Elegiac Trio (1916)

If Debussy’s Sonata in F was the earliest work scored for flute, viola and harp – and there is no evidence to contradict the notion – it is surely not just a coincidence that Bax wrote another only a year later. The argument for Bax’s originality in this case is that he couldn’t have heard the Debussy Sonata, which was first performed six months after he completed the Elegiac Trio. But the Debussy Sonata was actually published some time before it was performed and, although it is unlikely that a score would have crossed the Channel so quickly in war-time conditions, it is not impossible that Bax could have seen a copy. More to the point perhaps, he needed only to know the instrumentation of Debussy’s latest work to start thinking about the potential of the flute-viola-harp ensemble. Whatever the truth of the situation, it seems that Bax, who had made himself as Irish as an Englishman could be, wrote the Elegiac Trio as a lament on the Easter Rising in 1916. Certainly, although it could just as well be a sad comment on the Great War, it is coloured by a deep tinge of Celtic poetry