Piano Trio in F minor (1914)

Allegro vivace

Although Charles-Marie Widor, Honegger’s composition teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, didn’t approve of everything his Swiss pupil brought him, he liked his Piano Trio in F minor. Honegger himself, who thought he had written more interesting pieces than this “classical and well-behaved little Trio,” was less than pleased with the situation: “Widor has had the cheek to tell me that it is the best thing of mine he has heard,” he reported to his parents at home in Zurich in 1916, “and he keeps on talking about it in all his classes!”

Certainly, there is nothing in this Allegro vivace to suggest that its composer was shortly to become a member of the fashionably progressive “Groupe des Six” briefly linked under the artistic leadership of Jean Cocteau in Paris in the early 1920s. It was written in Zurich in 1914, before any of Honegger’s published works, and draws more on the German piano-trio tradition, as represented by Mendelssohn perhaps or Brahms, than on the French. It is, however, a most competently executed sonata-from construction based on the contrast between the peremptory opening theme in F minor and the lyrical second subject, seductively introduced by violin and cello and thirds, in E flat major. The development is brief but resourcefully scored and the recapitulation so economically organised as to present the F major recall of the second subject in effectively high profile.

The first modern performance of the Allegro vivace, based on an autrograph score found in the archives of the Paul Sacher Foundation, was given by the Takacs Trio in Geneva on 30 March. Although the manuscript bears the roman numeral I, indicating that Honegger intended to add at least one other movement, it is probably all that was actually written. If any more pages had survived, Paul Sacher - who was not only a great patron and collector but also a close friend of the composer - would certainly have acquired them.