Born near Vienna, of Jewish descent, Hans Gál won early recognition as a composer, culminating in the Austrian State Prize for a symphony in 1915. In spite of the cataclysmic aftermath of the First World War (during which he had served in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Gál was able to build a rapidly rising career during the 1920s, particularly in Germany. His opera Die Heilige Ente, premiered in 1923 in Dusseldorf under Georg Szell, then was immediately taken up by six more opera houses for the following season, and was still in the repertoire in 1933. These and other successes led to his appointment in 1929 as director of the Music Conservatoire in Mainz. But four years later the Nazi seizure of power resulted in instant dismissal and a complete ban on performance and publication of his work. He returned to Vienna, but in 1938 was again forced to flee, this time to Britain. He relocated to Edinburgh, where he became a lecturer at the University in 1945, remaining active as a composer, pianist, teacher and scholar until his death in 1987. He was a founding member of the Edinburgh International Festival, and the author of books on Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner and Verdi. Gál’s compositions include four operas, four symphonies, three solo concertos, several large-scale cantatas and a host of chamber, piano and vocal works. By the end of his long life, he had left a legacy of around 140 published works. His music can be enjoyed in many different ways. It is superficially easy to listen to, coherent and apparently straightforward, supreme in its clarity and formal mastery. But, at the same time, it is immensely intricate and subtle in its motivic structure, contrapuntal interplay of melodic voices, extended tonality and harmonic piquancy, wittily subverting expectation at every turn. His musical language is deeply rooted in the pre-serial Austro-German tradition, but the voice is essentially his own and is unmistakable to anyone who has the opportunity to get to know it.

In a note for one of his concert programs, Gál wrote about his special love for the trio as a genre: ‘Chamber music, as the most intimate form of expression, is the realm to which the musician repeatedly returns in order to retain the link with the essence of things. In a duo, trio or quartet, independent individuals converse with one another. The musical symbol for this process is polyphony: the most perfect and most transparent form of polyphony is three voices; for that reason, I have always had a predilection for the trio as the noblest medium of polyphonic setting.

In the case of the Serenade for clarinet, violin and cello, dating from 1935, Gál was faced also with the challenge of blending the tone-colors of clarinet and strings. Although in this work the clarinet plays an apparently prominent role, with a number of solo cadenzas, all three parts are otherwise intricately interwoven, the thematic material evenly distributed amongst the players. The individual movements, and also the thematic material within them, are richly contrasted, alternating between energetic, tonally unstable, strikingly asymmetric passages, and contrasting episodes of an idyllic character, with a very stable tonality, which seem to hark back to a better world. 

The Serenade was first performed in Vienna in May 1936 at one of Gál’s concerts with his Vienna Madrigal Choir, and was first broadcast, on swiss radio, in January 1938. Yet it was not published until 1970 as Gál’s Op. 93, 35 years after its composition, alongside his two wartime trios, the Huyton Suite, which became Op. 92, and the Trio for oboe, violin and viola, Op. 94.