Piano Trio in G minor, Op.15

Smetana’s three major chamber works - the two String Quartets and the Piano Trio in G minor - were all inspired by a personal disaster of some kind. In this case it was the death of his elder daughter, Bedriska, or “Fritzi” as her parents called her, who succumbed to scarlet fever at the age of four. “Nothing can replace Fritzi, the angel whom death has stolen from us,” Smetana wrote in his diary in September 1855. The Trio in G minor was first performed three months later.

The extent of the composer’s grief is made painfully clear at the very beginning of the work where the violin, unaccompanied at this stage, gives G-string voice to the anguished main theme of the Moderato assai. Too good a composer to dwell exclusively on his loss, however, Smetana has the cello introduce a consoling second subject in the relative major. The development is a dramatic and highly eventful conflict between the two main themes, ending in a quietly deranged piano cadenza. It seems for a while that the movement might end in G major, the key in which the cello recalls the second subject, but the fiercely expressive coda shatters that illusion.

Strangely enough, in an elegiac work like this, there is no slow movement. Two expressive slow sections are, however, incorporated in the Allegro ma non agitato, which begins in G minor as a macabre kind of scherzo - a polka with a phrase from the grief-stricken main theme of the previous movement enshrined in it - and ends, with a last-minute harmonic adjustment, in G major. That discreetly indicated change of heart is not immediately registered in the Finale, the opening section of which (taken from an earlier Violin Sonata) is a hard-driven Presto of cross-rhythms in G minor. Again, however, there are two slow sections, both of them based on the lovely melody introduced by the cello when the piano brings the Presto to a grinding halt. On its second appearance that cello melody is converted to a funeral march in G minor and then, as the Presto is resumed, into a radiantly positive declaration in G major.