Schubert completed his two piano trios between November 1827 and November 1828, the last year of his life. Despite his ill health, he still managed to write an incredible amount of compositions, and one masterpiece after the other flowed from his pen. Apart from the trios, within a few months’ time he wrote the great Symphony in C, the three last piano sonatas, the string quintet, the Lieder cycle Schwanengesang, the Fantasie for piano duet and the Mass in E flat.
Partially due to his awareness of his position as Vienna’s most prominent living composer, Schubert worked with confidence. His distinguished fellow citizen, Beethoven, had died on March 26, 1827; and Schubert had paid his respects to him by acting as torch-bearer at his funeral. After receiving a couple of requests in February 1828 from the music publishers Schott from Mainz and Probst from Leipzig to write some new works, Schubert happily offered them a series of new and substantial compositions two months later. However, the reactions must have disappointed him. Apart from his Piano Trio in E flat, which was purchased by Probst, Schubert was not able to get his most recent works printed. His publishers had been expecting music destined for performance within a domestic environment: i.e. Lieder, short piano pieces, piano duets, volumes of dances, vocal ensembles, the kind of composition with which Schubert had earned his livelihood for years as a freelancer. As these had mainly comprised works of a modest stature, only an intimate circle of friends knew that Schubert was composing operas, symphonies, chamber music and major sonatas behind closed doors. Being out from under Beethoven’s shadow, at last, must have given Schubert a feeling of liberation. The choice of genre in his later works prove that he felt freer to tread in the footsteps of his predecessor.
Stylistically speaking, Schubert continued to follow his own path, which he had discovered after much soul-searching. His early works are clearly based on Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. In his early years, Schubert once remarked with a sigh to his good friend, Josef von Spaun: “I hope to achieve something, but what can one really do after Beethoven?” He received an answer to that question from an unexpected quarter. During the autumn of 1817, Rossini presented his opera Tancredi in Vienna. Schubert went to the performance and was impressed by the expansive phrases of Rossini’s melodies. Shortly thereafter, he wrote his overtures in the Italian style and his Symphony No. 6. In these, he introduced the expansively drawn-out themes which would become his trademark and which Schumann praised in the following winged words: “…heavenly passages”. In other matters too, Schubert managed to distinguish himself. In genres where other composers, in keeping with the accepted norms, went for the grand gesture, he employed a remarkably subdued, contemplative tone, as we hear in his Unfinished Symphony, for instance. He also found his own particular sound in the elaboration of his harmonies. The adventurous spirit with which he explored various tangents while modulating between the keys was original for his time and broke new ground.
Schubert wrote his Piano Trio in E flat at the end of 1827 for Ignaz Schuppanzigh. By that time, the violinist had been considered an inspiring musical presence in Vienna for decades. Beethoven had respected him deeply, ever since the violinist had given him advice in his Piano Trios, Op. 1. Beethoven composed almost all his string quartets and later piano trios for Schuppanzigh’s regular quartet and trio. And Schubert had also completed a number of commissions for the violinist: his quartet Der Tod und das Mädchen, for instance, had been written at the latter’s request. The première of the Piano Trio took place privately on December 26, 1827. The work received a second performance during the only publicly accessible Schubertiade that we know of during Schubert’s lifetime. This historic concert was held on March 26, 1828, exactly one year following Beethoven’s demise, in the Musikalische Abendunterhaltungen series of the “Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde”, which was still in existence. Apart from the Trio, the audience in the sold-out small hall of the house “Zum roten Igel” was treated to a quartet movement, a work for male choir and seven Lieder. The new Trio was received by the audience with great acclaim. Unfortunately, the concert did not receive any press: all attention was focused on the sensational violinist, Niccolò Paganini, who was making his Viennese début that same week. As mentioned above, Schubert sold the Trio to the publisher Probst, who published the work in October 1828.
The first movement is notable for its lyrical and unusually extensively drawn-out themes. The second movement, Andante con moto, was inspired by a Swedish folk song, “Se solen sjunker” (= the sun has set), which Schubert had heard sung by the Swedish tenor, Isak Albert Berg. Using motifs from this folk song, he created a memorable and dramatic ballade. The scherzo begins with a precise round, which gradually loses its strict form. In the finale, a rondo in a dancing 6/8 beat, Schubert twice quotes the theme from the Andante, modulating to the major key at the end, in which – according to a commentator – the heavens appear to open up before our eyes.
Very little is known about the history of the development of the Piano Trio in B flat. It first appeared in print in 1836, published by the publishing house of Anton Diabelli. Following this event, Schumann wrote a highly enthusiastic review for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik: this important article contributed to the appreciation of Schubert as a serious composer, a process which was to take some time. The first movement of the Trio opens with a powerful martial theme, which is later quoted in imaginative fashion in pianissimo octaves in the piano, subtly accompanied by pizzicati in the cello. The expressive Andante once again gives evidence of Schubert’s gift for the creation of apparently endless, meandering melodies. The Scherzo is an expansive homage to the Ländler. In the finale, Schubert demonstrates – as in the Trio in E flat – his skills in a virtuoso and imaginatively designed rondo. Clearly, Schubert’s contemporaries missed out on a lot.

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