![]() It assured Beethoven a star role on his own instrument. The combination of violin, cello and piano was a favourite with amateurs, promising healthy sales. Beethoven had first ventured a piano trio in 1791, and it was no accident that he chose the medium to announce himself to the wider musical world. He began work on No 2 in 1793, and on No 3 in 1794, while sketches for No 1 almost certainly date back to the Bonn years. And if the cello sometimes doubles the keyboard bass, as it rarely does in Beethoven’s later trios, it often asserts its individuality in a way that Mozart only intermittently and Haydn almost never allowed.īeethoven seems to have laboured long on the trios, revising them extensively before publication. Each of the trios is in four movements rather than the two or three expected in chamber music with piano: these are not elevated divertissements, but symphonies for three instruments. And with their largely emancipated string parts, their weighty, extended sonata structures and their intensity of musical dialectic, the three works must have seemed like a headlong assault on the traditional notion of the piano trio as a small-scale domestic genre. The Prince held regular private soirées at which Beethoven would astonish the company with his brilliant keyboard improvisations and it was at one of these soirées that he chose to introduce his first important Viennese compositions, the set of three piano trios which he published by subscription in August 1795 with a dedication to Lichnowsky.īeethoven was determined to impress and challenge the Viennese musical elite with this first published opus. Soon after his arrival he became a house guest of Prince Karl Lichnowsky, a talented amateur pianist who kept his own string quartet. For all their ‘despairing frivolity’ (to quote A J P Taylor), the fin de siècle Viennese aristocracy was the most musically enlightened in Europe and with the help of aristocratic contacts, the fiery sans-culotte quickly made his mark in the city’s salons. His plan was to study composition with Haydn, by now an international celebrity, before conquering the city as a composer-performer. In early November 1792 the twenty-one-year-old Beethoven left his native Bonn for Vienna, then vying with London as Europe’s musical capital. ![]()
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