Piano Trio in G minor Op.110

Bewegt, doch nicht zu rasch - rascher

Ziemlich langsam - etwas bewegter - erstes Tempo

Rasch

Kräftig, mit Humor

The least often performed of Schumann’s Piano Trios is probably the most inspired. Too often dismissed, like many of his late works, as the product of a failing mind, Op.110 is as fresh in its way as the rejuvenated Fantasiestücke for piano Op.111 also written in Düsseldorf in the second half of 1851. It belongs to a series of high-quality scores, including the two Violin Sonatas Op.105 and Op.121, that arose directly out of the composer’s friendship with Josef von Wasielewski, the leader of his orchestra in Düsseldorf. With Wasielewski, the cellist Christian Reimers and Clara to play it through for him in his music room, he had every opportunity to make sure that was to be the last of his three piano trios would also be his best.

It is not at all unlikely that some members of the audience at the first public performance of the Piano Trio in G minor - given by David, Graubau and Clara Schumann in Leipzig in 1852 - were familiar with the Piano Trio in C minor which Mendelssohn had introduced at the Gewandhaus concerts seven years earlier. If so, they would have been fascinated by the kinship between the first movements of the two works and at the same time amazed by the technical and emotional extremities touched on in the later one. While, like Mendelssohn, Schumann subscribes to the textural duality established by Beethoven, with the strings on the one hand balanced by the piano on the other, he is impelled by the immediacy of his inspiration to take all kinds of risks here.

Carried away by the urgency of the opening theme, with its recklessly dissonant arpeggios and impulsive 6/8 rhythms, violin and cello engage in heated contrapuntal competition to express the passion invested in it. When the piano gets hold of the arpeggios they cannot forbear to add their own vehemently emphatic comments on it. The second subject, introduced in F major by the violin and repeated by the cello, is rather more lyrical but, with its anxiously syncopated rhythms, no less emotional and, with reminders of the first subject running alongside it, no less pressing. As if this were not worrying enough, Schumann introduces in the middle of the development section a spooky kind of fugue in B flat minor eerily coloured by quiet pizzicato and wispy legato figuration. The brief reference back to this episode at the end of the quicker coda integrates it to some extent but does not exorcise it.

The shape of the main theme of the first movement is reflected in the rising sixth that opens the violin melody at the beginning of the E flat major slow movement. Again violin and cello join in expressive counterpoint over a rhythmic accompaniment on the piano but this time in a highly poetic dialogue which, interrupted though it is by a quicker and disturbing middle section in F minor, is resumed on the reprise with no loss to its nostalgic serenity.

There is an echo of the main theme of the first movement also in the opening theme of the Rasch third movement. A fairly bleak scherzo in C minor, even though it includes two trios in major keys - the first in C with an aspiring syncopated theme reserved for the violin, the second based on a march tune in A flat - it gives no hint of the dramatic change of mood that is about to take place in the finale. Here again, striding purposefully in G major on piano and violin, is a theme in emphatic rising sixths. While its melodic shape relates backwards to similar material earlier in the work, its exuberant demeanour surges forwards through a rondo construction that never fails to sustain its high spirits. It makes way for other themes from time to time, notably in two episodes that correspond respectively with the syncopated and march-time trios in the previous movement, but never for so long as to hold up the irresistible progress to the brilliantly jubilant coda.