Mahler Piano Quartet in A minor

The name Mahler is so closely associated with the symphony and Lied genres that it is little known how intensively he applied himself to chamber music during his studies. Of his numerous attempts in this field only one piano quartet composed between 1876 and 1878 has survived - and of this merely the first movement in its entirety. The latter was only rediscovered in the 1960s and first published in 1973. Even if Brahms is unmistakably his model, the quartet movement contains enough individual and also unconventional elements - such as the almost symphonic treatment of the piano - for Henle to incorporate it into their Urtext ranks. In addition, they have included an appendix “for study purposes” with Mahler's fragmentary sketch for a further movement, a scherzo for the same instrumentation.