I am posting Beethoven’s Trio op.97 (the Archduke). This trio was really written for three virtuosi. The trio that is playing this chamber piece was among the finest ever formed. Each of the players was among the best instrumentalists of his time. The Archduke Trio has been acclaimed as one of the greatest achievements in its form and in classical chamber music in general.
Written with Hapsburg nobleman Archduke Rudolf of Austria in mind, the trio was first performed in 1811, just two days after its completion, with the composer at the keyboard.
Beethoven’s spirits were high at the time of composition, for both his health and his hearing had temporarily improved. He became once again a frequent habitué of plays, concerts, and other social gatherings. He even enjoyed playing the “Archduke” Trio with his friends. In fact, it was with this very piece that Beethoven the performer made his farewell to the stage.
Beethoven, the Archduke Trio, Op. 97 in B-flat Major
Archduke Rudolph Johann Joseph Rainer Hapsburg was born into a position of privilege. His grandmother was Empress Maria Theresa, while the revered Joseph II was his uncle. His father Leopold and brother Franz went on to rule the empire, as well. Existing on the periphery of affairs of state as Leopold’s youngest son, Rudolph was able to devote a good deal of his time to honing his musical talents. Around age 16, he fired the official teacher of the imperial princes and chose the 34-year-old Beethoven to be his piano teacher instead. He went on to become Beethoven’s only full-fledged composition student and, more importantly, the highest born and most devoted of the composer’s patrons. Indeed, Rudolph and Beethoven remained good friends until the composer’s death. Among the masterpieces Beethoven dedicated to his benefactor are the Missa solemnis, the Grosse Fuge, the Hammerklavier Sonata, and this Piano Trio.
It was in the summertime of 1810 that Beethoven began sketching what would become his final and finest piano trio. Earlier that year, he had harbored serious thoughts of marrying his doctor’s lovely 18-year-old niece, Therese Malfatti. When his hopes were dashed, the composer went to Baden for a few months, where he nursed his wounds and distracted himself by jotting down plans for a string quartet and a piano trio. On his return to Vienna in October, he completed the quartet – his striking Op. 95, “Serioso.” The piano trio itself was written in a flurry of inspiration from March 3 to 26 the following year. It completed a decade of awesome creativity which had begun with the “Eroica” Symphony. Coming at the end of this so-called “heroic” decade, the “Archduke” Trio represented the full bloom and the crowning achievement of the composer’s Middle Period. It is music of sweeping grandeur for a trio of virtuosos.
The composer’s own spirits were high at this time, for both his health and his hearing had temporarily improved. He became once again a frequent habitué of plays, concerts, and other social gatherings. He even enjoyed playing the “Archduke” Trio with his friends. In fact, it was with this very piece that Beethoven the performer made his farewell to the stage at a charity concert in 1814 at the Hotel Zum Ritter Romischen Kaiser in Vienna. Beethoven at the piano was joined by violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh and cellist Joseph Linke.
Pablo Casals
December 29, 1876 – October 22, 1973
Pablo (or Pau) Casals was born in December 1876 in El Vendrell, Catalonia, where his father was the local organist and choirmaster. Carlos taught his son to sing, to play the piano and organ and to compose. At six the boy heard an itinerant Catalan musician play a home-made cello. He asked his father to build him one and would always treasure that first ‘cello, which had a gourd for a sound box. At the age of 11 he heard a real cello and knew that it was his destiny to play such an instrument. His father bought him one and gave him lessons. Subsequently, he entered the Municipal School of Music in Barcelona, where he rejected the old-fashioned stiff-arm way of playing. While moonlighting in a café trio, he was heard by Albéniz, who helped him to move to Madrid to study at the conservatoire. He made his Madrid orchestral debut in the Lalo Concerto, which in 1899 he also played at the Crystal Palace in London and at the Lamoureux Concerts in Paris. He toured America in 1901 and in 1905 went to live in Paris where, with Alfred Cortot and Jacques Thibaud, he established a trio that would last until 1934.
For more than three decades Casals toured the world as a leading cello soloist. He was single-handedly responsible for bringing Bach’s solo suites out of obscurity, and he performed a wide, if conservative, repertoire. When he returned to Barcelona from Paris in 1919, he recognised the need for a local symphony orchestra. In setting up the Orquesta Pau Casals, he risked his own hard-earned fees by subsidising it for the first decade of its existence. The orchestra made its debut in October 1920 and, despite his lack of conducting experience, Casals made a success of the enterprise. In 1931 he directed the orchestra in a Barcelona performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to mark the birth of the Spanish Republic. But the civil war and the triumph of the Fascists tore his life and his career asunder. A man of principle, who would not appear in Hitler’s Germany, Casals was implacably opposed to Franco’s regime and in 1936, threatened with death if he returned to Spain, exiled himself to southern France. After the Second World War, alarmed at Britain and America’s acquiescence in Franco’s regime, he abruptly ceased playing in public. But from 1950, American admirers organised a festival around him in Prades, his adopted home in the French Pyrenees and Casals flourished again as chamber musician, teacher, conductor and musical philosopher. In 1956 he emigrated to his mother’s native Puerto Rico, from where he emerged to perform in 1958 at the United Nations and in 1961 at the White House. He died in Puerto Rico in October 1973, aged 96.
Alfred Cortot
September 26, 1877 – June 15, 1962
One of the 20th century’s most influential — yet inimitable — classical figures, Alfred Cortot was born in 1877 in Switzerland to a French father and a Swiss mother, and he based his long career as a pianist, conductor and teacher in Paris. Cortot was one of his era’s most renowned interpreters of Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Saint-Saëns and Franck, his best recordings setting an enduring standard for poetry in motion. In 1925, the pianist made the first electrical recording of classical music, for the Victor label in New Jersey, featuring music by Chopin and Schumann. Among his hundreds of subsequent recordings was the first complete version of Chopin’s Preludes Op. 28. In holding up Cortot as a paragon of Chopin playing even decades after his death, The New York Times described his method as combining “lucidity with spontaneity…. It is almost modern in its lack of sentimentality and attention to structure; yet it is unmistakably Romantic in its insistence on freedom and variety. Each line is suffused with subtle detail, with interior contours and dynamic shadings. But these are not indulgent ornaments; they reveal rather than cloud the music’s intentions.” Cortot’s way with the Gallic modernism of Debussy and Ravel was also marked by a deeply personal sense of color and feeling. Not only a soloist, Cortot co-founded one of Europe’s most famous chamber groups in 1905 with violinist Jacques Thibaud and cellist Pablo Casals, the trio recording some of the earliest best-sellers of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. As a conductor, Cortot was the leading young French Wagnerian of his time, even working at Bayreuth; later, he toured the world as a pianist, playing thousands of concerts, including all five Beethoven concertos at Carnegie Hall and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the composer present.
As an editor, Cortot made important editions of the keyboard music of Chopin, Schumann and Debussy, among many others. Teacher-broadcaster David Dubal has said: “These are among the most intriguing editions ever made, providing a fund of splendid annotations and ingenious exercises for overcoming technical problems. Cortot was one of the great piano minds, and his writings are sprinkled with his own constant wonder at the masterpieces he played.” Cortot was one of the most inspirational piano teachers of the mid-20th century, his pupils including Dinu Lipatti, Gina Bachauer, Samson François, Clara Haskil, Magda Tagliaferro and Vlado Perlemuter. Tagliaferro described the virtues of her teacher’s playing this way: “His sound was pure enchantment…. The images that he conjured up were absolutely visionary.” Like Artur Schnabel, Cortot represents a bygone era, one when music was an aspirational art and note-perfect performances were not the be-all-to-end-all. His recordings were always spontaneous creations, and his concerts — especially in later years — could be marred by memory lapses, smudged notes, outright clinkers. Yet the poetry was always there. Critic Harold Schonberg, who admired “the sharpness, point, clarity of line, unmistakable rubato and sheer intelligence” of Cortot’s playing, said of the pianist’s mistakes: “One accepted them, as one accepts scars or defects in paintings by an old master.” Subsequent generations of top pianists were inspired by his example on record. Alfred Brendel praised Cortot’s “three-dimensional playing,” saying: “He is the one pianist who equally satisfies my mind, my senses, my emotions.” steinway artist Murray Perahia, another Cortot devotee, supervised a set of recordings that feature Cortot masterclasses taped between 1954 and 1960, two years before his death. Perahia said: “He represents a kind of piano playing that has virtually disappeared: free, impulsive, personal, daring; yet at the same time, cogent and intelligent… First and foremost, he thought music ‘must live’.”
Jacques Thibaud
September 27, 1880 – September 1, 1953
Jacques Thibaud was a French violinist, born in Bordeaux on September 27, 1880, who died in a plane crash at Mont Cimet, near Barcelonnette in the French Alps, on September 1, 1953.
He first studied the violin with his father in Bordeaux before entering, at the age of thirteen, the Paris Conservatory, where he studied under Martin-Pierre Marsick alongside Georges Enesco. In 1896, he won first prize in violin, alongside Pierre Monteux.
He began his career as a section violinist, performing under the baton of Édouard Colonne, among others, before embarking on a career as a soloist. Wounded during World War I, he was forced to undergo a long process of relearning his technique.
A great interpreter of Mozart, he was a member—along with cellist Pablo Casals and pianist Alfred Cortot—of an internationally renowned chamber music trio. In addition to his concert activities, Jacques Thibaud also devoted himself to teaching at the École Normale de Musique de Paris and the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. In 1943, he founded the Long-Thibaud Competition with pianist Marguerite Long.
A friend and student of Eugène Ysaÿe—who wrote his Second Sonata for him—Jacques Thibaud remains to this day the epitome of the French violinist with an elegant and charming style.
On September 1, 1953, while traveling to Indochina with pianist René Herbin, his plane crashed in the Western Alps. There were no survivors.
His 1709 Stradivarius[1], the “Baillot” (which had previously belonged to Pierre Baillot; other sources indicate a 1720 violin), was lost in the accident. He had also played two other Stradivarius violins, the “Bérou” (1714) and the “Colossus” (1716), as well as a François Pique and a Bergonzi, both of which had belonged to Eugène Ysaÿe.
His grave can be seen in the old cemetery of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The Bordeaux Conservatory was renamed in his honor, as was a street along the beach in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.