Classical Music | Music for Trio

Recorded on 09/26/2006, uploaded on 01/14/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Heading into the later decades of the 19^th century, opera dominated French musical life to the point of stifling outlets for other forms of music and making it difficult for young composers to attract attention to their own works. Thus, in 1871, Camille Saint-Saëns cofounded the Société Nationale de Musique with the purpose of promoting new French music and increasing the presence of chamber and symphonic music in French culture. With this new outlet open to emerging composers, a younger generation helped reshape the direction of French music. One such composer and piece to benefit from the Société Nationale was Saint-Saëns’s friend and former pupil, Gabriel Fauré and his First Piano Quartet.

The quartet was begun in the summer of 1876, not long before his engagement to Marieanne Viardot, daughter of the famous singer Pauline Viardot, after five years of courtship. This hopeful and optimistic time perhaps factors into the quartet’s generally blissful temperament, despite its minor key signature. However, the engagement was short lived, and the composer’s heart was broken when Marieanne broke it off after only four months, which likely influenced the dejected tone of the third movement Adagio. The quartet was finished in 1879. It received its premiere at the Société Nationale on February 14, 1880 with Fauré at the piano. The original finale was not well received. Submitting to outside opinion, Fauré revised the movement, and the original has since been lost.

Cast in the traditional four-movement design, Fauré’s First Piano Quartet is a brilliant display of his understanding of Classical structure. The first movement is a well-conceived sonata movement and, in its C minor tonality, bears virtually no resemblance to the stormy incarnations of the key one so easily associates with Beethoven. Instead, a twilight glow beams from the music. The Scherzo and Trio second movement is a rare virtuosic piece from Fauré’s pen as the composer typically avoided ostentatious instrumental displays. As mentioned before, the Adagio third movement is pervaded by an immense sadness and resignation. Yet, there is restraint in the composer’s outpourings and the emotionalism of the movement never breaks its conventional ternary design. The quick-paced finale begins in the tonic of C minor, with a secondary idea in E-flat major, but ultimately yields to the major modality and comes to a brilliant close in C major.      Joseph DuBose

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Piano Quartet in c minor, Op. 15          Gabriel Fauré

1. Allegro molto moderato; 2. Scherzo; 3. Adagio; 4. Allegro molto

Fauré wrote six major chamber music pieces over the course of his compositional career including a piano trio, a string quartet, two piano quintets and two piano quartets.  This piano quartet-opus 15 from 1879-is the earliest of those compositions and is arguably the most popular of the six. 

Opus 15 opens with a unison string statement of a vigorous principal theme that is transformed into a tender melody.  The viola introduces a secondary theme that is imitated by the other instruments.  Fauré alternates between the two themes with a flowing piano part throughout.  The movement ends with a conventional recapitulation and coda.

The Scherzo opens with the piano introducing the melody in 6/8 meter surrounded by pizzicato chords from the strings.  The tune moves to the string players who offer it in a 2/4 meter variation.  A playful rhythm is the result of continued meter shifts and the occasional superimposition of the theme in one meter against the same theme in a second meter.  A contrasting Trio section introduces a new melody primarily given to the strings.  The movement ends by returning to the Scherzo's first melody.

The Adagio movement is a personal expression of grief portraying great yearning and melancholy.  In A-B-A form, both themes are structured around rising scale fragments.  The return to the A theme offers a more elaborate piano part.

The finale, marked Allegro molto, uses a similar rising scale theme as the Adagio with the same rhythmic pattern introduced in the first movement, thereby giving unity to the quartet as a whole.  After an energetic opening subject, the second more song-like theme is introduced by the viola, before being taken up by the other players.  The development section builds to an impassioned climax.  A recapitulation of the first motive of the movement starts quietly and leads to a brilliant conclusion.     Flatiron Trio

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.