Mendelssohn: Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, MWV Q 29, Op. 49 (Versions of 1839 & 1840)

Description

The music world has long been familiar with Mendelssohn's celebrated, standard-setting Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 49. No one, however, knew how many stages this masterpiece went through before it was finally published in 1840. According to preliminary sketches that can no longer be reconstructed, the early version of the work in its traditional piano-trio scoring was written in the spring of 1839. It was given its first performance at the Mendelssohn home in Berlin and remained unpublished. The following year, Mendelssohn brought out a version of the work with flute instead of violin at the request of an English publisher. He had already strongly reworked the original version for the publication. Another revision was made of the flute version, which not only took into account the different technical possibilities of a wind instrument, but also affected the compositional substance of the work. Thus Mendelssohn very nearly did write his D Minor Piano Trio three times!