Piano Trios 1 & 2

Abstract

It is not often that a composer in his maturity takes the trouble - or indeed gets the opportunity - to revisit a work from his youth, and, for no other reason than to prove that he now realises how it should have been written, put right its errors in the light of his accumulated experience. Yet this is exactly what the ever self-critical Brahms did with the first of his three piano trios, the B major, op.8. Composed early in 1854, the work in its original form was a product of the composer's confident and ebullient early years, dating from a few weeks before the tragic suicide attempt of his friend and idol Robert Schumann brought life's first disillusionment. The fertile and vigorous imagination of the twenty-year-old composer brought forth a work of considerable character and originality, but one which carried too much melodic material and laboured under the weight of a sprawling, overloaded construction. Brahms himself later admitted ruefully that, in the rush to have the Trio published, many improvements which should have been made were left undone. His chance to rectify this came in 1888, when his publisher Fritz Simrock undertook to republish much of the composer's music, inviting him at the same time to make changes if he so desired. Brahms, now with thirty-four years and nearly a hundred opus numbers between him and his youthful trio, accepted, and tackled the work's revision the following summer. The 'revision' -despite the composer's assertion that he 'did not provide it with a wig, but just combed and arranged its hair a little* -amounted in the end almost to recomposition, for little remained from the original, and the total length of the work was reduced by more than a third. Not surprisingly, Brahms' concern had been to streamline the piece, economising on material and simplifying its unwieldy structure, and in this he was completely successful. What makes his achievement all the more impressive, however, is that the exuberance and freshness of the original was in noway diminished, thanks primarily to the discerning selection and retention of the work's most striking material.