Preiser have served Schmidt well and have issued the two string quartets in A major (1925) and G major (1929), the Piano Quintet in G major (1926) and the Quintet in B flat major for clarinet, piano and strings (1932), albeit in LP form and in not entirely satisfactory performances. The present quintet completes their survey of his chamber music and comes from 1938. It was his swansong completed only a few months before his death the following year. The last of its five movements, the ''Variations on a Theme of Josef Labor'' is often played as a separate piece. It was recorded for Decca in the mid 1970s by Alfred Prinz, Eduard Mrazek and members of the Vienna Philharmonia Quartet as a fill-up to the G major Piano Quintet (nla). Like the two other quintets, the A major was written with Paul Wittgenstein in mind. (Having lost his right arm in the First World War, he commissioned a number of works for the left hand including concertos by Ravel and Prokofiev—the Fourth—and two Strauss works, as well as this Schmidt Quintet.)
Let me say straight away that this A major Quintet strikes me as one of Franz Schmidt's most original and beautiful compositions. It is steeped in the tradition of Brahms and Reger—and in this respect, as well as its elegant craftsmanship and autumnal eloquence, prompts one's thoughts to turn to Schoeck and even late Strauss. It is highly unusual in layout: it opens like some mysterious other-worldly scherzo only to lead us a few bars later into a pastoral theme of beguiling charm. The ideas unfold with an effortless logic. The second movement is for piano alone, a searching finely-wrought piece in three-part songform, which can be omitted in concert performance, and I would imagine played on its own. The longish scherzo is full of fantasy and wit, and there is an affecting trio, tinged with late Brahmsian melancholy. The fourth sets out as if it, too, will be a long meditation for the piano, but it has a nobility and depth that almost calls to mind the Elgar Piano Quintet. Here as in the final variations, the musical procedures are always lucid, beautifully paced and despite its breadth and sense of space, completely cogent. It takes almost an hour, yet seems far less and on every hearing yields more. In short this is a most rewarding score, full of glorious ideas and though written during Schmidt's final illness, there is no touch of self-pity, but the quiet strength, gentleness and dignity that one would expect from the composer of the Fourth Symphony. The recorded sound is not ideal, the acoustic is not quite large enough and the overall balance is synthetic. Of the Viennese players the clarinet, Christoph Eberle is by far the most imaginative, the pianist perhaps less so. But, as I have already indicated, this is a work of unusual beauty and a quiet individuality that should not be missed.'