Mendelssohn's
Piano Trio No. 2 was dedicated to Louis Spohr, the renowned violinist
and conductor who, around 1820, was among the first maestros to threaten
orchestral musicians from the podium with a pointed wooden baton rather
than a violin bow or a bare hand. Mendelssohn, who had been a friend
since meeting Spohr as a teenager in Berlin, followed this extraordinary
practice, and wielded the revolutionary stick for his epochal revival
of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1829 and in all of his concerts
thereafter.
Something
of Spohr's sturdy Classical Romanticism is heard in the Trio. In his
study of the chamber music, John Horton noted of the work's opening
movement, "Mendelssohn never wrote a stronger sonata-form allegro."
The urgent, rising and falling phrases of the main theme, announced
by the piano, generate a subsequent arch-shaped melody for the violin,
which is given above the keyboard's restless accompaniment. A sweeping
subject sung in duet by violin and cello in a brighter tonality serves
as the second theme. These motives are elaborated with immense skill
and deep emotion as the movement unfolds to create a powerful utterance
in which some commentators have detected the influence of Beethoven's
tempestuous Coriolan Overture.
The following
Andante is an extended Lied in which the piano often serves
as interlocutor for the tandem flights of the strings. The movement
is laid out in a smoothly flowing three-part form whose middle section
is marked by a heightened animation and a sense of adventurous harmonic
peregrination.
The gossamer
Scherzo is musical feather-stitching such as has never been
as well accomplished by any other composer -- Mendelssohn is simply
incomparable in evoking this elfin world of nocturnal wisps and fairy
wonder.
The Finale
is built from two contrasting thematic elements: a vivacious principal
subject which is launched by a leaping interval from the cello, and
a broad chorale melody introduced in a chordal setting by the piano.
The main theme returns for a vigorous working-out before the chorale
melody, traced by Eric Werner to the hymn Vor Deinem Thron
("Before Your Throne") from the Geneva Psalter of 1551, is
summoned in a grand, nearly orchestral guise to cap this masterwork
of Mendelssohn's fullest maturity.
