Trio in B flat Major for Piano, Clarinet (or Violin), and Cello, Op. 11

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

When 21-year-old Beethoven came to Vienna, he knew what he needed to do to succeed. He took lessons from Haydn, Salieri, and Albrechtsberger to refine his compositional skills. He used his piano virtuosity to impress audiences, especially the wealthy aristocrats who rewarded talent with patronage. He also engaged in competitions with rivals, such as Joseph Gelinek, one of Vienna’s favorite pianists. Gelinek boasted to a friend that he would defeat the upstart Beethoven, but after the competition took place, he reported a different view of his opponent: “Ah, he is not a man, he is a devil! He will play me and all of us to death. And how he improvises!”

Beethoven could take any musical theme that might be suggested and immediately improvise a series of variations on the theme. Naturally he could achieve even finer results when he took his time to plan and revise a set of variations. He used this musical form in over sixty of his works.

The trio Beethoven published in 1798 as his Opus 11 includes a theme and variations in the final movement. The theme was a tune the Viennese liked to hum or whistle, a “Gassenhauer” or street song, from which Opus 11 is sometimes called the “Gassenhauer Trio.” We have conflicting reports about who suggested this theme to Beethoven. Was it Domenico Artaria, the music publisher? Or did the idea come from Franz Joseph Bähr, the clarinetist with whom Beethoven performed a number of his works? In any case, Beethoven did not know at first that the Viennese had picked up this tune from a 1797 opera by Joseph Weigl. Upon discovering this when the trio was finished, Beethoven felt he had been duped. Later he thought he might write a new final movement for the trio and publish the theme and variations separately. But he never did. There is, however, more to the story of the Opus 11 trio, and it involves another competition. Daniel Steibelt, a musician five years older than Beethoven, had earned a great reputation in Paris. In 1800, he came to Vienna to take the city by storm. Count Fries hosted an event at which Beethoven and Steibelt were to compete as pianists and composers. Beethoven and two collaborators performed his Opus 11 trio – clearly he must have been proud of it. Steibelt’s contribution was one of his own quintets and a piano improvisation featuring his trademark tremolo effects. Eight days later, Count Fries hosted the second phase of the contest. This time Steibelt led off with another quintet, after which he tweaked Beethoven’s nose by “improvising” on the theme Beethoven had used in his trio variations. Convinced that Steibelt had prepared this music and wasn’t improvising at all, Beethoven angrily headed for the piano. Along the way, he picked up the cello part from Steibelt’s quintet and set it upside down on the music stand. Then he plunked out a theme from Steibelt’s piece with one finger and proceeded to show what the most dazzling improviser in the world could do. Without waiting for the end, Steibelt chose to sneak out and leave Vienna, hoping never to be in the same room with Beethoven again.

Waltz and Celebration from Billy the Kid for Cello and Piano

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

Born to Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire, Aaron Copland grew up in a largely Irish neighborhood in Brooklyn. He celebrated his bar mitzvah but drifted away from synagogue life and became an agnostic, never hiding his heritage but not emphasizing it either. Later in life, his unmistakably Jewish friend Leonard Bernstein told him jokingly, “Aaron, you’re not a real Jew.” Copland was more eager to help America develop its own musical voice in the classical tradition than to express his ethnic identity in music.

He became known to fellow musicians as “the dean of American composers.” His desire to create recognizably American music was most obviously fulfilled by a number of works in a populist style, including the ballets Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944) and the film music for The Red Pony (1949). But one of his greatest hits had come already in 1938, the ballet Billy the Kid.

With a partly fictionalized Billy the Kid providing a personal focus, the ballet uses tunes from cowboy songs to evoke the atmosphere of the Wild West. There are eight scenes in all; the music transcribed for cello and piano comes from two of them. In the Waltz, Billy dances with an imaginary sweetheart, recognized by the audience as the same dancer who in an earlier scene was the mother Billy lost in his youth. The Celebration portrays the crudely jubilant reaction of the townspeople when Outlaw Billy is captured.

Piano Quintet in E-Flat Major, Op. 44 (1842)

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

To get a quick picture of Schumann as a creative musician, think “binge composer.” During the 1830s, he focused heavily on the piano. Most of his major works for solo piano come from that decade: Carnaval, Fantasie in C, Scenes from Childhood, Kreisleriana, and many others. In 1840, the year of his marriage to Clara Wieck, he concentrated mainly on pieces for voice and piano, and the result was 138 songs. The following year he shifted his attention to orchestral works such as symphonies, an “Overture, Scherzo, and Finale,” and a fantasy for piano and orchestra. Then came 1842, Schumann’s chamber music year. After careful study of string quartets by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, he produced three of his own, followed by his piano quintet and his piano quartet, both in E-flat major.

Binge composing can also be seen in his on-again, off-again approach to creative work. He might go weeks without composing, but when his mind was churning with musical ideas, he worked intensely, sometimes to the detriment of his all too fragile state of mind. At such times Clara knew better than to disturb him by practicing her piano. In one burst of activity, he sketched the piano quintet in five days and completed it in another two weeks. Then he subjected it to an extensive process of revision before publishing it. He found the effort taxing, but one would never guess it from the unflagging excellence of the music.

The brilliant keyboard part was written for Clara, who had already achieved fame as a concert pianist and recitalist. She was to play in the first performance of the quintet, which Schumann arranged to take place in a private gathering, but when the day arrived, Clara was ill. Felix Mendelssohn substituted for her at the piano by sight-reading the score despite its “fiendish” difficulty.

Schumann was also a perceptive music critic. Reviewing the works of other composers gave him a chance to state his musical ideals, and composing his own works gave him a chance to strive for those ideals himself. For example, in his review of Chopin’s second piano sonata in four movements, he noted that it was odd of Chopin to call the piece a sonata, “for he has simply harnessed together four of his maddest children,” using the title “sonata” as an excuse to combine them. Schumann wanted to see a greater unity binding the movements together. In his piano quintet, he found ways of achieving that sense of unity. One of the most striking is the return of the opening theme of the first movement toward the end of the last movement. Schumann the critic had pointed out in a different review that simply repeating a theme to unify movements can seem contrived and unimaginative; a composer has to find something worthwhile to do with a theme if he brings it back. In the finale of his quintet, Schumann came up with the idea of making the opening themes of the first and last movements the subjects of a double fugue. It not only helps to bring the final movement to a grand conclusion, but it also pulls the entire composition together.