- Born August 9, 1874, in Caracas
- Died January 28, 1947, in Paris
- Composed in 1922
- Duration: 27 minutes

In his In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust devotes many pages to describing his characters’ fixation on themes of a fictional composer: Vinteuil, who wrote a pastoral Violin Sonata in F-sharp as well as a stormy Septet (oddly scored for more than seven musicians). Performers, musicologists, and literary scholars have long debated whom the invented Vinteuil was modelled on, a testament to Proust’s ability to write a compelling account of non-existent compositions despite his lack of training in music. He did have some help, though; Proust maintained a life-long friendship and correspondence with his former lover Reynaldo Hahn. The Venezuelan-born French composer pointed the author to music by Camille Saint-Saëns, César Franck, and others whose works are considered main contributors to the distinct musical sounds that Proust conjured up in his novel.

One wonders to what extent Proust’s writing fed back into Hahn’s practice as a composer. The critic Patrick O’Connor suggested that in Le rossignol éperdu (The Bewildered Nightingale), Hahn’s cycle of poetic piano works from the first decade of the 20th century, “a Proustian ethic seems to drive the music, with its evocations and memories of places and impressions.” And in Hahn’s turbulent Piano Quintet in the Vinteuil-esque key of F-sharp, written in the early 1920s as Proust’s health was deteriorating, I would argue that we might hear some equally evocative Proustian musical structures.

Hahn’s best-known works were those he wrote for the stage and for the voice, likely a consequence of the primary instruction in composition he received from the opera composer Jules Massenet. Since Massenet did not write any serious chamber music, Hahn reaches back to older French models for inspiration in most of his small ensemble works. The first movement of his Piano Quintet is built on a theme in F-sharp minor, in which the strings throw a tune with surging syncopations and then slam it down with seven accented strokes. This music, and the martial transitional themes that cycle through countless distantly related harmonies, bring to mind Franck’s famous quintet in F minor.

The very end of Hahn’s movement, where the strings seem to be in D minor while the piano comes to a cadence in F-sharp minor, is astonishingly abrupt. Immediately, he moves away from the impassioned sound world of Franck and toward something more serene and profound. The plainness of the piano accompaniment and simplicity of the tune at the start of the second movement bring to mind Proust’s description of the opening of Vinteuil’s Septet, as translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff: “it was upon flat, unbroken surfaces like those of the sea on mornings that threaten storm, in the midst of an eerie silence in an infinite void, that this new work began, and it was into a rose-red daybreak that this unknown universe was drawn from the silence and the night to build up gradually before me.”

The nursery-rhyme quality of the quintet’s finale is reminiscent of the innocent charm of the last movement of the early piano quintet of Camille Saint-Saëns, who gave Hahn some private composition lessons. When Hahn diverts from his naïve theme, it is to look back on tunes from the previous movements, memories that are transformed, related to the finale’s motifs, and integrated into a coherent narrative. And at the end, as in Proust’s invented Septet, the quintet’s refrain is “left triumphant; it was no longer an almost anxious appeal addressed to an empty sky, it was an ineffable joy which seemed to come from paradise.”

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a PhD candidate and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge.