(Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna)
In the 1890's, the fashionable Alpine resort town of Bad Ischl had become Brahms's second home. There, in 1891, on his 58th birthday, he drew up his will. He subjectively felt old, worried that his creative powers were leaving him, that it was time to prepare for the end, and that perhaps he would write no more. Two months later, he sent a new piece to a friend, a trio with clarinet, that he said was “twin to an even greater folly.” The “greater folly” was to be one of his most moving works, this Clarinet Quintet. The clarinet had never had an important place in his music before this final burst of inspiration; nevertheless, his last four pieces of chamber music, the Trio, this Quintet, and two Sonatas for Clarinet all resulted from his admiration for a particular clarinetist. This clarinetist, a man Brahms first met in 1891 and called a “dear nightingale,” was Richard Mühlfeld (1856‑1907).
Mühlfeld was trained as a violinist and taught himself to play the clarinet. In 1873, he joined the violin section of the fine orchestra that the Duke of Meiningen maintained at his court, and in 1876, he became its first clarinetist. In March 1891, Brahms went to Meiningen as an honored guest to hear von Bülow conduct some of his works. On one of the programs Mühlfeld played a Weber concerto for clarinet. “The clarinet cannot be played better,” Brahms, known to be sparing of praise, wrote to Clara Schumann. In July, when he had completed both the trio and the quintet, he reported to Clara, “I look forward to returning to Meiningen if only for the leisure of hearing them. You have never heard a clarinet player like the one they have there. He is absolutely the best I know of.” Clara read through the score of the Clarinet Quintet at the piano with her daughter and wrote back that it was a “heavenly work.” When she heard Mühlfeld play it in 1893, she wrote to Brahms, “I am not feeling very well, but I must write you a line after having heard your exquisite Quintet at last. What a magnificent thing it is, and how moving! Words are inadequate to express my feelings. He plays so wonderfully that he must have been born for your music.”
If Brahms had not encountered Mühlfeld when he did, perhaps some other performer or instrument would have caught his interest and sparked the fire of invention again. There is no way to know, but posterity is grateful to Mühlfeld for these last glorious works, and for the Clarinet Quintet most of all. The music, composed in 1891, is mellow and warm, even sensuous, but it is also a touching valedictory, introspective and retrospective, a calm and beautiful farewell. The movements of the quintet are interrelated, as had become usual in Brahms's late chamber music, by patterns, motives, and turns of musical phrase that appear and reappear in the long course of the work. At the very end, in the coda to the finale, the music that opens the work comes back to round out the score with great elegance.
After the gentle melancholy of the Allegro first movement comes a remarkable Adagio in a simple three‑part form. It begins with a floating melody in the clarinet, richly but quietly accompanied by the muted strings. A contrasting middle section does not introduce new material but instead turns the first theme into a dark, wild gypsy rhapsody.
The third movement opens as a simple and gentle Andantino with two themes, which Brahms soon transforms into a scherzo‑like Presto non assai, ma con sentimento that starts quietly in the strings alone. Despite the apparent great change in tempo, Brahms writes the music so that although it looks and feels as though it is going by at a great rate, the actual beat is very nearly the same as that of the opening music. The last movement, Con moto, is a masterly, Mozartian set of variations on a theme that seems reminiscent of the first and third movements. As it proceeds, the opening theme from the first movement reappears as part of and in combination with the music that is new here, as though it were itself new.