Piano Trio No.1 in F major Op.18 (1864)

Saint-Saëns’s Piano Trio No.1 in F major is the earliest work of its kind by a French composer still regularly performed today. There are two particularly interesting earlier examples by Édouard Lalo but they are all but forgotten – Lalo’s masterly Piano Trio No.3 in A minor, which does get the occasional hearing, was written in 1879, fifteen years after Saint-Saëns made the breakthrough with the present work – and they are nowhere near as distinctive as his in personality. Being a string player, on the other hand, Lalo is never tempted to overindulge the piano, whereas with Saint-Saëns the pianist in him was difficult to resist.

While the texture of the opening Allegro vivace of the Piano Trio in F major is finely wrought and admirable for its clarity and its imaginative detail, the piano writing occasionally gives an impression of frothiness to a construction which is actually a model of thematic economy. It is based almost exclusively on the cheerful theme first presented (after a brief introduction) by the cello and repeated by violin and piano in turn. The most prominent element in that theme is a little two-note motif which in one form or another echoes through the whole movement – including, although it is disguised here, a second subject apparently set up to initiate a fugue but in reality not so serious-minded that it can long resist the debonair charm of the main theme. Saint-Saëns is so convinced of the unshakable integrity of his construction that when he comes to the recapitulation he recalls the second subject in entirely the wrong key, creating a potentially awkward situation from which he extricates himself with characteristic ease.

The A-minor Andante is a reminder that Saint-Saëns first got to work on his Piano Trio in F major when he was on holiday in the Pyrenees and the Auvergne. Although its rather solemn, march-like opening theme has been claimed as an indication of the influence of the slow movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat, it surely has to do more with the folksong of the mountainous regions he was in at the time. Certainly, the monodic nature of the theme introduced by the piano and the cello against a lightly sustained drone on the violin points towards some kind of folk-music source. Saint-Saëns might convert the drone into a jingling of little bells in the upper register of the piano, as he does when violin and cello recall the theme in the middle of the movement, but its primitive harmonic function is unchanged. The one episode in which he liberates himself from the dotted rhythms that are rarely absent from the opening bars onwards is in a spontaneously inspired quicker episode in a radiant A major (ending in cello and piano cadenzas) just before the last appearance of the main theme.

Deftly constructed and delightfully scored, the Scherzo is based for the most part on witty rhythmic syncopations which are expressed in detached notes in the sparse textures at the beginning and in legato phrases in the more indulgently harmonised contrasting sections. The closing recall of the opening material approaches a reconciliation between the two kinds of articulation.

The spontaneity and freshness characteristic of the work so far are brilliantly sustained in the last movement. Although the friendly conversation between violin and cello, exchanging two-note phrases over a liquid arpeggio accompaniment, is brought to an end by a peremptory gesture on the piano – and although that gesture has a dynamic role to play in introducing the second subject and the exposition repeat – geniality prevails. The development section does adopt a more serious attitude when, after an unexpected modulation, the piano introduces a chorale in a remote key and persuades the strings to give it their expressive attention. Towards the end of the movement, however, the chorale melody is not only neatly integrated into the violin and cello conversation but also, on the instigation of the piano, unceremoniously bundled into the molto allegro coda.

Gerald Larner © 2008