Brahms: Piano Trios Nos. 1 And 2

Description

Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, Op. 8 (revised version)Piano Trio No. 2 in C Major, Op. 87Johannes Brahms was born on 7th May 1833 in the Gängeviertel district of Hamburg, the son of a double-bass player and his wife, a seamstress seventeen years her husband's senior. It was intended that the boy should follow his father's trade and to this end he was taught the violin and cello, but his interest in the piano prevailed, enabling him to supplement the family income by playing in dockside taverns, while taking valuable lessons from Eduard Marxsen.In 1853 Brahms embarked on a concert tour with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi, during the course of which he visited Liszt in Weimar, to no effect, and struck up a friendship with the violinist Joseph Joachim, through whose agency he met the Schumanns, established now in Düsseldorf. The connection was an important one. Schumann was impressed enough by the compositions of his own Brahms played to him to hail him as the long-awaited successor to Beethoven. Schumann's subsequent break-down in February 1854 and ensuing insanity brought Brahms back to Düsseldorf to help Clara Schumann and her young family. The relationship with Clara Schumann, one of the most distinguished pianists of the time, lasted until her death in 1896.It was not until 1862, after a happy period that had brought him a temporary position at the court of Detmold as a conductor and piano teacher, that Brahms visited Vienna, giving concerts there and meeting the important critic Eduard Hanslick, who was to prove a doughty champion, pitting Brahms against Wagner and Liszt as a composer of abstract music, as-opposed to the music-drama of Wagner and the symphonic poems of Liszt, with their extra-musical associations. Brahms finally took up permanent residence in Vienna in 1869, greeted by many as the real successor to Beethoven, particularly after his first symphony, and winning a similar position in popular esteem and similar tolerance for his notorious lack of tact. He died in 1897.After spending the Christmas of 1853 with his parents in Hamburg, Brahms travelled to Hanover, where Joachim was employed, and found there the peace to set to work on a new composition, the first of his three piano trios. The manuscript of the trio bears the words \Hannover. Januar 54. Kreisler jun., the last a reference to the nickname of Brahms in the Schumann circle, derived from the Kapellmeister of that name in the writing of E.T.A. Hoffmann. The work was first performed in New York, with the pianist William Mason, a pupil of Liszt, and in this original version has much to recommend it. In the summer of 1889 Brahms responded to an invitation from his publisher Simrock to revise any he cared to of his earlier compositions with a complete revision and recasting of this first piano trio, which he described in a letter to Clara Schumann as Opus 108 rather than Opus 8, its original numbering. The r