Brahms's Clarinet Quintet was immediately recognised as a wonderful achievement on its appearance in 1891 and it has retained the ability to claim the hearts and minds of players and audiences ever since. Nowadays there is likely to be little dissent from the forthright assertion in the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians that ‘for emotional intensity and beauty of tone-colour the Clarinet Quintet may well claim the top-most place in Brahms's chamber music’. Indeed, this observation forms part of an adulatory tradition dating back to the years immediately following Brahms's death in 1897. As early as 1905 his biographer Florence May described it as a beautiful and now favourite work, containing the ‘richest fruits of the golden harvest of the poet's activity’. Her evocative style of writing nicely encapsulates the spirit of the Quintet, though in terms characteristic of the earlier rather than the latter part of the twentieth century: