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Smetana Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 15 (1855)
Mozart Piano Quartet No 2 in E Flat Major, KV 493 (1786)
Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884) was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style that became closely identified with his people's aspirations to a cultural and political "revival." He has been regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music. In 1844, at the age of twenty, Smetana was appointed as music teacher to the five children of Count Leopold Thun in Prague. Smetana himself was virtually self-taught apart from violin and piano lessons as a child, and this was his first job. He had already composed a large number of pieces, mostly dances, and wrote in his diary: ‘By the grace of God, and with his help, I will one day be a Liszt in technique and a Mozart in composition.’ In 1845 he at last had the opportunity to correct his ignorance of music theory when he was accepted as a composition pupil by Joseph Proksch, a leading music teacher in Prague. Smetana worked hard and, from a grounding in harmony and counterpoint, went on to produce at great speed a series of increasingly sophisticated compositions, culminating in a Piano Sonata in G minor, composed in 1846. The last movement of this work, a ferocious two-against-three tarantella, was to form the basis, nine years later, for the finale of the Piano Trio in G minor.
The prime inspiration for the Piano Trio was personal tragedy. After leaving Proksch’s music school, Smetana had begun to establish himself as a professional musician and teacher, opening his own music school in Prague. His modest income at last enabled him to marry his beloved Katerina in 1849, and they lived happily together and had three daughters over the next few years. The eldest, Bedriska (known as Fritzi), born in 1851, soon showed signs of exceptional gifts. Katerina described in her diary taking the little girl, aged four, to a concert in February 1855 at which Smetana conducted his Triumph Symphony (his first appearance as a conductor in public): ‘This concert, given by her father, was to be Bedriska’s first and last. How quietly and cheerfully she sat through the whole long concert … When her father came on to the stage to conduct the symphony, she stood up to see him, and she remained standing, listening attentively.’ The previous year, the Smetanas had already lost one daughter to tuberculosis. And now, eight months after that concert, Bedriska died from scarlet fever. Smetana wrote in his diary: ‘Nothing can replace Fritzi, the angel whom death has stolen from us.’ His reaction to the loss was to throw himself into his music, producing at the age of thirty-one the first work to reveal his full power as a composer, the Piano Trio in G minor. It may not be so directly autobiographical as his late string quartet ‘From my Life’, but Smetana himself acknowledged the inspiration of the Trio in a letter: “The loss of my eldest daughter, that extraordinarily gifted child, inspired me to write the Trio in G minor in 1855.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Born in Salzburg, in the Holy Roman Empire, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, Mozart was engaged as a musician at the Salzburg court but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in Vienna, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his early death at the age of 35. The circumstances of his death have been much mythologized.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s piano quartets do not make any reference to any tradition; Mozart was among the first to explore the genre. He did not see the piano quartet in the same light as a string quartet with one instrument being replaced, but rather as a kind of sonata enriched with additional voices. The Piano Quartet was written with another idea in mind, beginning with a triumphant principal theme. This gracious theme plays a minor role in the first movement: in both the development and the coda the secondary theme prevails. The second movement is notable for the refined harmony and the capricious ornamental figurations of the piano. The finale opens with a deceptively simple theme, but the subsequent development is so intense that the piece grows like the finale of a piano concerto.