Piano Trio No.2 in E minor Op.92 (1892)

When Saint-Saëns came to write his second Piano Trio in 1892 the situation in France was very different, both politically and musically. Thanks not least to the activities of the Société Nationale de Musique founded by Saint-Saëns himself (with Alexis de Castillon and Romain Bussine) in the vacuum left by the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, French chamber music was flourishing. String quartets were still in short supply but there was already a distinguished repertoire of chamber works with piano, including the trios by Castillon, Lalo and Chausson which followed in the wake of Saint-Saëns’s First in F.

So the Second Trio, requested by Saint-Saëns’s publisher Durand in the hope of matching the profits brought in by the First, had to be something special – which is no doubt why it extends to five movements and why it took the composer at least four years to get himself in the right mood to undertake the task. Even when he was comfortably installed at Pointe Pescade in Algeria, where he was spending more and more time these days, he was apprehensive about the “slavery” involved. Started in Pointe Pescade in March 1892, the work was completed in Geneva four months later, published almost immediately and first performed to a somewhat bewildered public before the end of the year.

The first movement, Saint-Saëns told Durand, is “black (in notes and sentiment).” As far as the notes are concerned, he was probably thinking of the black look on the page of passages like the opening bars, where the piano sustains a tattoo of semiquaver chords restlessly rising and falling in accompaniment to the main theme on violin and cello. As for the sentiment, it is certainly dark in its E minor harmonies, the rueful expression of the melodic line, the demonic brilliance cultivated by the piano, and the tension generated by the violin in high positions on the E-string. It is not all darkness, however: the lilting, almost waltz-time second subject which eventually settles in E major makes a timely contrast. As in the First Trio the exposition is repeated but in this case it is not a literal restatement but a re-invention, particularly when it comes to the second subject, which is now overlaid with nostalgia by violin and cello. The development is comparatively short and the recapitulation dramatically extended, the unfortunate violinist climbing higher than ever up the E-string, the sentiment finally affirming its blackness.

The first of the two intermezzo movements, the Allegretto in E major, is written entirely in quintuple time – which, a year before Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, was a rare achievement. A scherzo with two trios, it has its black moments, both in the minor-key interventions in the scherzo sections and in the pressurised bravura of the trios, but it ends quite happily in E major. The central Andante con moto is another reminder (before the event) of the Pathétique, not because of the Chopinesque harmonies with which it begins but because of the expressive downward inflection of the theme which the piano introduces at this point and which is the sole source of melodic interest throughout. Here, in this highly romantic and beautifully modulated meditation, is the composer’s best answer to the accusations of emotional dryness so regularly levelled against him. But only Saint-Saëns, whose taste is another controversial issue, could have followed that Andante with the melodious but somewhat incongruous waltz in G major headed Grazioso, poco allegro.

Saint-Saëns’s skill was never in doubt, however. The closing Allegro is a tour de force of composer virtuosity. Said to be based on material rescued from a discarded string quartet, it presents two main themes - a sinuous melody introduced in legato octaves by the piano and, once that has been developed and extended, a bright fugue subject which appears first on violin before being taken up by the other instruments in turn and briefly treated in genuine four-part counterpoint. Any respectable composer of Saint-Saëns’s generation could write a fugue, of course, but not so many could combine the fugue with the first subject as he so spectacularly does in the development section. And Saint-Saëns in his late fifties was just as capable of springing a surprise as he was in his late twenties: a relaxed E major treatment of the fugue subject suggests that a happy ending is about to ensue. In fact, as a coda of semiquavers in octaves on all three instruments confirms, the ending of the work is as black as its beginning.

Gerald Larner ©2004