Into Uncharted Territory

Into Uncharted Territory

Beethoven’s Piano Trios

Harry Haskell

An offspring of the Baroque trio sonata, the piano trio— usually denoting a work for piano, violin, and cello—was still in its infancy when Beethoven penned his first essay in the genre around 1791. Although he declined to assign an opus number to the early Trio in E-flat major (which would be published posthumously in 1830), the composer reportedly considered it “one of his worthiest experiments in the art of composition.” A celebrated concert pianist, Beethoven had mixed motives as a composer: his piano trios were designed both to showcase his own virtuosity and to experiment with musical forms and techniques that would bear fruit in other genres. In adopting the four-movement format associated with the symphony and string quartet, for instance, he distanced himself from the three-movement piano trios of Haydn and Mozart. Equally significant was the increasing independence that Beethoven awarded to the three instruments. That his three Op. 1 trios of 1795 still privileged the keyboard was signaled by the first edition’s title page, which billed them as “composed for the piano,” with “violin and violoncello” printed below in lighter, less conspicuous type. Between then and 1816, when he bade farewell to the genre with the effervescent “Kakadu” Variations—probably composed as early as 1802–3 and revised more than ten years later—, Beethoven took the piano trio into uncharted territory, placing ever-greater demands on listeners as well as performers.

Appearances to the contrary, the Trio in E-flat major Op. 1 No. 1 was far from the first piece of music Beethoven wrote. It wasn’t even his earliest piece of chamber music. It was, however, the work that the ambitious young tyro chose, along with its two companions in the Op. 1 set, to introduce himself formally to the Viennese public. The popularity of the piano trio genre, which Mozart and Haydn had brought to a high level of sophistication, ensured that the publication of the three trios would attract considerable attention, to say nothing of earning a tidy sum of money for their chronically impecunious composer. Beethoven’s debt to Haydn, with whom he studied from late 1792 to early 1794, is apparent in the E flat–major Trio’s artful combination of playfulness and equanimity. Although outwardly conceived on a grand scale, the work is formally concise and hews close to the trail blazed by Beethoven’s predecessors. The opening Allegro is cast in a Classical mold, its themes genial and clearly delineated. If the writing for violin and cello falls well within the competency of an accomplished amateur, the intricate figurations of the piano part pose technical challenges of a higher order. The Adagio cantabile, in A-flat major, opens with a lyrical eight-bar melody in the piano, which is subsequently taken up and elaborated by the other two instruments. A chain of quietly pulsing A-flats in the cello launches a detour into the murkier realm of C minor. An elfin scherzo in brisk threequarter time soon whisks us back to the home key, though A-flat major briefly reasserts itself in the central trio section. The finale exudes high spirits, with its teasing starts and stops, wide leaps, breathless rhythms, and sharp dynamic contrasts. The Trio in C minor Op. 1 No. 3 similarly tempers Sturm und Drang turbulence with a quirky, antic spirit that borders on impishness. The opening Allegro con brio sets the tone in its explosive energy, exuberant virtuosity, and air of brooding menace. The bravura element is still more pronounced in the spitfire variations of the Andante cantabile and the tense, intricately interlocking gestures of the Menuetto. Beethoven seems to go out of his way to subvert the minuet’s traditional character: this specimen is more calisthenics than courtly dance. The trio’s pent-up energy is released in the feverish finale, which germinates from a stabbing three-note motif that is as arresting, and as packed with musical meaning, as the “fate” motive in the composer’s Fifth Symphony. The C-minor Trio was considerably more adventurous than its opus mates—so adventurous, in fact, that Haydn advised his protégé against publishing it, lest he alienate potential patrons and customers. Beethoven interpreted this well-intended tip as a sign of jealousy, a claim that seems far-fetched in light of Haydn’s magnanimous disposition. (The older composer would later eat his words, telling Beethoven’s student Ferdinand Ries that “he had not imagined that this trio would be so quickly and easily understood nor so favorably received by the public.”) Not only did Beethoven disregard Haydn’s advice, he petulantly omitted the customary acknowledgment of his teacher on the title page of his debut opus. Instead, he chose to curry favor with the aristocracy by dedicating the three trios to a future patron, Prince Karl Lichnowsky.

If the E flat–major Trio harks back to Classical models, the Trio in G major Op. 1 No. 2 strikes out on a more individualistic and decidedly forward-looking path. The keyboard part is no less brilliant than in the first of the Op. 1 set, but the strings increasingly share the limelight. The evenhanded give-and-take between piano and violin that characterizes the beginning of the Allegro vivace makes room for the cello in the dark and stormy development section, and from then on all three instruments participate in the musical conversation on equal terms. The E-major Largo casts a luminous, and unmistakably Romantic, spell with its tenderly yearning harmonies and pearly strands of 16th notes. While the piano takes precedence in introducing the slow movement’s long-breathed melodies, the cello is first off the mark in the high-spirited scherzo, including a mock-tragic trio interlude in which the violin mostly stands on the sidelines. The lickety-split Presto confirms the egalitarian dispensation as the three players volley the bouncy, tautly wound theme back and forth. Midway through the finale, Beethoven belatedly adds an amiable, more relaxed variant of this repeatednote motto to the mix, as if to show us that his well of inspiration will never run dry.

“Strange forms begin a joyous dance, as they gently fade toward a luminous point, then separate from each other flashing and sparkling, and hunt and pursue each other in myriad groupings. In the midst of the spirit kingdom thus revealed, the enraptured soul listens to the unknown language, and understands all the most secret allusions by which it has been aroused.” Thus did the early–19th century critic and novelist E.T.A. Hoffmann describe Beethoven’s chamber music in general, and the two Op. 70 piano trios in particular. To listeners steeped in the genial Classicism of Mozart and Haydn, the muscular Romanticism of Beethoven’s middle period seemed a strange and wondrously allusive language, almost, indeed, the “air of another plant” that bewildered audiences encountered a century later in the work of another musical revolutionary, Arnold Schoenberg. Beethoven’s early piano trios, charming and inventive as they are, barely hint at the energy and audacity that burst forth in the D-major Trio. Composed in the summer of 1808, Op. 70 No. 1 followed close on the heels of such exuberantly expansive works as the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the A-major Sonata for Cello and Piano. Beethoven sketched some incidental music for Macbeth around the same time, leading suggestible commentators to detect Shakespearean overtones in the trio’s darkly mysterious slow movement. It was not Banquo’s ghost, however, but that of Hamlet’s father who gave the trio its nickname, thanks to a fanciful association advanced by the pianist Carl Czerny. “Ghostly” is a fitting epithet for the central Largo, even if Hoffmann discerned in its D-minor angst no more than a note of “gentle melancholy.” The trio’s expressive heart, the Largo contrasts sharply with the bright, extroverted athleticism of the two outer movements. Yet there too Beethoven injects elements of strangeness and surprise. At the outset of the opening Allegro vivace e con brio, the briskly ascending D-major theme, announced by the three players in unison, barely gets off the ground before coming to rest on a harmonically “foreign” F natural. A swift change of gears introduces a lyrical countersubject, whereupon the two themes “hunt and pursue each other” in myriad permutations, as Hoffmann perceptively observed. Even by Beethoven’s elevated standards, the D-major Trio is music of extraordinary dynamism and compression. Ear-opening modulations lie around every turn. Brief motifs are ingeniously combined and recombined, telescoped and expanded. Light and shadow, turbulence and calm alternate in quick succession. To borrow a favorite metaphor of the Romantics, storm clouds billow ominously on the horizon, then disperse in a flash. The ghost is exorcised and the dance ends, as it began, in pure joy.

Variations and Double Variations

Throughout his life, Beethoven amused himself (and supplemented his income) by composing variations on popular tunes of the day, from patriotic tub-thumpers like “Rule Britannia” to operatic arias by Mozart and Salieri and an unpretentious waltz by Anton Diabelli. In 1816, he offered the Leipzig publisher Breitkopf & Härtel first dibs on a set of variations for piano trio on the song “Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu” (I am the tailor Kakadu), which he disarmingly described as “one of my earlier compositions, though it is not among the reprehensible ones.” Precisely when Beethoven wrote this charming jeu d’esprit is unknown, but its origins may go back two decades or more: Wenzel Müller created Kakadu’s lighthearted ditty for a comic singspiel that premiered in Vienna in 1794, two years after his junior contemporary relocated there from Bonn. Beethoven puts Müller’s catchy tune through its paces in a series of ten increasingly elaborate variations, including one each for solo piano and string duo. In a spirit of innocent merriment, the work begins with a long, portentous introduction in G minor and ends with an equally incongruous coda in “learned” contrapuntal style.

Eight years earlier, Beethoven had displayed his formidable variation technique in the Op. 70 No. 2 piano trio: the second-movement Allegretto (substituting for the conventional slow movement) features not one but two themes, in sunny C major and sultry C minor, that serve as the basis for a series of interlocking double variations. This later E flat–major Trio abounds in ingenious and often idiosyncratic felicities. For instance, the slow, quietly introspective introduction returns near the end of the opening Allegro ma non troppo, paving the way for a breezy coda featuring the recurring trill motif that has generated so much of the first movement’s dynamic energy. The Allegro’s brisk, free-flowing 6/8 meter is echoed in the waltz-like lilt of the third-movement Allegretto ma non troppo, whose warm A flat–major tonality—the third key the listener has encountered in as many movements—marks a further departure from the sound world of Haydn and Mozart. Here again Beethoven plots his transitions cunningly: the center section of the ABA-form structure circles back by way of a hauntingly ethereal and harmonically searching bridge passage. The home key is resoundingly reestablished in the swashbuckling finale, with its propulsive rhythms and vigorously striding themes in Beethoven’s best “heroic” manner.

Music for an “Amiable Prince”

Beethoven sketched the Trio in B-flat major Op. 97 in 1810 and completed the score early the following year, shortly before starting work on his Seventh Symphony. As the last and most overtly symphonic of Beethoven’s seven canonic piano trios (excluding variations, arrangements, and juvenilia), the “Archduke” anticipates the trios of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms. The nobleman in question was Archduke Rudolph, son of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. and younger brother of his successor, Emperor Franz I. As Beethoven’s pupil, friend, and most magnanimous patron, Rudolph was more than deserving of the tribute the composer paid him in the dedications of such masterworks as the Missa solemnis, the “Emperor” Piano Concerto, the “Hammerklavier” Piano Sonata, and the Op. 97 Trio. Beethoven’s relations with the young archduke, whom he described to another friend as “an amiable and talented prince,” were singularly warm and free of tension and guile. Surely it is not reading too much into the Trio to see Beethoven’s feelings for Rudolph mirrored in its majestic phrases and nobility of conception. The opening bars of the Allegro moderato, with its broadly arching piano melody, piquant intensifications of harmony, and ecstatic violin and cello outbursts, set the stage for a movement infused with drama and tender lyricism in equal parts. After such boldly striding music, the delicate, mincing tread of the scherzo is all the more delightfully startling. Here, too, Beethoven works on an expansive scale, deftly transforming the cello’s bouncy staccato theme first into a flowing legato melody and then into a slithering, chromatic fugue. An even sharper contrast lies in store in the luminous Andante, which Beethoven marks “cantabile, ma però con moto” (songlike, yet with movement). A softly pulsing melody limned in block chords gives way to a cascade of triplets in the piano part, the two hands in contrary motion, accompanied by unison sighing figures in the strings. This is the first of four richly imaginative variations that Beethoven weaves on his simple D-major theme, topped off with a coda that pivots adroitly back to the home key before striking off in a new and totally unforeseen direction. The finale, like the first movement, is marked Allegro moderato, but its antic spirit and ingenious rhythmic repartee might almost come from a different world.