Piano Trio

Fliessend, doch nicht zu schnell - so schnell wie möglich; starr

(Flowing, but not too quickly - as quickly as possible; inflexibly)

In much the same experimental spirit as Jean Paul in his novels, Schumann freed himself from formal conventions so as to be able to create “poetry” in music. In so doing he influenced a twentieth-century German composer who also understands music as language: Wolfgang Rihm.

In his lecture “Musical freedom” Rihm characterised Schumann as a composer “whose musical thinking was recognised as anarchic by his contemporaries and whose musical expression always seems to me the ideal example and the absolute image of fantasy communicating directly from the inside to the outside.” In Schumann Rihm found inspiration similar to that of Schoenberg in his atonal phase, a similar urge towards dionysiac expression even at the risk of shattering form into fragments.

Rihm’s earliest work had been stimulated by pictures. Radically subjective though he was, however, he had also absorbed the whole musical tradition - Debussy as much as Bach, Varèse, Mahler or Busoni. In that and in his conception of music as language he differs from those Darmstadt composers who from 1945 had attempted to think music afresh on a scientific, acoustic basis.

The important part played by the piano trio in Rihm’s work derives from his own experience as a pianist and the cello playing of his friend and mentor. Ten years before he wrote his Fremde Szenen I-III, which he describes as “essays in the piano trio,” he appeared before the public for the first time with his Trio for violin, cello and piano. The twenty-year-old student, who had only just graduated from the Karlsruhe Conservatory, revealed here a subjectivity taken to extremes - a characteristic which, since then, has become evident in the music of others as well as his own. The Piano Trio also has something in common with Schumann in the eloquent tempo headings of the two parts (which, incidentally, are played without a break).

translated from a note by Eckhart Heiligers©