Schubert’s Second Piano Trio at Rolling Hills

The Felici Piano Trio, l-r: Rebecca Hang, Steven Vanhauwaert, Brian Schuldt.

REVIEW

The Felici Piano Trio, Second Sundays at Two, Rolling Hills United Methodist Church

BARBARA GLAZER

The recital of Schubert’s Piano Trio No.2 in E-flat major, Op. 100, D 929 (1827) by the acclaimed Felici Trio (pianist, Steven Vanhauwaert; violinist, Rebecca Hang; cellist, Brian Schuldt) in the Classical Crossroads series, was one of technical perfection and exquisite instrumental interplay rarely achieved in performances of this symphonically-scaled masterpiece. It is well worth a repeat viewing on Jim Eninger's excellent video.

Some background

Franz Schubert, by Wilhelm August Rieder, 1825.

Of the great Classical musicians, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven all moved to Vienna, but Schubert was the only one born and raised in that cosmopolitan city. At eight, he began violin studies with his father and shortly after the piano with his brother, whom he rapidly surpassed; at 11 he was a student, and member of the second violins in the prestigious Stadtkonvikt in Vienna, where he was exposed to the music of the masters and particularly enthralled with Beethoven, who had an indelible influence on the young composer's work. (The teenage Schubert even sold his books for the price of admission to Fidelio).

Beethoven and Schubert lived in Vienna at the same time, but seem not to have been personally acquainted. However, it was a relationship that was mutually appreciative, if impersonal: with his nephew Karl, Beethoven enjoyed playing Schubert's Eight Variations on a French Theme, which Schubert dedicated to Beethoven with the flattering inscription "from his Worshipper and Admirer, Franz Schubert"; and a month before Beethoven died he read through 60 of Schubert's lieder manuscripts, shown him by the publisher, Anton Schindler, and with evident enjoyment said "truly, the divine spark dwells in this Schubert.”

Schubert's grave.

In death they are also entwined: Beethoven died on March 26, 1827, and was interred three days later in Währing cemetery in a funeral attended by over 10,000 people. Schubert was one of the 30 torchbearers. On his deathbed, he requested a performance of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 which Schubert acknowledged as the pinnacle of musical art, saying "after this, what is left for us to write?"

He died on November 19, 1828, and two days later his father honored his son's request for burial at Währing cemetery, next to Beethoven—the nearest site was three places apart. Although the funeral was subdued, attended only by family and friends, Schubert's brother arranged a torchlight parade, traditional for composers.

In 1888, Beethoven and Schubert were both reinterred in the Zentralfriedhof (Central cemetery) in Vienna where they now lie side by side (Brahms is nearby). The poet Grillparzer's words are inscribed on Schubert's tombstone: “The Art of Music has buried here a rich possession, but even far fairer hopes"; Beethoven's tombstone is a simple white pyramid shaped monument, inscribed with only his name BEETHOVEN (right), decorated with a gold cross and surrounding laurel wreaths. To visit was very emotional.

The answer to Schubert's question "what is left for us to write?" (after Beethoven) is "plenty!" Schubert was one of the most prolific 19th century composers, and despite his youth wrote music of remarkable maturity. In addition to over 600 lieder, he composed 10 dramatic works, seven complete symphonies plus the famous “Unfinished,” chamber music, solo piano works, six mass settings, and countless incomplete pieces. Little known to the general public during his lifetime, his works through the praise and performances of Schumann and Brahms was rescued from obscurity to become jewels in the classical canon—even the harmonic inspiration for some of the popular work of the Beatles.

The work

Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 has a different sensibility from his lyrical First Piano Trio (not performed in his lifetime). Written eight months after Beethoven's death, it sounds like a homage, with multiple references to that musical Titan, and was first performed at a private party on January 28, 1828. It formed the centerpiece of Schubert's only solo public concert, on March 26, 1828, a date chosen to mark the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death. As Schubert was not a virtuoso pianist (or violinist), he engaged his good friends and renowned solo performers Carl Maria von Brocket (piano), Ignaz Schuppanzigh (violin), and Josef Linke (cello) to play it at both events.

Ignaz Schuppanzigh
(1776-1830).

Schubert did accompany the songs on the program, including Auf Dem Strom, D. 943 (“On the river”) which quotes the funeral march from Beethoven's Eroica. It is a melancholy song of farewell—most believe referencing Beethoven—with the piano triplets' rhythm imitating the constant flow of the river taking one further and further from the shore (and the adored one) and the vocal line expressing sadness, and longing for an irretrievable loss.

Josef Linke (1783-1837)

The 1828 subscription concert was a significant financial and artistic success for Schubert, and enhanced his status beyond that of an admired lieder composer. Shortly after Beethoven's death there had been concerts pairing his and Schubert's works—the first on April 15, 1827, by Schuppanzigh and his chamber ensemble, which perhaps answered the question posed at Beethoven's funeral in Grillparzer's eulogy: "Who shall stand beside him?" This concert included the first public performance of Schubert's Octet in F Major, followed by a transcription of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto.

Schubert's Piano Trio No. 2 references Beethoven's compositional structures in many ways, but these are not just imitated, they are a catalyst to Schubert's own musical vision and unique expressive genius. A brief overview of these structures includes his use of the keys of E-flat major (which Beethoven described as heroic and used for the Eroica, which is quoted in Schubert’s first movement), and C minor—said to be Beethoven's favorite key—in the second movement, the heart and soul of the Trio.

Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872).

Schubert also adopted Beethoven's motivic compositional technique, where a small musical idea or motif (a “cell,” a few notes, a gesture, an octave leap) is used in various ways (repetition, changing pitch or rhythm, inversion, augmentation, fragmentation) to create a cohesive, comprehensible structure.

Schubert was influenced by Beethoven's prolific use of the dactylic rhythmic mode—the dotted long-short-short—and this became a hallmark of his later works (e.g. signifying fate in his String Quartet No.14,”Death and the Maiden”). This gives the E-flat major Trio an intense and often march-like rhythmic energy, especially in the Scherzo and the main theme of the rondo finale.

Very importantly, the Second Piano Trio borrows the “circular” structure much favored by Beethoven, in which thematic material from one movement returns later. Here the C minor main theme from the second movement recurs in the finale, but in its triumphant conclusion transposed to E-flat major, the Trio’s home key—as Beethoven used memorably in the Fifth Symphony, where the C minor first movement's theme returns in the finale, transformed to C Major.

The performance

The Second Piano Trio is a four-movement, monumental, expansive masterpiece of chamber music which balances dramatic, dark intensity with lyric beauty and emotional depth. The first movement, Allegro, is in sonata form, with one of the opening themes based on the theme of the Minuet from Schubert's Piano Sonata No. 18 in G major. The exuberant rising opening arpeggios, a motif used throughout the movement, as played by Steven Vanhauwaert were just gorgeous, and the melodic interplay between the piano, Rebecca Hang’s violin, and Brian Schuldt’s cello was stunning.

Schubert sometimes drew on songs for themes in larger works—and normally his own—but in the Andante con moto second movement he used a Swedish folk song, Se Solen Sjunker (The sun is setting), that deeply impressed him when he first heard it at a private party given by some friends. How Schubert deploys it is a mark of his genius. Its lyrics are not funereal, but a sort of quiet reverie, expressing scenes at day's end: the sun setting, forest creatures at rest, evening stillness, light rain on roofs, etc. But Schubert disregards all this and makes it a tragic, deeply emotional dirge, a funeral march with a relentless piano pulse and a singing melodic line in the cello, superbly played by Schuldt.

Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.

This music has been used in many films, most famously in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (click image right) as a motif underlining scenes of great gravity, tragic loss, and impending doom, as when Lady Lyndon ruefully assesses her unfortunate marriage to the Irish rake Barry, the fortunes of whom are imploding.

This movement is written in an asymmetrical double ternary form: a mouthful for a complex ABA structure where each section has its own subdivisions, but not equal or balanced in length as in a simple or compound ABA form. It's brilliant—the melancholic march section oscillates with an intensely passionate section, and the Felici players earned laurels for their performance.

The Scherzo, marked Allegro moderato, is in a double ternary form—an expansion of the standard ABA structure where each of the three large sections contains a separate, smaller musical form, typically used for scherzos and minuets. The fast, playful tempo of the Scherzo—with the piano dominating in setting a lively and witty tone, beautifully played by Vanhauwaert—introduces the main melodic material and drives the brisk dance-like energy. This contrasts with the lyrical, slower Trio, where Hang and Schuldt delineated to perfection the sudden harmonic shifts.

The sonata rondo fourth movement, Allegro moderato, is fascinating, and has three thematic centers, typical of late Schubert. The first is a "skolie" (Greek for a drinking song) , with a theme of "make hay while the sun shines." Schubert wrote more than one song with this title, and scholars differ as to which he used here, but Alfred (not Albert) Einstein, the well-respected Schubert biographer, identifies it as Skolie, D 306 (1815).

The next section, in duple time (two beats to the bar, with a strong/weak pulse, ideal for marches and dances) has a Hungarian gypsy flavor, while the last comprises two returns of the Andante's Swedish theme, the final one transformed from C minor to the Trio's home key of E-flat major. But this is the revised finale—originally the Swedish theme returned three times, the second in a fugal counterpoint with other material from the movement, which Schubert cut.

A page from Schubert's manuscript of the Piano Trio No. 2.

On the urging of his professional musical friends, especially pianist Carl Maria Brocket and publisher, Heinrich Probst, Schubert worked on several revisions to address their legitimate concerns that the fourth movement was too long (20 minutes), too repetitive, too “sprawling"—with highly complex harmonic detours and some experimental counterpoint (using the Swedish theme) not well integrated into the music. From a publisher's point of view, the Trio in its original form was not marketable.

Schubert's death mask.

By November 1828, a few weeks before he died, Schubert completed the final revision, and sent it to Probst with the instructions that it be published, and played, exactly as now revised. To reduce the finale’s length and make it a more coherent, Schubert made significant and extended cuts to the development section, removed the exposition repeat, altered the used of the Andante’s Swedish theme, and added some bridge material between passages to make the movement structurally more sound.

Surprisingly, despite Schubert's wishes, in the late 1860s Brahms published the uncut version of the Second Piano Trio, and the relatively recent re-publication in 1975 encouraged a cottage industry of uncut performances, even by the estimable Andras Schiff, who in his magnificent series on Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas cautions performers to adhere strictly to the composer's wishes—even to the daunting tempi of the Hammerklavier Sonata.

While earlier versions of a piece of music or the under-painting of a famous artwork are of academic interest, it's the finished canvas of a Leonardo, the final version of a Schubert—not the under-paintings, nor, say, any of Beethoven’s earlier tries before his final glorious version of the Fifth Symphony—that have pride of place, and for this I thank the Felici for playing the version of the E-flat major Piano Trio that Schubert stipulated, which they performed superbly. 

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Second Sundays at Two, Rolling Hills United Methodist Reform Church, Sunday, April 12, 2026, 2:00 p.m.

Images: The performance: Artists' website, Classical Crossroads, Inc.; Historical portraits and composer graves: Wikimedia Commons; Schubert manuscript: www.omifacsimiles.com/.