String Trio in G minor Op.6 (1908)

Of the generation of Hungarian composers born in the late 1870s or early 1880s – Ernö Dohnányi, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Léo Weiner – Weiner was probably even more resistant then Dohnányi to the progressive trends represented by the other two. Indeed, while Bartók admired much about Dohnányi, he had little to say in favour of Weiner, whose technical accomplishment he acknowledged but whose “classical puritanism, which made him an adversary of all the modern achievements” he clearly deplored. But Bartók made that comment in 1921, by which time he must have found Weiner’s oong-term opposition to progress more than a little tiresome. The String Trio in G minor, on the other hand, was written 13 years earlier, when Weiner was still a young man and Bartók and Kodály were only just beginning to find a way forward by way of a language based on Hungarian folk idioms.

While it is difficult to find traces of Weiner’s Hungarian background in the the String Trio, it is not lacking in interest from other points of view. Harmonically, it is too much of its time to be dismissed as the work of a “Hungarian Mendelssohni,” even though there are echoes of that clearly favourite composer in the occasional turn of phrase. Texturally, it is well written for the ensemble, even though it does tend to favour the violin at the expense of the others. Best of all, perhaps, it is abundantly tuneful. The second subject of the first movement, introduced by violin with a viola counterpoint over a pizzicato cello accmpaniment, is an outstanding example, particularly when it is recalled by viola in the recapitulation. The outer sections of the Vivace, a scherzo which owes more than a little to Mendelssohn, are deftly scored, and if the middle section is virtually a violin solo, poised over an ostinato on viola and cello, it is appealingly melodious.

It seems from the prominence of the viola in the introduction of the main theme of the Andantino, a barcarolle which is to be the subject of the follow three variations and coda, that it might be the central figure of the movement. In fact, although the viola rises to the surface in the second half of the first variation and the cello at the equivalent point in the second, it is the violin that stars in the expressive third variation. The violin occupies a similar role in the Allegro con fuoco but there is nothing too anomalous about that in a finale which requires so much energy from all three instruments on each occurrence of the main theme and such subtle colouring in the episodes between.