Notes for: July 23, 2019
Mendelssohn occupied a singular place in the musical life of his time. He was renowned not just for his music and his influence, but also for his warm personality and his remarkable capacity for friendship; he was a favorite of everyone from fellow musicians to Queen Victoria. Mendelssohn’s ideas had a great impact. As director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, he promoted the performances both of German masterworks and worthy new compositions. Energetic in his pursuit of new works, he became what Peter Mercer-Taylor calls “north Germany’s leading arbiter of musical taste.”
Schumann called Felix’s Piano Trio in D Minor, written in the summer of 1839, “the master trio of our age” and added, “he has raised himself so high that we can indeed say he is the Mozart of the 19th century.” Interestingly, when Mendelssohn played a draft of the Trio for his friend Ferdinand Hiller, Hiller commented that the piano part was too old-fashioned and urged Mendelssohn to make it more virtuosic, in the modern manner of Chopin and Liszt. Mendelssohn at first was reluctant. “Do you think that would make the thing any better?” he argued. “The piece would be the same, and so it may remain as it is.” Eventually, though, Hiller convinced Mendelssohn to make significant changes to the first movement, adding brilliance and a Romantic sensibility to the Trio’s graceful Classical proportions.
The Piano Trio is notable for its craftsmanship, Classical form, abundance of memorable melodies, and the brilliance of its piano writing. Two wonderfully lyrical themes open the sonata-form first movement, each introduced by the cello. Throughout the exposition, the cello and violin trade these melodies and develop them harmonically and contrapuntally, while the piano rumbles agitatedly underneath or wraps the melodies in sparkling figurations. That pattern continues in the development section and the recapitulation, at the end of which the music rises to a peak of passionate virtuosity. In a dramatic change of mood, the second movement begins with a Mendelssohn trademark: a gentle Song without Words introduced by the piano, followed by a duet between the violin and the cello, a contrasting, minor-key middle section, and a return to the enchantment of the opening. The third movement, an effervescent Scherzo, is another trademark – the type of mercurial, perpetual-motion romp that Mendelssohn invented in his Octet. The Piano Trio comes to a glorious end in a rhythmic Finale that once more combines virtuosic and lyrical elements. Mendelssohn’s biographer, R. Larry Todd, aptly describes this last movement as summarizing the entire composition, incorporating “the agitated brooding of the first, subdued introspection of the second and playful frivolity of the third...before reconciling them in the celebratory D-major ending.”