Beethoven cut his musical teeth in his native Bonn, a relatively small provincial capital whose cultural life offered limited scope for a prodigiously gifted and ambitious young musician. In late 1792 he burst onto the scene in cosmopolitan Vienna and spent the rest of the decade burnishing his reputation as a pianistic powerhouse; upon hearing him play, his fellow virtuoso Wenzel Tomaschek was so overwhelmed that he refused to touch his own instrument for days. Despite their numerical designation, the three piano trios that constitute Beethoven’s Opus 1 were not the first pieces of music he wrote; they weren’t even his first pieces of chamber music. They were, however, the works that Beethoven chose to introduce himself to the discriminating Viennese public. The popularity of the piano trio genre, which Mozart and Haydn had brought to a high plane of sophistication, ensured that the publication of the three works in 1795 would attract considerable attention, to say nothing of earning a tidy sum for their chronically impecunious composer.

Beethoven was impatient to take his place in the public eye alongside Haydn, with whom he studied from late 1792 to early 1794. The C-minor Trio was considerably more adventurous than its two companions in the Op. 1 set—so adventurous, in fact, that Haydn advised his pupil not to publish it for fear of alienating potential patrons and customers. Beethoven interpreted this well-intended tip as symptom of jealousy, a claim that seems far-fetched in light of Haydn’s magnanimous disposition. (In fact, the older composer would later eat his words, telling Beethoven’s student Ferdinand Ries that “he had not imagined that this trio would be so quickly and easily understood nor so favorably received by the public.”) Not only did Beethoven disregard Haydn’s advice, he petulantly refused to include the customary acknowledgment of his teacher on the title page of his debut opus. Instead, he opted to curry favor with the aristocracy by dedicating the three trios to a future patron, Prince Karl Lichnowsky.

Beethoven’s debt to the older master is apparent in the C-minor Trio’s combination of Sturm und Drang turbulence and a quirky, playful spirit that at times borders on impishness. The opening Allegro con brio sets the tone for the work in its explosive energy and air of brooding menace. If the writing for violin and cello falls well within the competency of accomplished amateurs, the piano part presents technical demands of a higher order, reminding us that Beethoven in his mid-twenties had already established himself as one of Europe’s leading virtuosos. The bravura element is still more pronounced in the spitfire variations of the Andante cantabile and the tense, intricately interlocking gestures of the Menuetto. In the latter, Beethoven seems to go out of his way to subvert the genre’s nominal character: this minuet is more calisthenics than dance. All the Trio’s pent-up energy is released in the feverish Finale, which germinates from a stabbing three-note motif that is as arresting, and as packed with musical meaning, as the “fate” motive in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

© Harry Haskell, 2022

A comparatively late bloomer, Dvořák was in his early 30s when he first made his mark in his native Bohemia. Until then his reputation had barely penetrated beyond the city limits of Prague, where he eked out a modest living as a piano teacher and church organist. A few of his songs and chamber works had been performed locally, and his comic opera King and Charcoal Burner had been well received at the city’s Czech-language opera house. But Dvořák’s career didn’t really take off until the imperial Austrian government awarded him a much-needed stipend in 1875. In addition to providing a measure of financial security for the composer and his growing family, the prestigious prize brought him to the attention of Brahms, who proceeded to write a glowing recommendation to his own publisher in Berlin. Dvořák “has written all manner of things: operas (Czech), symphonies, quartets, piano pieces,” Brahms told Fritz Simrock in 1877. “In any case, he is a very talented man.” Soon the obscure Czech composer was inundated with so many requests for compositions that he had trouble keeping up with them. 

Among the works Dvořák produced in this first flush of celebrity was the second of his four extant piano trios. Completed in January 1876, the Trio in G minor is less well known than the F-minor Trio of 1883 or the ever-popular “Dumky” Trio of 1891. But the fact that it followed Dvořák’s debut in the genre by less than a year (not counting a pair of earlier trios that he apparently destroyed) suggests he found the combination of piano, violin, and cello a congenial medium for expressing his growing interest in Czech folk music, as evidenced in works like the song cycle Moravian Duets. The Trio’s elegiac G-minor tonality, and the bittersweet lyricism of the slow movement in particular, have led some listeners to associate it with the death of the Dvořáks’ newborn daughter in August 1875. (Twenty years earlier, the composer’s senior compatriot Bedřich Smetana had written a piano trio in the same key in an explicit response to his four-year-old daughter’s death of scarlet fever.) Yet the overall impression the music makes is anything but funereal.

The Allegro moderato opens with a pair of boldly annunciatory chords, followed by a languid melody that trails off in a faster rippling figure. These three contrasting ideas are the basic building blocks of a movement that displays Dvořák’s gift for folk-like lyricism, subtle rhythmic modulations, and sophisticated thematic development. The E-flat-major Largo is similarly economical, elaborating as it does on a simple arching motif in a distinctly Schubertian mode. (Dvořák especially admired Schubert’s two piano trios, calling them “among the very best of their kind in all musical literature.”) The manic intensity of the Scherzo, a vigorous triple-time dance in G minor, is tempered by the graceful lilt of the movement’s major-key Trio section, while the bravura Finale evinces a sturdy Schumannesque spirit, including a brief passage of fugal writing.  

© Harry Haskell, 2022

Schubert’s genius as a composer of art songs manifested itself while he was still in his teens. But in other genres—notably the symphony and chamber music—he struggled to cast off the weight of tradition (as represented above all by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) and embrace the new freedom of the Romantic style. Schubert’s two mature piano trios are a case in point. His first essay in the medium, a short and rather commonplace student piece written in 1812, was all but unknown until the manuscript came to light in the 1920s. Why the composer lost interest in writing for the popular (and highly marketable) combination of piano, violin, and cello is a mystery. At any rate, it was only in the last year of his life that Schubert produced the two great piano trios that cemented his reputation as Beethoven’s peer in the realm of chamber music: the Trio in B-flat major, D. 898, and the Trio in E-flat major, D. 929.

Little is known about the genesis of the B-flat-major Trio, which in Schubert’s lifetime was eclipsed by its sequel. The score wasn’t published until eight years after the composer’s death, and scholars long believed that neither Schubert nor his contemporaries actually heard it performed. Research by Eva Badura-Skoda and others, however, suggests that D. 898 was premiered on December 26, 1827, in the music hall of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Music Lovers’ Society) in Vienna, the same venue where the E-flat-major Trio would receive its first airing three months later. Both works appear to have been written for the Czech pianist Karl Maria von Bocklet, whose virtuosity far outshone Schubert’s modest keyboard technique. He was joined by the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh and the cellist Josef Linke in what Schubert described as an “admirably executed” performance.

Robert Schumann’s comparison of Schubert’s twin masterpieces is typically insightful: “The first movement, which in the [E-flat-major Trio] is inspired by deep indignation as well as boundless longing, is graceful and virginal in the one before us [the B-flat-major Trio]. The adagio, there a sigh tending to swell to anxiety, is here a happy dream, a rising and falling of genuine feeling…. In a word, the Trio in E-flat major is more spirited, masculine, and dramatic; this one is more passive, lyric, and feminine.” From our perspective, the two trios do in fact have much in common, starting with the marked similarity between the exuberantly annunciatory openings of their first movements. There is in both works the same restless toggling between light and shadow, lyricism and drama, impetuosity and repose. The slow movement of the B-flat-major Trio, with its impassioned middle section driven by agitated syncopations, has a bittersweet radiance that even Schubert seldom surpassed. The Trio section of the Scherzo is delicate, almost submissive, while the rollicking, rondo-form finale is characterized by propulsive dotted rhythms, sharp dynamic contrasts, and ethereal fluttering effects.

© Harry Haskell, 2022