This quintet, written in 1802 at a time when Hummel and Beethoven were vying for the attention of Viennese audiences, might be regarded as the foundation stone of the entire tradition of compositions for piano quintet in the nineteenth century. It led directly to the composition of Schubert's "Trout" Quintet of 1819, with which it shares the instrumentation of piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass; Schubert's quintet was written for a group of players who were performing Hummel's piece and wanted another work for the same forces. The persistence of Hummel's quintet over 17 years of rapid musical change testifies to its popularity in the composer's day, although it, along with most of the rest of Hummel's oeuvre, was forgotten after his death. Revivalists who have unearthed it have discovered a work with the composer's proto-Romantic musical language fully in place. The quintet is in four movements, with E flat minor and E flat major contending interestingly for dominance in all but the slow (major) third movement. The wide harmonic range of Beethoven's middle-period works was not wholly his invention; it was in the air at the time, and Beethoven's achievement was to bring a new concision to complicated harmonic structures. Hummel's opening movement has many of the Beethovenian trademarks: a four-note motive that weaves its way through all the instruments and appears in various harmonic guises, a plethora of third relationships and flat supertonics and submediants, and an effective integration of pianism with a chamber grouping. The movement opens in E flat minor and goes to A flat major for a lyrical second subject before dropping down to the expected relative major of G flat. The movement is a large one with splashes of harmonic color that are nicely woven with motivic material to recall earlier sections of the music. The quintet's second movement is an E flat minor scherzo with a lyrical trio section in a slower tempo and a contrasting accent pattern. The third movement, consisting of a group of harmonically ambiguous chords followed by a simple ornamented melody, is essentially an introduction to the final rondo. Though the work is sometimes marked by blankly periodic structures that Beethoven would have gleefully demolished, it is well worth the closer acquaintance that composers of its own time would have had.

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