Beethoven & Goetz

There are many piano quartets (and many fine ones, as Beethoven’s Quartet in E flat major, WoO 36/1, demonstrates). Piano quintets, on the other hand, are somewhat rarer. Yet many composers have written particularly beautiful works in this genre: Hermann Goetz’s Piano Quintet is one such example. What a consummate, graceful piece! It stands alongside the more famous piano quintets by Schumann and Dvořák, without needing to hide in their shadow. Music conceived with great feeling, delicately crafted, and sensually distributed between the piano and string instruments. Although the minor key in which the work is written does not impose itself with pathos, it nevertheless retains the upper hand, for even the finale concludes with an almost dramatic turn in C minor. Perhaps an overly bright ending would have seemed insincere to the composer, who suffered from tuberculosis throughout his life? In 1863, at the age of twenty-three, he came to Winterthur, became organist at the town church and remained so for almost twenty years. In 1870, he moved with his wife from Winterthur and their daughter – the future children’s book illustrator Margarete Goetz – to Hottingen, then a suburb of Zurich, where he died of his illness in 1876. Today, 150 years later, it is high time his music was played more often again. The four string players of the Musikkollegium and pianist Martin Lucas Staub are doing just that, bringing joy to themselves and to us.