TRIOVANBEETHOVEN

In 1828, Franz Schubert wrote to his publisher of his final piano trio: “This work is dedicated to none except those whom it pleases”. Years later Robert Schumann, who famously helped bring Schubert’s music to the attention of the wider world, spoke of a “fiery star in the heavens”. His friend Felix Mendelssohn, who conducted the first performance of Schubert’s great Symphony in C Major, did not have it easy when it came to his own second (and final) piano trio. The work was always overshadowed by his first composition in this form — and unfairly so. Joseph Haydn dedicated a set of trios he composed in London in 1795 to the pianist Rebecca Schroeter, a woman “who I could very easily have married, had I been single”. These included his most famous trio work, the G Major “Gypsy”, with its fiery “Rondo a l’Ongarese”.