Piano Trio in A major H.XV:9 (1785)

Whatever Haydn’s reason for tying the cello so rigorously to the bass line in his piano trios, in one fascinating case he dropped it. The opening Adagio of the two-movement Trio in A major requires the cello not to double the left hand of the piano part but to align itself with the violin – in such a way as to anticipate in detail the two-sided texture, with strings on the one hand and piano on the other, which would become standard in the piano trio, except for Haydn’s, until well into the 20th century.

While it is tempting to speculate on whether this singular departure from his normal practice might have had something to do with Haydn’s increasing admiration for Mozart, it seems unlikely that it did: the younger composer’s first piano trio in the modern manner was still a year ahead. Even so, there is is something of Mozart in the Adagio of the present work – not so much in the string instruments’ joint answers to the piano’s opening statements as in their melodious flight in parallel tenths over an arpeggio accompaniment on the piano and, towards the end of the exposition, a briefly unsettling slide into the minor. Although the two-sided balance is retained in the rest of the movement, the role of the cello does lose a little of its interest in the one or two instances where it is drawn to support piano harmony rather than violin melody.

The success of his adventurous scoring in the first movement did not induce Haydn to risk more of the same in the Vivace second movement, where he reverted to the class distinctions he had observed in his piano trios the past and would continue to observe in the future. The piano, which introduces both the cheerful A-major main theme and the slightly anxious    F-sharp-minor second subject, is never cast in an accompanying role here and, while the violin has a share of the melodic interest, the cello is reduced once again to little more than doubling the pianist’s left hand.