Examples of clarinet quintets include those by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Anton Reicha, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Sigismund von Neukomm, Carl Maria von Weber, Franz Krommer, Alexander Glazunov, Heinrich Baermann, and Thomas Täglichsbeck.

Brahms may have met Mühlfeld already when Hans von Bülow was directing the Meiningen Court Orchestra.

But it was Fritz Steinbach, Bülow's successor, who brought Mühlfeld's playing to the attention of Brahms in March 1891.

[6] When speaking about early performances of the quintet, Eric Hoeprich described that "...both the clarinetist and strings [would] make liberal use of vibrato as well as frequent rubato, which may seem excessive to us today.

This was possibly inserted because when Brahms listened to Richard Mühlfeld at his recital, he was playing this concerto.

Via an agitated transition with even more modulations, the music calms down and returns to the beginning theme, and then subsides.

The fourth variation, in B major, has a sweet melody mostly performed by the clarinet, which recalls the mood of the second movement.

The fifth (final) variation, beginning with the viola playing the melody over the pizzicato cello, is back in B minor but bears a different metrical sign (6/8) till the end of the movement.