“It sounds like the work of someone from whom much can still be expected, so youthfully fresh and powerful, and masterly as well” – this personal, even enthusiastic reflection on Robert Schumann’s Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 63 comes from the diary of none other than Clara Schumann. Did it matter that the work was performed for the first time on 13 September, on her birthday? It was rather a genuinely sincere and profound feeling that was at work here, since Clara considered the first movement of the piece to be among “the most beautiful she had ever known”. The eminent artist had every right to be delighted, but it is worth noting the emphasis on the “youthfulness and freshness” of Schumann’s music. In 1847, Robert was slowly approaching forty, a fully formed composer with an impressive output. Even chamber music was nothing new to him – the year in which his interest in the genre “exploded” had already passed. Nevertheless, Trio in D Minor, Op. 63 was indeed Schumann’s first work written for the “canonical” line-up of piano, violin and cello, and he was all the more eager to send it out into the world: “go ahead, then, as fast as you like and as far as you can”.
Brahms was incomparably younger – barely twenty – when he penned his Piano Trio in B Major, Op. 8 in 1853. He signed it in his manuscript “Kreisler Junior”, as if (perhaps fearfully?) wishing to hide behind this artistic pseudonym. Although the Trio was premiered in New York (27 November 1855), less than three weeks later (18 December) it was also performed in Wrocław, with Clara Schumann on the piano. Although the reviews of the work were very favourable, several decades later Brahms decided to revise it significantly. This act of “smoothing down and neatly combing the Trio’s hair” had the least impact on the light and colourful Mendelssohn-besotted second movement.
Rihm was over thirty when he composed Fremde Szenen – three extraordinary essays for piano trio – in the early 1980s. In them, he confronts the tradition of the genre, transforming it for his own use, as if he was taming something potentially alien. Fremde Szene III is mysterious at first, before then giving the impression of being “caught up” with the past (even with allusions to Brahms). However, it ends in a not entirely obvious, indeed rather suggestive and disturbing way. Is it a question about the future that is being raised here? This is something to ponder on.