- Vaughan Williams’ Piano Quintet in c minor has an unusually mysterious performance trajectory compared to most of his other works. Vaughan Williams wrote the three-movement work in 1903, and it premiered in London in 1905. However, Vaughan Williams eventually removed the piece from his compositional oeuvre for unknown reasons, saying that it should never be performed publicly again. The Piano Quintet was published as recently as 2002.
- While the music of Vaughan Williams is often associated with a nationalistic English sentiment and use of English folk music, his Piano Quintet was written early enough in his career that his primary musical influences were still those of the Romantic era, especially Johannes Brahms.
- However, he DOES use an English folk song as the theme for the third movement variations.1
- Fun fact – Vaughan Williams used the same instrumentation for Piano Quintet in c minor as Schubert used for his “Trout” Quintet (piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass).
- Three movements:
- Allegro con fuoco
- Andante
- Fantasai (quasi variazioni). Moderato2
Sources
- Carlos Andres Gaviria, “Revisiting the Past: Harmony, Structure and Narrative in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Piano Quintet in C Minor” (DMA diss., University of Houston, 2020), 6-9.
- “Piano Quintet in C minor (Vaughan Williams, Ralph),” IMSLP, accessed August 11, 2025, https://imslp.org/wiki/Piano_Quintet_in_C_minor_(Vaughan_Williams%2C_Ralph).
Cut IDs
27240