Barenboim, Barenboim & Soltani

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 sightreader, 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 “Sonate pour clavecin ou pianoforte, avec l’accompagnement de violon et de violoncelle.” While Mozart’s later trios aspire to a more equal balance between the instruments, this one remains largely true to the traditional billing, with the keyboard emphatically in charge and the cello doubling its bass line virtually throughout. That said, the violin’s echoes near the start of the crisp, bristling opening Allegro assai already add something crucial to the keyboard-dominated texture. More than in any of the later trios, the keyboard here often seems to simulate an orchestra, not least in the vivid dynamic contrasts of the opening theme.

The Adagio exploits the mellow, slightly veiled quality of strings in the key of E flat, often chosen by Mozart for soulful or amorous outpourings in his operas, from Ilia’s “Se il padre perdei” to Tamino’s Portrait Aria. From the gently musing opening theme, sounded by violin over murmuring keyboard figuration and then repeated with roles reversed, violin and keyboard now discourse as equals. This newfound partnership is celebrated in the witty give-and-take of the finale, a rondo in the style of a minuet, like so many of Mozart’s concerto finales in the 1770s. In a rare moment of independence, the cello at one point provides a pizzicato bass to a charming passage of imitative dialogue repartee between violin and piano left hand beneath trills in the right hand.

In the years following Mozart’s move to Vienna in 1781, he confounded his father’s dire warnings by earning a handsome living as a composer-impresario in what he dubbed “the land of the clavier.” Showing a canny business sense, he promoted himself in the magnificent series of piano concertos he premiered at his own Lenten subscription concerts between 1784 and 1786. Thereafter he relied increasingly on income from opera commissions (Figaro was premiered in May 1786, Don Giovanni in October 1787) and fees from publishers and patrons. The flourishing amateur domestic market meant that there was a steady demand for chamber music with piano. And it was for this market, and his own performance in Viennese salons, that Mozart composed a clutch of chamber works in the summer and autumn of 1786, including two piano trios: the G major, K. 496, and the B flat, K. 502.

True to convention, the Trio in G major K. 496, dated July 8, once again was published as a “sonata for the fortepiano, with the accompaniment of violin and cello.” The keyboard is indeed first among equals, epitomized by its leisurely opening solo. Yet from the moment the violin takes up the tune, Mozart delights in operatic-style interplay between the two instruments. Initially the cello’s prime role is to lend its sustaining power to the keyboard bass—a reminder that the tone on 18th-century pianos decayed much more rapidly than on a modern Steinway. But the hitherto subordinate cello comes into its own in the central development, where Mozart works the movement’s opening motif in a series of modulating imitative dialogues.

The cello also gradually emerges as an equal partner in the Andante. This begins with a gracefully decorative theme, sounded by the piano and repeated by the violin, before the textures become more closely woven, with dense thickets of chromaticism that must have startled many of Mozart’s contemporaries. The finale is Mozart in overtly popular mode: a set of six variations on a breezy theme in the style of a gavotte. The cello’s moment of glory comes in the fourth variation, in G minor, that dissolves the theme in a mysterious contrapuntal haze against a recurrent wailing figure on the violin. Beethoven was so impressed by this variation that he copied it out for study. In the fifth variation Mozart transforms the theme into a pensive Adagio, before restoring its original jauntiness in the final variation. The tiny coda alludes fleetingly to the mysterious fourth variation, now hovering between major and minor—a magical final touch.

Mozart the instinctive musical democrat is immediately to the fore in the Trio in B-flat major K. 502, which he entered into his thematic catalogue on November 17, 1786. The main theme gains much of its piquancy from the strings’ chirpy ripostes to the keyboard’s smooth, chromatically inflected phrases. Later on, after the piano has varied the theme, it is delightfully expanded, first by violin and cello against trilling figures in the keyboard, then in imitation between the piano’s right and left hands, and finally as dialogue between violin and cello against rippling keyboard figuration —the chamber equivalent of a favorite texture in Mozart’s great piano concertos. Although the exposition is monothematic, in a way more typical of Haydn, Mozart introduces a new cantabile melody on the violin at the start of the development.

The lavishly decorated Larghetto is a supreme example of Mozart using galant clichés to deeply expressive ends. The individual phrases are common 18th-century currency. Yet Mozart manipulates them with exquisite grace and harmonic subtlety, in textures whose sensuous richness (with eloquent use of both the cello’s tenor and basso profundo registers) were unprecedented in a piano trio. The affinity with Mozart’s contemporary piano concertos is closest in the Allegretto finale, where the solo keyboard is often pitted against the string “tutti.” Both the gavotte-style opening melody and the jaunty second theme are Mozart at his most insouciant. But the mood grows more serious in the modulating central episode, which puts the jaunty second theme through its paces in a passage of strenuous contrapuntal imitation.

The year 1788 was difficult financially for Mozart, not least because Emperor Joseph II’s declaration of war on the Ottoman Turks meant that many of his aristocratic supporters disappeared to their regiments or their country estates. Yet the summer and early autumn, especially, were artistically prolific, with the composition of the last three symphonies —probably intended for subscription concerts which may or may not have taken place—and three piano trios, K. 542, 548, and 564, that brought Mozart much-needed income at a time when his expenditure outran his earnings.

Dated June 22, 1788, the Trio in E major K. 542— Mozart’s only work in that key—is the most poetic and, dare one say, personal of Mozart’s trios; and it is no surprise to learn that it was a special favorite of Chopin’s. Beginning with a gentle, chromatically drooping theme for piano alone, the triple-time first movement combines wistful lyricism with an exhilarating harmonic range. Particularly thrilling is the moment in the exposition when the cello and violin, in imitation, plunge the second theme dramatically from B major to G major, which the piano then darkens to G minor —a key daringly remote from B major. In the central development Mozart becomes mesmerized by a falling two-note motif from the main theme, working it in close imitative dialogue before the piano embarks on a bout of concertostyle virtuosity.

The enchanting Andante, in A major, is a delicate pastoral gavotte, with a plaintive central episode in A minor based on the same theme. Not the least of the movement’s delights are the nonchalant imitations between strings and keyboard, and the stinging harmonic twist at the end of the theme. In the A-minor episode—Mozart at his most Schubertian— violin and keyboard bass, then violin and cello, dialogue against a constant flow of triplets. The rondo finale alternates melodies of limpid grace with flights of virtuoso display for piano (especially) and violin: another reminder that Mozart himself took the piano part in his trios at Viennese soirees. The cello again asserts its equality in the quickfire dialogues of the central, “developing” episode, which are then distantly echoed at the very end, with the cello having the last word in a slyly witty touch.

Completed on July 14, 1788, between symphonies Nos. 39 and 40, the Trio in C major K. 548, is a very different affair. Its opening contrasts assertive C-major ceremony with plaintive questioning—an antithesis found in the near-contemporary “Jupiter” Symphony. While flamboyant extroversion has the upper hand in the exposition, the central development transposes the opening fanfare into the minor, then explores a more intimate, shadowed world of feeling with laconic, sighing phrases. These recur towards the end, giving the whole, ostensibly confident movement a typical touch of Mozartian ambiguity.

In the central Andante, whose serenity is ruffled by sforzando accents and characteristic moments of chromatic harmony, the hitherto subordinate cello is at last allowed to display its cantabile eloquence in its tenor register. Mozart ends the trio with a bounding, jig-like movement in 6/8 time, akin to the finales of several piano concertos. From the outset, the cello is fully involved in the music’s quicksilver dialogue, not least in the central C-minor episode that develops the movement’s opening motif with mock vehemence before C-major merriment returns.

The last of the three 1788 works, the Trio in G major K. 564, completed in October and first published in England, is written in a lightweight, popular style, with simpler, less closely woven textures than its predecessors. This is the piano trio counterpart of the so-called “Sonata facile” K. 545. In the opening Allegro the piano kickstarts proceedings with a breezy tune which is then taken up by the strings and subsequently varied as a “second subject.” Following the pattern of Mozart’s previous trios, the cello emerges by stealth, culminating in its presentation of the second theme in the recapitulation. By the second movement, a set of six decorative variations on a graceful minuet-like tune, it has established absolute parity with keyboard and violin.

For his finale Mozart writes a rondo on a naïve, nurserystyle theme in bouncy siciliano rhythm. The first of the two episodes, in G minor, introduces a note of wistful pathos (a foretaste here of the finale of Beethoven’s violin concerto), while in the second episode the trio morphs into a village band to strike up a delightful rustic waltz. This is just about as demotic as the urbane Mozart ever gets.