Dialogues for Three Mozart’s Piano Trios
Richard Wigmore
In the late 18th century, the combination of keyboard (often played by a woman), violin, and cello (strictly male preserves) was a favorite form of chamber music among amateurs, and a profitable one for publishers. Such was its popularity, especially in England and the German lands, that symphonies and even string quartets quickly appeared in arrangements for trio. It was almost certainly for performance in the family home that the 20-year-old Mozart composed his earliest keyboard trio, the so-called Divertimento in B-flat major K. 254, in August 1776, when he was beginning to grow restless at what he saw as his life of servitude in provincial Salzburg. In Munich early in October 1777, near the start of his fateful journey to Mannheim and Paris, Mozart played the violin in two performances of the trio at the inn “Zum schwarzen Adler.” “I played as if I were the finest fiddler in all Europe,” he wrote euphorically to his father Leopold. In Salzburg the Mozarts and their friends would have performed the trio on the two-manual family harpsichord. The music-loving innkeeper (and amateur violinist), Franz Joseph Albert, possessed a fortepiano; and shortly after the double performance in his inn, Mozart took the keyboard part at a private birthday concert for Albert—one of his earliest encounters with the fortepiano. Although Albert was a one-time pupil of Tartini, he was evidently a hopeless sight- reader, prompting Mozart’s comment to Leopold: “There indeed I had a fine accompanist! In the Adagio I had to play his part for six bars.” When the piece was published in Paris around 1782, it was advertised, in keeping with 18th-century tradition, as 15
