Franz Schubert: Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major, D.898

Program note written for the San Francisco Symphony.

In the last full year of his life, at the young age of 30 and suffering from syphilis, Franz Schubert wrote a torrent of transcendental works. We can guess at its impetus: a heightened sense of mortality, both from his own progressing illness and from the death in 1827 of his greatest musical hero, Ludwig van Beethoven. Schubert marched as a torchbearer in Beethoven’s funeral procession where he heard a eulogy calling for a successor to emerge. As the musicologist Christopher Gibbs argues, Schubert likely recognized that many leading musicians of the day saw him as the natural heir to Beethoven’s musical legacy. His works from this time show an eye towards posterity: in Gibbs’s words, “he was now writing essentially for himself—and for the future.”

In Schubert’s lifetime, much of his music was only ever performed at Schubertiads, musical house parties centered around Schubert and his music. Schubertiads were a sustaining pillar of Schubert’s life and career, so it is no accident that he wrote most of his great works in the intimate genres of art song and chamber music (literally: living-room music). Though he may have written these works for a small audience of friends, many are cosmic in scope and evoke universal human themes, particularly those written towards the end of his life.

The manuscript of the B-flat major trio is lost, but we know that Schubert wrote all of his piano trio music in his final two years. Unlike the E-flat major trio, he did not promote the B-flat publicly and it was not published until 1836. It received its first performance in January 1828, just 10 months before Schubert’s death, at a gathering hosted by his lifelong friend, Joseph von Spaun to celebrate von Spaun’s engagement. Unbeknownst to the revelers, this party was to be the last Schubertiad of Schubert’s life.

The Music

When composer and critic Robert Schumann heard the B-flat trio for the first time, he wrote, “the troubles of our human existence disappear and all the world is fresh and bright again.” It is hard to reconcile the joyfulness of this trio with the misery that Schubert experienced while writing it. The 20th-century biographer Alfred Einstein identified a reference to Schubert’s drinking song “Skolie” in the trio’s final movement. The song’s lyrics capture this incongruity: “In the morning beams of May, let us enjoy the flower of life before its scent fades! As quickly as joy kisses us, death beckons us and it flies away.” We are reminded to admire the fleeting beauty of things that must die, a beauty perhaps inherent in mortality and in the temporal art of music. The song then asks “Should we be afraid of death?” It concludes “anyone who drinks this can laugh at death’s threats,” but any reassuring laughter must co-exist with the foreboding question that preceded it. This dichotomy between joy and despair, light and dark, pervades Schubert’s music from his final year. Schubert’s carefree moments strike us so powerfully because their effervescent beauty exists alongside the darker truths of human existence.

The trio begins blithely with a playful melody in the strings accompanied by vivacious chords and encouraging interjections in the piano. By the end of the first phrase, Schubert gives us a glimpse of wistfulness—we are suspended for the briefest moment at the high point of the violin’s melody and then drawn warmly back into the jovial conversation between the instruments. The second theme enters through the plaintive voice of the cello, hinting at what is to come in the second movement. Schubert continues developing these themes, often spinning us off into unknown lands through key changes. Towards the end of the movement, the syncopated accompaniment pattern suddenly becomes urgent and brings the whole group to a stop. The music reenters with a pleading moment in the strings and then returns to the prevailing blithe mood to finish the movement in high spirits.

An achingly beautiful cello melody begins the second movement. Floating and soaring, the violin and cello exchange this melody with gentle piano accompaniment until a troubled, minor-key middle section takes over. The clouds pass quickly, however, and we once again find ourselves amid the beauty of the main theme until the movement winds down with a gentle exhalation. In the third movement, Schubert gives us not one, but two dances: the ländler and the waltz. We can imagine ourselves at a Schubertiad or other 19th-century gathering. In the rondo form of the fourth movement, we meet an amiable theme that returns over and over with episodic flights of fancy in between. This theme is where Einstein identified the song “Skolie.” We can certainly hear the “delight” of the song’s lyrics. As we are caught up in the conversation between the instruments, time is once again suspended, but even these “heavenly lengths,” as Robert Schumann quipped of Schubert’s music, must finally come to an end.