Françaix: String Trio in C Major, Op. 2
The French composer Jean Françaix (1912-1997), cutting against the stylistic trends of his day, applied his considerable talents to music filled with joy and lightness. He had the advantage of having two professional musicians for parents; his father, as a composer and the director of a conservatory, was able to get input from no less an authority than Ravel, who wrote back, “Among the child’s gifts I observe above all the most fruitful an artist can possess, that of curiosity.” Françaix’s precocious start earned him a chance, at the age of ten, to take composition lessons with Nadia Boulanger, and later he studied piano at the Paris Conservatory.
Françaix was 21 and fresh off the success of his breakthrough Concertino for Piano when he composed the String Trio in C Major for the three French brothers who performed together as the Trio Pasquier. The four short movements each conjure miniature worlds of their own, starting with the bustling first movement. The bouncy scherzo uses “wrong notes” to give the impression of dance music gone awry, countered by the hushed and muted strains of melody in the Andante. The rondo finale, from its robust main theme to its sly ending, is a glittering example of how Françaix took classical ideals and made them fun and fresh.
Mozart: Divertimento in E-flat major, K. 563
The leap that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) made in 1781 to try his luck as a freelancer in Vienna initially seemed to pay off as he built up a lucrative career that centered on his reputation as the city’s top keyboard player. But when a war with the Ottoman Empire caused a financial downturn and scattered Vienna’s aristocrats, Mozart saw a drastic slowdown in the demand for his services as a performer and teacher, and the increasing interest in his operas and other compositions could not offset the losses. It didn’t help that he had a growing family to feed, a wife with a taste for spending lavishly on “cures,” and a gambling habit that made his finances all the more precarious. In the summer of 1788 he moved to a cheaper apartment in the suburbs, and a series of letters to his friend Michael Puchberg—a fellow freemason and textile merchant—showed that Mozart was not too proud to beg for personal loans.
Not long after finishing his masterful three final symphonies (Nos. 39-41) that summer—works created for some unknown opportunity that never panned out—Mozart turned his attention to another large project he started of his own volition, a trio that he dedicated to Puchberg. During his early adulthood in his hometown of Salzburg, Mozart wrote a number of works that were designed as lighthearted evening entertainment, many of them under the title Divertimento (K. 563). He used the same heading and a familiar six-movement structure for the trio, but this enormous, finely-crafted collection of some 45 minutes of music was clearly no throwaway score. And while it wasn’t the first composition for a trio of violin, viola and cello, there was no precedent for such an ensemble playing music of such breadth and sophistication, and as such it spawned a new genre, with Beethoven picking up the mantle in the next decade, and so many more composers following suit in the 19th and 20th centuries.
