Trio pathétique in D minor

From the title of Glinka’s Trio pathétique one might reasonably assume that here is the origin of the peculiar Russian tradition of elegiac trios. After all, the origin of much in Russian music is to be found somewhere in Glinka’s output. In fact, there is little that is Russian in the Trio Pathétique, which was written in the Italian vernacular in Milan in 1832, and not much that, by the standards of Tchaikovsky’s and Rachmaninov’s gloomy trios, could be called “pathetic.”

However, the autograph score of the work does bear the words “I have known love only through the punishments it brings” and it is said that the woodwind players from La Scala who joined Glinka in the first performance of the Trio were heard to exclaim, “Ma questo e disperazione!” (“But this is despair!”). They cannot have been so moved by the first movement, which is dramatically articulated but not conspicuously unhappy, or by the Scherzo which, apart from a melodramatic episode at the end, is positively cheerful. But what an experience for a clarinettist and bassoonist from an opera orchestra to be given parts in the slow movement worthy of the most eloquent of Bellini’s sopranos or baritones! The short finale confirms the cyclic continuity of Glinka’s four-in-one construction.