Brahms and Schumann Trios

The lives of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms intersected on multiple occasions, and always intensely. Schumann, publisher, and music critic as well as composer, promoted the young composer Brahms via the press, and his wife Clara mentored Brahms who was always self-critical with the works he composed and often discarded or rewrote them until he felt satisfied with the result. The Trio no. 1 is a good example of Brahms’ perfectionist obsession, although he composed a remarkably different version of it in 1889. Schumann’s first Piano Trio brings the energy, vivacity, and character diversity of militant German romanticism within a classical form that is constantly challenged. Schumann’s spirit is very present in Wolfgang Rihm’s Fremde Szenen, a series of piano trios that recall tradition but join it with the fluidity of modernity.