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At the time Beethoven made his official debut as a composer with his three trios Op.1, in 1795, the piano trio was the most popular form of domestic chamber music-making. Haydn was still very much active in the same field, though the majority of his late trios were composed during the years he spent in London. Whereas Haydn's trio textures grow out of the sonority of the piano, Beethoven's treat the players much more as equal participants. His Op.1 Trios are conceived on an unprecedentedly large scale, expanding the traditional two- or three-movement format of chamber music with piano to four movements. In the first two works, moreover, the additional movement is not a minuet, but a dynamic scherzo. Of Beethoven's subsequent piano trios only the comparatively lightweight Op.11 (originally scored with clarinet in place of a violin) and the Ghost Op.70 No.1 retain the old-fashioned three-movement design.
The most dramatic of the Op.1 trios is the last, in Beethoven's typical C minor vein. But despite the forcefulness of so much of its writing, the work ends inconclusively, with the music dying away in a chain of C major scales. Beethoven was pleased enough with his composed fade-out to resort to the idea again in two further C minor works - the Piano Sonata Op.10 No.1, and the String Trio Op.9 No.3.

The two Trios Op.70 date from 1808. For all the wit and sophistication of its outer movements, it is the sombre D minor Largo of the first Trio in the pair that makes the most immediate impression. Its 'flickering' tremolos have earned the work the nickname of the Ghost , and its theatrical flavour is explained by the fact that at the time he wrote it Beethoven was also jotting down ideas for a projected Macbeth ´Ç±è±ð°ù²¹.Ìý

The second of the Op.70 trios is one of Beethoven's most relaxed works, and its minuet-like third movement had an unmistakable influence on Schubert. Its energetic finale carries out a formal experiment in expansion that links it to the last movement of the Eighth Symphony, composed some four years later.

Little is known about the origins of Beethoven's greatest and most famous piano trio - the Archduke Op.97. The dates that appear at the beginning and end of the composer's autograph score are 3 and 26 March 1811, but they are likely to refer only to the preparation of his fair copy. Even then, it is likely that Beethoven revised the trio, together with the last of his violin sonatas, Op.96, in the comparatively lean year of 1815. If it is the Op.97 Trio rather than any of the many other great works Beethoven dedicated to his most ardent patron, Archduke Rudolph, that posterity has so closely linked with his name, it is perhaps in view of the nobility of its famous opening theme. As for the scherzo and trio, they are not only through-composed, they are fused in such a way as to lend the piece an overwhelming sense of continuity and organic unity. The slow movement, with its serene, sarabande-like theme, is one of Beethoven's great variation-sets. Towards the end of the piece Beethoven quietly introduces a new idea that appears to be drawing the music to a tranquil close. But for all its apparent inevitability the new theme turns out by a stroke of genius to be an anticipation of the genial subject of the rondo finale, which follows without a break.

©Misha Donat