The ensemble of eight wind players popular in Vienna entered Germany around 1784, when the Austrian Emperor's brother became Elector in Bonn and brought along his Viennese Harmonie. This music loving Prince placed the fourteen year old Beethoven on retainer as court organist, and sometime before 1792, Beethoven wrote this Octet for his ensemble. Later that year, the Elector sent Beethoven to Vienna for advanced study with Haydn, but that teacher pupil relationship was not successful: Beethoven revised this Octet there and passed it off on Haydn as a new work. When Haydn sent it back to Bonn as evidence of his pupil's progress, it was recognized as an earlier work, and the revelation of Beethoven's deception was an embarrassment to all.

In 1795, Beethoven converted the Wind Octet into a String Quintet published the following year as his Op. 4. The wind version was not published until 1830, two years after the composer's death, when it was arbitrarily assigned the late Op. 103, a number that had accidentally been left vacant. This cheery, light-toned work is entertainment music by a young composer of huge gifts, idiomatically set for wind instruments.

It opens with a bright and almost shiny Allegro; it continues with an Andante in large part a tender lyrical duet for oboe and bassoon, and with a lively Minuet; it closes with a Presto Finale.

Tchaikovsky had many happy memories of Florence, where he vacationed from time to time. It was there that he chose to stay during the winter of 1890 while working on the rough draft of his opera, The Queen of Spades, which he was able to finish in 44 days. Then, without wasting any time, he set to work again in earnest on a sextet, which he had promised to the St. Petersburg Quartet Society.

In Tchaikovsky’s music, the instruments are not always on equal terms. He never venerated to any degree the contrapuntal style of the German Classicists, often preferring to showcase one instrument for an extended period while using the others as accompaniment. The Sextet’s first movement (Allegro con Spirito) is a rondo, in which the principal subject is first introduced by the first violin while the five other instruments fill in with an undulating accompaniment. This is also the case for the expressive subordinate theme, where again the first violin is accompanied by the others, taking on, at the same time, the flavor of a Florentine street serenade.

César Franck was a Belgian by birth who lived and taught most of his life in France. He was one of the most influential music teachers of the period and a famous organist. Although he enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire at age 15, his maturation as a composer was late in life—he wrote his most lasting compositions while in his fifties and sixties. He was a quiet, easygoing, and unassuming person who never knew how to promote his works. As a result, much of his music was either derided by the doctrinaire academicians or ignored during his lifetime, gaining recognition only in the last century. But his students adored him, calling him “Pater seraphicus,” and his influence on the future of French music was immense. He was appointed in 1871 as professor of organ at the Conservatoire, but his classes evolved into de facto composition classes for the next generation of French composers such as Vincent d’Indy, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, and Paul Dukas.

Franck seems to have composed the Quintet in 1879 as a passionate love offering to one of his composition students, the Irish composer Augusta Holmès, characterized by Rimsky-Korsakov on a visit to Paris as “A very décolletée person” (many of Fauré’s students fell in love with her as well). To judge from Mme. Franck’s attitude to this composition—the only one of her husband’s works she hated—the infatuation must have been serious. Saint-Saëns, to whom Franck dedicated the work and who was the pianist at the premiere, did not like it either. He insulted the composer by abandoning the dedicated manuscript on the piano and walking off in a huff.

The Quintet is an intensely dramatic and stormy work, with enough pianissimos and fortissimos to parallel the roller-coaster of a love affair. It has only three movements, and its structure is cyclical in that a theme from the first movement reappears in the second and third movements, a method widely used by Franz Liszt, one of Franck’s models. There is no relief from the emotional intensity throughout the Quintet and, given its history, one is tempted to label this recurring theme a “love motive.” But since Franck uses the same device in the Violin Sonata, it is dangerous to interpret too much autobiography in the music.

The Quintet opens with a long introduction, Molto moderato quasi lento, full of unresolved dissonance and wandering tonality. The recurring motive occurs as the second theme of the following Allegro. Franck develops his themes in fragmentary motives, except for the recurring one, which stands out in its completeness and acquires the nature of a refrain. The movement in expanded sonata form includes a recapitulation of the introduction at the end, part of Franck’s cyclical style.

The second movement, Andante, is just as intense as the first, just slower. Franck reintroduces his recurring motive towards the middle of the movement. In the stormy finale, Allegro non troppo, ma con fuoco (not too fast, but fiery), the motive reappears in the coda in counterpoint with the movement’s main theme, its importance emphasized by its placement at the end.