"Infinite Grace And Delicacy"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 190, 12 February 1943, Page 5

"Infinite Grace And Delicacy"

Mozart’s Pianoforte Trios

(By

FREDERICK PAGE

ce HEN are we to have a little chamber music in your house? I have composed a new trio." So wrote Mozart in a postscript to a letter to a friend begging for funds. It was the trio in E Major, the third of six,. for piano, violin, and ’cello, that will be broadcast from 3YA on alternate Monday evenings from February 15. Like much of Mozart’s music, with the pianoforte sonatas, and the sonatas for pianoforte and violin, these trios have been badly underestimated. Only recently, in Christchurch, did a pianist play the third movement of the sonata in F (K.332), and omit the first and second movements, possibly the richest in invention of all his piano sonatas, on the score that they were not of sufficient interest. These trios have been frequently dismissed. Both amateur .and professional players pass them by, perhaps because they listen to music with nineteenth century ears, and want from Mozart what he is not prepared to give. Certainly these works do not make a big noise. One can easily imagine Mozart himself playing in them with some of his congenial Salzburg friends. How he would have brought out their intensity of expression, that, play on the imagination which we associate with the word "Mozartian!" Like the pianoforte concertos, with their world of splendour and poetry, like the operas, with their dramatic force, these trios live in their own world of infinite grace and delicacy. There are few more ravishing slow movements, even in Mozart, than that in the second trio in B flat, few more radiant melodies than that in the last movement of the E major. The first, too, in G major, offers continual surprises, the fifth, also in G Major, a fount of melody.