Beethoven: String Trios, Op. 3 & Op. 9, Nos. 1-3

During the last decade of the eighteenth century, Ludwig van Beethoven, then in his 20's, channelled much of his creative energy into the composition of chamber music. Many of these works were designed for certainly unusual, if not categorically bizarre, combinations of instruments. As a result, most of these early chamber works are rarely heard and represent, along with the lieder, the least known aspect of Beethoven's oeuvre.

What about those "'weird' pieces, the Trio in C, Op. 87, and the Variations on "La ci darem la mano'" for two oboes and English horn, for example? Those two compositions, written in the mid-1790's. were probably designed specifically for the Teimer brothers who ranked among Europe's finest wind players at the time. Particular pieces for particular players--not an uncornmon motive for these early chamber works. That Beethoven did not consider the instrumentation to be fixed like stars in the heavens is indicated by his authorization of transcriptions of the C Major Trio for two violins and viola and also for piano and violin, retitled Sonata, though in this last incarnation it is not included in the canon of the Violin Sonatas.

Chamber music in Vienna, in fact throughout Europe, was in a state of flux in the 1790's. The Trio Sonata so dear to Bach, Handel, and Corelli three quarters of a century before was now an extinct animal, a musical woolly mammoth. So, too, had the figured basso continuo disappeared, replaced by fully written out, independent keyboard parts or done away with altogether. Haydn and Mozart, and to a certain degree Boccherini, had developed the string quartet into an established art form--an enduring one at that, but the other chamber music forms, at least as far as instrumentation was concerned, were far from settled. Always a gallant experimenter and certainly influenced by the needs of specific musicians, Beethoven played an important role in the determination of the instrumental combinations that were to become 'standard''--in the final analysis the string quartet and the so-called piano trio (piano, violin, and 'cello). Beethoven, of course, was not the sole arbiter, but the influence of his compositions was weighty and reinforced the standardizing trend begun, in essence, by Haydn and Mozart with the publication of their quartets and piano trios.