Composed 1918-19; 39 minutes

“It is strange music I think, and I like it,” Elgar told the Piano Quintet’s dedicatee, music critic and biographer Ernest Newman, as he neared completion of the work—“but it’s ghostly stuff.” The score lives up to the remark. Shadowed themes drift in and out of focus, as if premonitions. Shapes emerge, dissolve, and return transformed. It is music written at the height of Elgar’s technical powers—and in a world irrevocably changed.

The Quintet belongs to the bleak years of the Great War. Europe had endured trench warfare and the loss of a generation. Elgar, newly turned 60 and in fragile health, recoiled from the carnage and the jingoism he heard around him. His post as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra ended in 1914. His large Hampstead house became a burden. Apart from a few patriotic commissions, his creative voice fell silent. London—with its incessant telephone and social demands—offered no refuge.

At his wife Alice’s urging, Elgar retreated to Brinkwells, a thatched cottage in rural Sussex, secluded and surrounded by woods. In this isolation he found renewal. For the first time in 30 years, he returned to chamber music. The Violin Sonata came first, then the String Quartet—both in E minor. Alongside them he began the Piano Quintet in the equally brooding key of A minor. All three works share a vein of nostalgia, yet this is no comfortable backward glance. The music is leaner, harmonically pared down, emotionally stripped. In these pages Elgar discovers a more inward language—one that would reach its most forward-looking expression in the Cello Concerto, written concurrently with the quintet. These autumnal works, often likened to late Brahms, would prove to be his final completed masterpieces.

The Piano Quintet unfolds on a broad canvas. It opens with austere, descending piano chords—plainchant-like in their gravity—beneath murmuring strings. These ideas become the DNA of the work. The chords reappear, hardened, in the fugal drive of the Allegro; the murmuring strings blossom into the second theme, sung in thirds by the violins over a rocking piano figure. A brief, wistful string phrase following the opening chant casts a shadow of imminent tragedy across the movement.

The noble slow movement deepens the mood. Variants of that same wistful phrase hover throughout, entwined with a rising cello line that feels both pleading and resigned. When the finale begins, the fragment returns, binding the work into a cyclical whole. Earlier echoes resurface as the movement gathers force. The writing is often brilliant, but its brilliance never feels empty. The emotional spectrum ranges from elegiac introspection to hard-won affirmation. In the end, the music strides toward a grandioso close—not triumphal in a public sense, but resolute, as if light has been reclaimed from “ghostly stuff.” 

— Program notes copyright © 2026 Keith Horner. 
Comments welcomed: khornernotes@gmail.com