Notes for: August 1, 2023
By the time Schubert wrote the String Trio in B Flat, D. 471, he was near the end of an unhappy period in his life. Three years earlier, at the age of 16, he had finished his education at the Imperial and Royal City Seminary, returned to live in his family’s overcrowded home, and begun teaching at his father’s school – stressful arrangements for a young man who wanted only to live independently with his friends and spend all his time writing music. He avoided teaching as much as he could, instead spending much of his time at his desk composing and whipping any boy who interrupted him. Asked to describe his method of composing, he said simply, “When I have finished one piece I begin another.”
Despite being shackled to a job he hated, over the next three years he wrote an astonishing amount of music – what one biographer called “an outburst of composition without parallel in the history of music.” His range was tremendous. He wrote hundreds of lieder, including his masterpieces “Gretchen am Spinnrade” and “Erlkönig,” plus many string quartets, four symphonies, several masses, and innumerable smaller pieces. He also tried his hand at opera, which he hoped would enable him to support himself. But then and for the rest of his short life he was unable to earn a living as a composer, and many of his greatest works were not heard publicly until long after his death.
Schubert’s Vienna was a Classical mecca, awash in the music of Haydn and Mozart. Schubert’s unique musical personality had already begun to emerge in his masterful songs, but the great instrumental works that helped define Romanticism were still in the future. The String Trio in B Flat, D. 471, written in September 1816, shows that the Vienna of his youth remained a significant influence. The String Trio is a Classical delight. Like several of his other instrumental compositions, it is unfinished: a second movement peters out after 30-some measures. But the movement that remains sparkles. It is written in the satisfying symmetry of sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation. The main themes of the Trio’s exposition are lyrical and light, with a playful moment when forte scales descend during the second theme. In the development, which is based almost entirely on the last few notes of the exposition, Schubert takes the music through colorful key changes and adds a touch of soberness with a brief minor-key episode, before the recapitulation restores the Trio’s melodic charm and good humor.
That fall Schubert finally broke away, moving out of his father’s house and beginning an independent life at the center of a bohemian circle of devoted friends.