Merz Trio

Dmitri Shostakovich (born St. Petersburg, September 25, 1906; died Moscow, August 9, 1975)

Trio no.1 in C minor, op. 8 (composed 1923)

Meet the sickly sixteen-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich, sent to a sanitorium in Gaspra, Crimea to recover from tuberculosis in 1923, accompanied by his sister Mariya. By the time Dmitri had turned thirteen in 1919, his musical skills had already captivated Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936), the director of what was still called the Petrograd (later the Leningrad) Conservatory. During those three years, Glazunov made sure that Shostakovich was fed and cared for, including the Crimean convalescence. As Mariya reported in a letter home, Dmitri had not simply regained his health, he also grew taller, worked on his tan, and fell in love.

Tatyana Glivenko, the daughter of a scholar in Moscow, was the object of Dmitri’s affections and would remain so for roughly the next decade, even after her 1929 marriage. Shostakovich abandoned his unrequited infatuation only after the birth of Tatyana’s first child in 1932. Tatyana was also the dedicatee of the “Trio no. 1 in C minor, op. 8,” which Dmitri wrote while in Gaspra. Originally entitled “Poème,” the single sonata form movement marked “Andante” reflects a romantic demeanor rarely produced by the mature Shostakovich. Some critics, however, hear in this “Trio” a precursor to the slow movement of his “Symphony no. 1 in F minor, op. 10.” The opening passage gives rise to most of the material in the “Trio, op. 8.” He borrowed the second subject from a B minor piano sonata he had given up on several years earlier.

Not until 1983, sixty years after its composition, was the “Trio no. 1” published, having to be pieced together from several incomplete autograph scores. Even then, the final twenty-two measures of the piano part remained missing and had to be reconstructed by Shostakovich’s student Boris Tishchenko (1939-2010), a prolific composer in his own right.

--ProgramnotesbyJayWeitz,SeniorConsultingDatabaseSpecialistformusic, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio. For over three decades, he has writtenabouttheartsinCentralOhioforthedailypapers“ColumbusCitizen-Journal” and“ColumbusDispatch,”thealternativeweeklypapers“ColumbusGuardian”and “ColumbusAlive,”the“ColumbusJewishNews,”andColumbuspublicradiostation WCBE-FM. In2019,theMusicLibraryAssociationawardedhimitslifetimeachievement award and highest honor, the MLA Citation.

Robert Schumann (born Zwickau, Saxony, June 8, 1810; died Endenich, near Bonn, July 29, 1856)

Trio no. 2 in F major, op. 80 (composed 1847) where young musicians flourish

Vienna had received Clara Schumann with enthusiasm when she concertized there in 1838, playing works she would later come to regard as facile and showy. In the winter of 1846/1847, she returned to Vienna with her husband only to find that the city still wanted the empty works that had made her earlier career, not the more substantial offerings of Mendelssohn, Chopin, and both Clara and Robert Schumann. Performances of Robert’s “Piano Concerto op. 54” and the “’Spring’ Symphony, op. 38” met with similar resistance. When the pair moved on to Prague, they found the reception more to their liking. Both the adversity and the advocacy encountered on this tour inspired Robert to return to sustained chamber composition for the first time since his so-called “chamber music year” of 1842.

Two piano trios date from 1847, the “Trio in D minor, op. 63,” completed in June, and the “Trio in F major, op. 80,” written between August and October. He revised both in preparation for publication in April 1848, but only the first appeared at that time. “Opus 80” would not be published until 1850, the year of its premiere performance, accounting for the wide discrepancy in opus numbers. Schumann himself thought of the second trio as “friendlier” than the first and more immediately accessible. The use of German rather than Italian tempo markings, a practice begun by Beethoven, was the result of a vogue of Teutonism in the mid-1840s.

The strings in octaves open the “Sehr lebhaft” (very lively), relegating the second theme to the piano. A third theme bears a strong resemblance to the “Intermezzo” (“Dein Bildniss wunderselig”) from Schumann’s Eichendorff song cycle, op. 39. The development treats all three themes, and the recap stretches into a rhythmic adventure.

The violin’s song over piano triplets introduces the slow movement, “Mit innigem Ausdruck” (with heartfelt expression). A countertheme arises in the cello, then after a key change to A major, the strings continue in canon. A brief canon, this time between the cello and piano, also begins the scherzo, “In mässiger Bewegung” (with moderate movement). Passages full of imitation in all three instruments are interrupted temporarily by a lyrical piano theme. More contrapuntal still is the finale, “Nicht zu rasch” (not too fast), especially the development. The main cantabile theme in the cello and a secondary staccato motif provide the developmental fodder.

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