Piano Trio

Fanny Mendelssohn, roughly four years older than her more famous brother, Felix, was forbidden by their father to pursue music as a profession. Nevertheless, her compositional voice sometimes seems more adventurous than Felix’s. It’s possible that because she was not writing with an eye on public acclaim, she did not feel bound by the type of constraints that affected him. Her Piano Trio is a substantial work in four movements, highly Romantic and shot through with structural and harmonic daring. She wrote it in 1846 as a birthday present for her younger sister, Rebecka. After Fanny’s tragically early death, aged 42, the family, perhaps contrite, organized its publication in 1850. The first movement, marked “Allegro molto vivace,” begins with a soaring melody on the strings, accompanied by rippling piano. A contrasting theme in the major becomes a “cyclic” element that comes back in the finale. The second movement is a gentle, reflective “Andante espressivo,” and is followed by a short “Lied” akin to Felix’s Songs without Words. Then, after a slow introduction, the music lets fly with a substantial “Finale” containing plenty of virtuoso writing, especially for the piano. There’s a climactic return for the first movement’s major theme, and the work concludes with a powerful coda.