trio (hXV:29),
which eventually turns to the dominant of the home key and leads directly into
the finale.A composition for piano and two other instruments, usually violin and cello; standard variants include piano with flute and cello (Weber j259), clarinet and viola (Mozart k498, Schumann op.88), clarinet and cello (Beethoven op.11 and Brahms op.114), and violin and horn (Brahms op.40). The genre emerged in the mid-18th century from the Baroque duo and trio sonatas and the keyboard sonata through a shift of emphasis from the string parts to the keyboard (see Sonata, §§II and III; Accompanied keyboard music).
Obbligato writing (as opposed to continuo parts) for keyboard instruments occasionally appeared in late Baroque chamber music. In a number of J.S. Bach’s sonatas, for example (including those for violin, flute or viola da gamba and harpsichord), the texture is predominantly one of three equally important parts, two of them carried by the harpsichord. In his sonatas for harpsichord and violin op.3 (1734) Mondonville shifted the balance in favour of the harpsichord, often reducing the violin to an accompanying role; the change of emphasis was pursued in Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin en concerts (1741), where the accompanying parts are merely optional. A cello part, often colla parte with the keyboard bass line, was sometimes added, particularly by German composers; such accompanied sonatas are the immediate antecedents of the Classical piano trio. In the piano or harpsichord trios of such composers as Johann Schobert (see DDT, xxxix) the harpsichord style of the French school gives way to a keyboard adaptation of the Mannheim style; the keyboard parts no longer relapse periodically into figured bass but are fully written out and dominate the accompanying strings, which, the cello in particular, are rarely genuinely obligatory. Many sets were published with string parts specified ‘ad libitum’; sometimes cello parts were not even printed.
In
some of Haydn’s early piano trios (e.g. hXV:1 in G minor)
the musical language recalls Baroque features, but his later examples of the
form are as rich in musical substance as the late symphonies and quartets and
share their musical language. The relationship between violin and piano is
fruitfully exploited in the kind of dialogue anticipated by Mondonville’s op.3
or Giardini’s op.3 sonatas (c1751), although the cello is rarely
emancipated. Haydn’s formal and tonal schemes in the piano trios are often
boldly imaginative: an example is the B major slow movement in the E trio (hXV:29),
which eventually turns to the dominant of the home key and leads directly into
the finale.
Trios
of this kind were written primarily for pianists, often amateurs. Textural
richness could more readily be achieved by the addition of further accompanying
parts without prejudicing the simplicity of the piano part with elaborate
part-writing. Mozart’s early B trio k254, for example, is
fundamentally an accompanied sonata. But in his later trios, such as k542 in E, the string parts attain a real measure of
independence.
The gradual freeing of the cello part from its historical role as harmonic support continued in the piano trios of Beethoven and culminated in Schubert’s trios d898 and 929. Both composers adopted a four-movement scheme for the piano trio, lending their works a scale and importance previously associated with the quartet and the symphony. Single-movement pieces such as Beethoven’s ‘Kakadu’ Variations op.121a for piano trio also began to appear; this work’s inclusion of variations for solo piano and for string duo shows how far Beethoven had moved away from the earlier concept of the accompanied sonata. The piano trio became an increasingly popular medium in the early 19th century, and many larger works were arranged for it; Beethoven himself so arranged his Second Symphony.
The piano virtuoso composers of the 19th century, such as Hummel and Chopin, tended to favour their own instrument with a part of great brilliance; the same might be said of Mendelssohn, although his string parts also contribute vitally to the musical substance. Important trios were written by Schumann, Brahms, Smetana, Dvořák and Franck, but even in Brahms’s there is sometimes a feeling of striving after effects that might better have been achieved with a larger body of strings – an imbalance resulting partly from the change of musical vocabulary in the 19th century and partly from a development of the capabilities of the piano which quite eclipsed analogous developments in string instruments during the same period. Perhaps it was to compensate for this that composers wrote for all three instruments in an increasingly brilliant style. In the piano trios of Tchaikovsky and Arensky virtuosity is required of all three players, resulting in a kind of composition far removed from the amateur-orientated trios of the 18th century.
In the 20th century the range of trios for the standard ensemble was enlarged, most notably, by Ives (1904–11), Ravel (1914), Rebecca Clarke (1921), Fauré (1922–3), Copland (Vitebsk, 1928), Bridge (1929), Martinů (1930, 1950 and 1951), Shostakovich (1944), Alexander Goehr (1966) and Isang Yun (1972–5). There are examples of works which incorporate a single wind instrument by Bartók (Contrasts, 1938, clarinet and violin), Lennox Berkeley (1954, violin and horn), Hans Zender (Trifolium, 1966, flute and cello), Klaus Huber (Ascensus, 1969, flute and cello), and Ligeti (1982, violin and horn). Major technical innovations, applied to a fundamentally conservative medium, included skeletal writing for the piano (with a resultant curtailment of its traditionally dominant role), the provision of lengthy solo sections for strings and piano separately, and the use of string devices such as scordatura tuning, microtones, col legno and snap pizzicato. Several piano trios from Germany reveal unusual sources of inspiration, literary and historical: these include Zimmermann’s Présence (1961), a type of chamber ballet with a speaker, dancers, and three characters (Don Quixote, Joyce’s Molly Bloom, and the farcical King Ubu) represented by the trio instrumentalists; Killmayer’s Brahms-Bildnis (1976), a one-movement work with a ‘psycho-programme’ which seeks to explore ‘the secret inner life-chaos of Brahms’; Wolfgang Rihm’s Fremde Szenen I–III (1st series, 1982–3), an ‘anachronistic’ setting prompted by titles in Schumann’s diaries; and York Höller’s Tagträume (1994), comprising seven chamber-style ‘tone-poems’, based on verses by the Dutch author Ces Nooteboom.
W. Altmann: Handbuch für Klaviertriospieler (Wolfenbüttel, 1934)
G. Cesari: ‘Origini del trio con pianoforte’, Scritti inediti a cura di Franco Abbiati (Milan, 1937), 183–98 [also in Storia della musica, iii (Milan, 1941), 465ff]
A. Karsch: Untersuchungen zur Frühgeschichte des Klaviertrios in Deutschland (diss., U. of Cologne, 1941)
W. Fischer: ‘Mozarts Weg von der begleiteten Klaviersonate zur Kammermusik mit Klavier’, MJb 1956, 16–34
N. Renner: Reclams Kammermusikführer (Stuttgart, 1956, 10/1990, ed. A. Werner-Jensen)
K. Marguerre: ‘Mozarts Klaviertrios’, MJb 1960–61, 182–94
G. Feder: ‘Haydns frühe Klaviertrios’, Haydn-Studien, ii (1969–70), 289–316
H. Hering: ‘Das Klavier in der Kammermusik des 18. Jahrhundert’, Mf, xxiii (1970), 22–37
C. Rosen: The Classical Style (London, 1971, enlarged 3/1997), 351ff
R.R. Kidd: ‘The Emergence of Chamber Music with Obbligato Keyboard in England’, AcM, xliv (1972), 122–44
D. Fuller: ‘Accompanied Keyboard Music’, MQ, lx (1974), 222–45
M. Fillion: The Accompanied Keyboard Divertimenti of Haydn and his Viennese Contemporaries, c.1750–1780 (diss., Cornell U., 1982)
K. Komlós: The Viennese Keyboard Trio in the 1780s: Studies in Texture and Instrumentation (diss., Cornell U., 1986)
J.H. Baron: Chamber Music: a Research and Information Guide (New York, 1987)
K. Komlós: ‘The Viennese Keyboard Trio in the 1780s: Sociological Background and Contemporary Reception’, ML, lxviii (1987), 222–34
B. Smallman: The Piano Trio: its History, Technique, and Repertoire (Oxford, 1990)
MICHAEL TILMOUTH/BASIL SMALLMAN