle between strings and piano, this sunny music wins the day with a blaze of A major.

© Jonathan Blumhofer