Hummel contributed to all musical forms except to the symphony. His main oeuvre is for the piano, on which instrument he was one of the great virtuosi of his day. He wrote eight piano concertos, ten piano sonatas, eight piano trios, a piano quartet, a piano quintet, two piano septets, four-hand piano music, a cello sonata, a wind octet, a mandolin sonata, a Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major, operas, Singspiels, masses, and much more.
At the end of his life, Hummel saw the rise of a new school of young composers and virtuosi, and found his own music slowly going out of fashion. His disciplined and clean Clementi-style technique, and his balanced classicism, opposed him to the rising school of tempestuous bravura displayed by the likes of Liszt and Giacomo Meyerbeer. The last of a line of Viennese composers which stretched from Haydn and Mozart through Beethoven and Schubert, Hummel’s death in 1837 marked the end of a musical era.

programnotes