Dashed off in a few white-hot weeks during Schumann's “chamber music year” of 1842, this quintet essentially invented the genre of piano plus string quartet, inspiring Brahms, Dvořák and Franck. It storms in with one of music's great opening gestures, pauses for a shadowy funeral march, hurtles through a scherzo built from racing scales, and ends by combining the finale's theme with the work's opening in a double fugue. Clara Schumann premiered it; Mendelssohn once sight-read the piano part when she fell ill.
