Johannes Brahms

It seems to have taken Brahms over two years to complete the opus 87 trio, but the result evidently pleased him and he boasted of the work to his publisher, Simrock. Brahms' close friend Clara Schumann pronounced the piece "a splendid work" and "a great musical treat." A generously proportioned work in four movements, it features a second movement andante and third movement scherzo, an arrangement common in his symphonies but reversed in his other piano trios. He had first mentioned it and a companion work, an E flat trio, in a letter to a friend in the summer of 1880, but did not reveal it to Simrock until July 1882. By then, the E flat work had disappeared.

The piece opens thickly, with strange dissonances and a heavy feel, and seems to proceed sluggishly. It is nonetheless dynamically, rhythmically, and chromatically challenging and gives the sense of being a major work, and the first movement ends with symphonic grandeur. The slow movement is similarly heavy of texture, and Brahms makes considerable use of double-stopping as a way of making the two stringed instruments sound like four or even more. The scherzo, a four-minute presto, is begun and ended by a fluttering figure which generates momentum and contains a lyrical passage of some tenderness. The finale is the most adventuresome of the four movements and contains puzzling transitions and modulations which resolve to produce powerful effects. The final dénouement of the work is positively huge, proving that, in the hands of Brahms, even the tiny piano trio can be a large and imposing work. His boasts of the piece would seem to have been true.