String Trio

There are times when Schoenberg’s String Trio sounds like a message from another world, which under the circumstances perhaps isn’t too surprising. Schoenberg had just begun work on the Trio in 1946 when he suffered a major heart attack. After effectively dying on the operating table he was only brought back to life by an injection directly into his heart. Back in the world of the living, Schoenberg resumed work on the Trio almost immediately and finished it quickly. It seems this was music that demanded to be written. Talking about the Trio later with the novelist Thomas Mann, Schoenberg said that it directly reflected his recent physical and mental ordeal. Even by Schoenberg’s highest standards it is fantastically inventive, even visionary, and the fusillade of modernist effects in the opening section easily suggests a mind and body bombarded by terrifying sense impressions—and all this with just three solo string instruments. But there is also plenty of still, eerily reflective music, along with moments of lyricism which range from quietly anguished to achingly tender. In some of Schoenberg’s earlier “12-tone” works there is a suspicion that his rigorous serial techniques can act as an imaginative straitjacket; here the sense of creative freedom is almost dizzying. In the end though, this highly original single-movement structure does work through to a kind of peace, or at least acceptance. And as a whole, it is one of the most remarkable emotional journeys in chamber music.