Trio in G minor for flute, cello and piano, Op.63
Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Schäfers Klage: Andante espressivo
Finale: Allegro
Carl Maria von Weber was a cousin of Constanze Weber, Mozart’s wife, and was raised from an early age to emulate his great relative-by-marriage. His eccentric father Franz Anton, sometime soldier, actor-manager, viola-player and lithographer, brought him up as a child-performer in a theatrical and highly unstable atmosphere. The young Weber studied with Michael Haydn at Salzburg and in the first decade of the 19th Century, as the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars swept back and forth across the German states, he moved from city to city performing concerts, teaching, writing operas, and seeking a stable income wherever it could be found. His father was a constant source of worry, and a stint as Private Secretary to Duke Ludwig of Württemberg ended in Weber’s arrest when the old man, who seems increasingly to have resembled a character out of E.T.A. Hoffmann, involved his son in a badly-timed horse-dealing swindle. Driven into exile, he continued his concert tours, finally gaining a settled position as kapellmeister at the German Opera in Prague in 1813, followed by an appointment to the Dresden opera in 1817. It was here, in mid-1818 that he began work on his masterpiece "Der Freischütz" and, the following summer, completed this Trio in G minor for Flute, Cello and Piano.
Chamber music was the bread-and-butter work of most early-19th century composers, but clearly, Weber’s upbringing and career was far from conventional and this Trio is one of only four chamber works in his entire output. Weber’s instincts were theatrical and Romantic, and the qualities that made him a great composer of opera and concertos are exactly those that explain why he wrote so little chamber music. High drama, an aptitude for brilliant display and a vivid sense of instrumental colour were not the stuff of domestic music in the early 19th century, and Weber never really seems to have felt entirely comfortable with classical structures. Atmosphere and colour were his strengths, and so in the Trio, ambitious, classically structured outer movements frame a scherzo and an andante that are effectively salon miniatures – albeit delightful ones. The Allegro moderato opens in a gloomy Romantic twilight, Weber’s sense of instrumental colour well to the fore in his use of the flute’s husky lower register and the cello’s capacity for melancholic song. It grows into one of his longest and most effectively sustained sonata structures. Beginning as a stamping scherzo in the gruffest Beethoven manner, the second movement rapidly turns into a whirling salon waltz, very like the famous "Invitation to the Dance" that Weber was to write immediately afterwards. The slow movement has the romantic title "Shepherd’s Lament" but is a gentle pastorale, a sunlit landscape over which thunder clouds gather only after more than half of this brief movement has elapsed. It’s not surprising to discover that, in its earliest version, it predates the rest of the Trio by six years. In the finale, a Rondo, Weber once again brings off an extended classical structure, but the mood here is distinctly operatic, with a recitative-like opening and jaunty passages in which the cello and flute display their coloratura. As in the first movement, the form is classical but the content is all Weber. The Trio was published in 1820 in Berlin, where, the following June, the triumphant premiere of "Der Freischütz" would establish Weber’s brand of romanticism as one of the most far-reaching influences in 19th century music.
R.G. Bratby 2001
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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