Schubert, Franz (1797–1828)
Allegro
Andante con moto
Scherzando (allegro moderato) — Trio
Allegro moderato
This Piano Trio was the only one of Schubert’s large-scale and serious instrumental works printed in his lifetime. Even then, the first publisher to whom he offered it along with other music turned it down, and he had to settle for a low fee from another publisher, commenting that it represented ‘six times as much work’. So the opus number attached to the trio by the publisher on Schubert’s instructions, No.100, should really be worn with pride – it must have meant a lot to the composer, appearing in print months before he died. He probably never saw the edition.
He had, however, managed to hear this trio performed in public. There is some uncertainty which of Schubert’s two piano trios, written close together, is being referred to in each case, but the likelihood is that the one in E flat was first performed at a private party on January 28, 1828 – a ‘Schubertiad’ to celebrate the engagement of his friend Joseph von Spaun. The players were Schuppanzigh, violin, Linke, cello, and Bocklet, piano. The pianist was a professional virtuoso, and Schubert gave him a rewarding part. This Trio in E flat was also included in the one all-Schubert concert given in his lifetime, on 26 March 1828, with Böhm replacing Schuppanzigh as violinist. Both piano trios were begun and completed in the latter part of 1827, the year which saw the composition of the song-cycle Die Winterreise and of the Impromptus for solo piano. The B flat Trio was also played by a group including Schuppanzigh, in November, but in private.
Not so long after Beethoven had expanded the scale of the piano trio enormously, Schubert went much further. Too far, he feared: he instructed the publisher to make two cuts, of 50 bars each, in the very long last movement. This is a cut which most performers used to make until recently, when the ‘heavenly length’ in Schubert, famously commented on by Schumann, has once again come to seem a virtue to some. One modern performer, pianist Steven Lubin, has commented that in the cut version, the development seems episodic. The rather exotic additional episodes, in Lubin’s view, make the structure of the development more convincing. In their performance, the Kungsbacka Trio play the manuscript version, with the episodes later cut.
Years after Schubert’s death, Schumann reviewed Schubert’s two Trios together, finding the one in B flat ‘passive, lyrical and feminine’, this one ‘more spirited, masculine, dramatic in tone’. Schumann overdraws the contrast, but he was on the right track.
This Trio shows the range of Schubert’s invention, from the dramatic announcement of the first theme, and the rich melodies which follow it. The second movement is a kind of slow march, with a theme whose inflections sound Hungarian (there are further Hungarian touches, perhaps, in the second subject of the finale, where the piano, in particular, may be imitating a cimbalom). But the main theme of the slow movement, according to a well-authenticated tradition, was borrowed from a Swedish song, ‘The sun has set’, which Schubert heard sung by the tenor Isak Albert Berg, who was in Vienna in November 1827. In the Trio, it is announced by the cello, which comes into a prominence throughout not even Beethoven had given it. This theme returns, several times and memorably, in the finale, one sign of Schubert’s unification of this trio. On its last appearance, just before the end, it turns triumphantly to the major. The second subject of the slow movement continues the folk associations of the material, containing an upward interval of a sixth which suggests yodelling, but the figure which almost dominates the movement in the falling octave in the theme.
Similar passages in the Scherzo of Beethoven’s ‘Archduke’ Trio probably gave Schubert the idea for the imitations in canon in his Scherzo movement. Unlike Beethoven’s ‘Archduke’, this work, Schubert declared ‘is dedicated to nobody, except those who find pleasure in it’.