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Vienna Piano Trio Sunday Concert
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Program Notes
Copyright © 2013 by Jason S. Heilman, Ph.D.
Trio in C Major, Hob. XV:27
composed in 1797 – duration: 20 minutes
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Today, Joseph Haydn is remembered as the father of the
string quartet (not to mention the symphony), but he also
made many important contributions to the piano trio
genre. Indeed, Haydn was one of the main early contributors to the development of the piano trio out of the baroque-era trio sonata. Haydn’s forty-five piano trios are
quite different from those of subsequent composers, however. The three voices are not as independent as they
would become in the trios by Beethoven and his successors. Rather, Haydn’s piano trios are more like solo piano
sonatas augmented by violin and cello: the soloistic piano
part dominates the texture, while the strings take supporting roles, accentuating or imitating the piano melody. The
cello in particular often merely doubles or mirrors the piano’s left hand, amplifying the thin-sounding bass range of
the keyboards of Haydn’s time. In this way, Haydn’s trios
function as the link between the baroque sonatas for violin
and basso continuo (which incorporated both keyboard
and cello) and the more ambitious trios of the nineteenth
century and beyond.
By the 1790s, Haydn was one of the most famous composers in all of Europe. In contrast to his previous life as a Kapellmeister to a noble court, were he was constantly at his
lord’s beck and call, obligated to produce new works on demand, Haydn now enjoyed the luxury of working on his
own schedule. He was also free to take trips abroad, and he
did so, making two famous voyages to London (first in
1791–92, then again in 1794–95) where he found he was
already a celebrity. It was on the first of these London journeys that Haydn, stopping in the German town of Bonn,
met a young musician named Ludwig van Beethoven, who
later came to Vienna and ultimately became Haydn’s most
famous student. On his second trip to London, Haydn met
a virtuoso pianist named Theresa Jansen Bartolozzi, who
would become the dedicatee of many of his last works for
the keyboard, including his final set of three piano trios.
Interestingly, Haydn composed these three rather conservative trios a full four years after the appearance of Beethoven’s brash young Opus 1 piano trios — works that
Haydn, as Beethoven’s teacher, had deemed unready for
public consumption. Comparing Beethoven’s first trios
with Haydn’s last gives a clear sense of the generational
change that was taking place in Viennese music.
The C major trio that opens Haydn’s final set — No. 27 according to the Hoboken catalog, but Haydn’s forty-fifth piano trio overall — is still very much in Haydn’s traditional
mold. In the first of the trio’s three movements, a sonata-
form allegro, the piano features prominently in all of the
refined main themes, frequently mirrored by the violin.
The second movement begins as a gentle andante, led
again by the piano, which is briefly interrupted by a turbulent central section recalling Haydn’s brooding Sturm und
Drang phase. The presto finale features an infectiously
light and airy melody passed between the piano and the
strings, which recurs regularly to bring the trio to a cheerful close.
Trio in D Major, Op. 70, No. 1, “Ghost”
composed in 1808 — 24 minutes
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Though he was regarded during his own lifetime as the
greatest composer in Vienna, Ludwig van Beethoven was
not always financially secure. This was largely his own
fault; Beethoven steadfastly refused to take on a position
as a Kapellmeister to a noble court, as Haydn had, and he
only took on the bare minimum of students. Instead, it
seems that Beethoven intended to make his living entirely
as a freelance composer, in spite of the fact that Mozart had
died attempting the same thing. While Beethoven managed to scrape by in his early years on the money he made
from his piano compositions and solo appearances, he often had to rely on the kindness of friends and admirers to
make ends meet. His enthusiastic patrons frequently prepaid for commissions, floated loans, and even gave Beethoven access to their homes and vacation cottages so that the
composer could work undisturbed.
During the autumn of 1808 (a year after he completed his
Fifth Symphony and shortly after he finished his Sixth),
Beethoven lived for several months at the city palace of a
certain Countess Marie von Erdödy. The countess, some
nine years Beethoven’s junior, had long been an (apparently platonic) friend and admirer of the composer, and
had frequently helped to introduce him to new patrons.
Beethoven showed his gratitude by dedicating two new piano trios to her that winter, which he premiered in a private concert at her home and published together as his
Opus 70. These were Beethoven’s first attempts at the piano trio genre since his 1797 “Gassenhauer” Trio featuring
the clarinet, and his first trios specifically composed for piano and strings since his Opus 1 set from 1793. Like his
nearly contemporaneous Fifth and Sixth Symphonies,
which were premiered on the same program and published
sequentially as Opp. 67 and 68, Beethoven’s two Opus 70
trios have starkly contrasting characters: No. 1, the socalled “Ghost” Trio in D major, recalls in its turbulence the
stormy Fifth Symphony, whereas the E-flat major trio No.
2 has a more genial character, evoking at times the cheerful
music of the “Pastoral” Symphony.
Recalling the piano trios of his onetime teacher Joseph
Haydn, Beethoven’s “Ghost” trio is cast in three movements, with the allegro vivace e con brio first movement
opening in a flurry of activity. Unlike Haydn, however,
Beethoven makes prominent use of the cello here, which
passes the movement’s undulating theme back and forth
with the violin, marking the beginning of the piano trio as
a true partnership of three equals. The trio gets its nickname “Ghost” from the haunting second movement,
marked largo assai ed espressivo. Reportedly, Beethoven
had been considering writing an opera based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the time, but he ultimately abandoned
the work. Musicologists have suspected that Beethoven’s
fascination with Macbeth might have influenced this
movement, lending it an appropriately brooding atmosphere — though Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny, who
gave the work its nickname, thought that the music evoked
another of Shakespeare’s apparitions: the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The presto finale that closes the work is in a
much more straightforward rondo form, bringing us out of
the tonal murkiness of the second movement to close in the
bright key of D major.
French chamber music in particular. By the decade’s end,
it would include virtually every major French composer.
Saint-Saëns himself contributed enormously to the cause
of native French chamber music. At the end of his long career, his catalogue included two piano trios, two string
quartets, a quartet and a quintet for piano and strings, numerous instrumental sonatas, his 1879 Septet for trumpet,
piano and strings, and the famous Carnival of the Animals, which was originally written in 1886 for a mixed
chamber ensemble.
Saint-Saëns wrote his first mature piano trio in 1864 during the early stages of his professional career; as Opus 18,
it was one of his first chamber works to be published. His
First Piano Trio, in the key of F major, showed all the hallmarks of a composer who had mastered the Viennese style
of Haydn and Beethoven, achieving the difficult balance
among the three disparate instruments through a series of
inventive themes and carefully constructed movements.
Yet this piece remained Saint-Saëns’s only contribution to
the genre for nearly three decades. When he began work
on his second and last piano trio in 1892, he remarked in a
letter to a friend, “I am working quietly away at a trio which
I hope will drive to despair all those unlucky enough to
hear it. I shall need the whole summer to perpetrate this
atrocity; one must have a little fun somehow.”
Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 92
composed in 1892 — 30 minutes
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)
By the end of 1892, Saint-Saëns had completed this “atrocity,” known today as his Second Piano Trio in E minor.
Though it is not shocking to modern audiences, the E minor trio has a number of features that were unconventional
in the late nineteenth century — including, notably, its
five-movement format. This gives the piece a symmetrical,
arch-like structure, with two relatively fast movements
opening and closing the work, and two scherzo-like movements flanking the lyrical midpoint. The trio’s first movement, marked allegro non troppo, begins in an ominous
mood; the minor-key theme that opens the work recurs
throughout, eventually soaring to impassioned heights. If
the allegretto second movement seems a little odd, that is
because the movement has an unusual five-beat meter
throughout, which stays relatively constant throughout its
various changes of character. Despite occasional dramatic
outbursts and flurries of notes, the simple texture that begins the movement always returns. The andante con moto
third movement is the axis upon which the whole piece is
structured. This brief movement opens with an almost
nostalgic theme that gets passed among the three instruments. Like the second movement, the gracioso, poco allegro fourth movement is a dancelike scherzo, though this
one is more like a graceful waltz. The allegro finale returns
to the ominous mood of the first movement, culminating
with a brief fugue before the splashy coda.
With a career that spanned nearly eighty years — and even
included some of the earliest film scores — Camille SaintSaëns was one of the most prolific composers of his era.
Born in Paris, he showed musical talent at an early age,
completing his first composition at the age of three and
making his public debut on the piano at age five. SaintSaëns went on to study at the Paris Conservatory under the
opera composer Fromental Halévy (1799–1862). His early
compositions were widely praised, even earning plaudits
from the notoriously prickly Hector Berlioz. For much of
his early career, he worked as a church organist, developing a reputation as the finest organist of his day and eventually becoming the organist of Paris’s famous Madeleine
Church.
Though he composed in virtually every genre, including
five symphonies and more than a dozen operas, SaintSaëns had a particular affinity for chamber music. This was
despite the fact that opera-mad Paris seemed to have little
time for instrumental works — and certainly not the chamber works of native French composers, preferring instead
the works of the German and Austrian masters. To combat
this situation, in 1871, in the aftermath of the disastrous
Franco-Prussian War, Saint-Saëns co-founded the Société
Nationale de Musique, a group of composers with the goal
of promoting French instrumental music in general and
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