Piano Trio in E flat major D.929 (1827)

The occasion of the first performance the Piano Trio in E flat­ was a party arranged in Vienna in January 1828 to celebrate the engagement of Schubert’s life-long friend Josef von Spaun. Many of the fifty or so guests - “We all got tipsy,” one of them cheerfully recalled - must have been bewildered by much of what they heard. Inexhaustibly melodious though it is, Schubert’s second and last piano trio is about as suitable for an engagement party as, say, Winterreise, which was also completed in the unhappy second half of 1827.

While the first movement seems for the most part to be in robustly classical good health, the C minor Andante con moto is more revealing - unlikely though that might seem of a piece which proceeds at such a steady pace and which borrows its main theme from a setting of a Swedish song (“The Sun is Sinking”) by another composer. As the kinship between this apparently alien material and the first of the Winterreise songs suggests, and as the regular outbursts of anger confirm, Schubert was not in a cheerful mood at this time.

If Josef von Spaun’s guests had no difficulty in appreciating the quality of the Scherzo, the “tipsy” ones among them could not have got much out of the closing Allegro moderato, which requires an ear alert enough to recognise the worrying reappearances of the Swedish song in minor keys on the cello in the middle of the movement and just before the sudden and surprising decision to end the work in E flat major.

Schubert’s first piece for violin, cello and piano was a sonata movement written when he was no more than fifteen. Although he had nothing to do with the piano trio for a long time after that, when he did return to it, towards the end of 1827, he approached the medium with such confidence and such accomplishment as to produce two of the greatest works of their kind. Perhaps the inspiration – or, anyway, the formative revelation of what could be achieved – was Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio in B flat, which had been performed in public in Vienna in 1825 by the same ensemble which was to perform Schubert’s Piano Trio in the same key only two years later.

Ignaz Schuppanzigh, Josef Linke and Karl Maria von Bocklet also gave the first (private) performance of the Piano Trio in E flat. The occasion was a party arranged in Vienna in January 1828 to celebrate the engagement of Schubert’s life-long friend Josef von Spaun, many of whose fifty or so guests – “We all got tipsy,” one of them cheerfully recalled – must have been bewildered by what they heard. Inexhaustibly melodious though it is, the Trio in E flat is about as suitable for an engagement party as, say, Winterreise, which was also completed in the unhappy last months of 1827.

Piano and strings set off in unison and robust classical health with one of those motifs which are clearly built for structural security. In fact, Schubert makes little long-term use of it. He makes not much more of the nervously fragile second subject which, after much turbulence in the form of runs and trills, is eerily introduced in B minor by the piano against quietly repeated staccato quavers on the strings. Far more important to Schubert is a short but amply lyrical melody heard on violin and then on piano in an area of B flat major tranquillity just before the end of the exposition. Virtually the whole of the development section is devoted to that one theme. To the sustained accompaniment of rippling piano arpeggios, it passes through a dozen modulations and as many different moods before it discreetly assumes the shape of the first subject and provokes the beginning of the recapitulation. The coda compensates the second subject for the lack of attention given to it earlier on.

The heart of the work is the C minor Andante con moto – unlikely though it might seem of a movement which proceeds at such a steady pace and which borrows its main theme from a setting of a Swedish song by another composer. But it is clear from the kinship between this apparently alien material and the first of the Winterreise songs that the sentiment of the Izak Berg’s “Se solen junker” (“The Sun is Sinking”) coincided with Schubert’s mood at the time. As the regular outbursts of anger in this not so straightforward movement suggest, it was not a happy mood either.

The canonic counterpoint which has been such a consistent source of textural interest in the work so far is a particularly attractive feature of the outer sections of the Scherzo. Both on its introduction in E flat major and in its artfully contrived deflection into E major the main theme is carried weightlessly forward on the exchanges between piano and strings. The A flat major Trio section is less charmingly scored but its emphatic articulation does at least draws attention, after a two-bar silence, to the contrastingly timid echoes of the staccato quavers from the first movement.

If Josef von Spaun’s guests were not bewildered by this stage they surely would have been before the end. The Allegro moderato as they heard it, before Schubert revised it for publication, was even longer than it is now. Its length is a desirable quality but more, surely, to an audience which is in a state to remember the Swedish song from the Andante con moto and to recognize its reappearance, sotto voce on cello in B minor, in the middle of the movement. And for thorough integration with thematic material of the Allegro moderato – a playful 6/8 opening theme introduced by the piano and an exotic cimbalom-like invention introduced in repeated notes in 2/2    by the violin – the Swedish song has to be recalled more than once. So it can be heard again, in E flat minor this time on the A-string of the cello, before the sudden decision to end the work in E flat major.