Composed 1851; 28 minutes

Even before he had completed the four Fantasiestücke, Robert Schumann went on to compose three full-length piano trios, beginning in the summer of 1847 with the first two. He sketched a draft of the D minor Piano Trio in a characteristic burst of energy in one week in June, completing it in time for a private performance on his wife Clara’s 28^th birthday in September. She had completed her own piano trio the previous summer, so there may have been an element of competition at play: these two trios were frequently paired in 19^th century music-making. Schumann then followed with a second piano trio by the beginning of November. “It makes a friendlier and breezier effect,” he said in a letter to a fellow composer. The third, however, had to wait a few years until, fleeing the 1849 uprising in Dresden, the Schumanns eventually found themselves in Düsseldorf receiving a festive welcome for Robert’s appointment as the city’s municipal music director.

Although the move did not turn out well, Schumann could call on several key musicians among an odd mix of professional and amateur musicians he was working with. During his second season in the Rhenish capital, concertmaster Joseph von Wasielewski (later to become Schumann’s biographer) prompted his A minor Violin Sonata, Op. 105 and, several months later, a second sonata, Op. 121. In-between came the G minor Piano Trio, beginning on October 2, 1851—starting with “some thoughts for a trio,” progressing by the 9^th (“just about finished with the last movement”), and ready for rehearsal, during this burst of chamber music, by the 27^th. On this day, Wasielewski and cellist Christian Reimers joined Clara in the Schumann’s apartment for the first rehearsal of the G minor Piano Trio. 

The work stands as a thoughtful complement to the two earlier piano trios: more concentrated in tone, often darker in color, yet just as inventive in its dialogue between piano, violin, and cello. The opening movement begins with a restless theme in G minor, immediately answered by a more lyrical idea. Note the opening violin motif—an upward then downward arpeggiated swish—the gesture will return throughout the trio, most immediately between the two themes, later accompanying the second theme. Rather than dramatic contrast alone, Schumann weaves the themes together in a fluid, contrapuntally designed exchange. 

The slow movement begins with an echo of the rising violin motif, in a waltz-like dialogue between the strings, supported by the piano. This is abruptly worked into a tense, angular variant before resolving into a calmer reprise of the theme, now shared between all three instruments. The scherzo is restless and decidedly enigmatic, with off-the-beat accents and two contrasting trios—the first, lyrical and nodding back to the opening theme of the first movement, the second, a brisk march anticipating the finale. The finale, with its large-scale sonata rondo structure, again draws on thematic elements from earlier movements with a subtlety that creates cohesion and cyclical unity across all four movements. “It is original,” Clara wrote in her diary, “and increasingly passionate, especially the scherzo, which carries one along with it into the wildest depths... How wonderful is such an incessantly creative, powerful spirit; how fortunate I count myself that heaven has granted me sufficient intellect and feeling 
to comprehend this mind and this soul so completely.”