Schubert has been looking for his own voice in chamber music composition for quite a long time. Yet when he finally found it, having learned a lot from Beethoven’s string quartet writing, something truly magical happened. The great master of song was now free to tell his stories solely through the voices of the instruments he was writing for. A violin, viola and cello now spoke to the listener in their own compelling tongue, painting vivid images with hundreds of shades of joy and sorrow. In his cello quintet this palette is only enriched by adding the second cello to a standard string quartet formation. The depth of color thus achieved surely served as inspiration for the unprecedented breadth and expanse of this massive piece. While there is surely an abundance of passionately dramatic and even tragic passages in this quintet it is also remarkable how sincerely cheerful and even celebratory his writing often gets. An upsurge in spirits that makes it difficult to believe that such music could have been written by a composer who faced such extraordinary difficulties in his life.