Abstract
Given the extent of Granados’s activity as a chamber musician, it is curious that he contributed relatively few original works to the genre. Premiered in 1895, the Piano Trio is an important composition, all the more valuable for the overall paucity of chamber music produced by the Spanish nationalist school. The trio presents an amalgamation of many familiar threads of Granados’s compositional style: virtuosic piano writing, a grounding in mainstream European Romanticism, a generalized nationalistic flavor, a more explicitly Catalan regional color, and a cyclical handling of large-scale form.The trio did not enjoy a significant performance history, and was not published until 1976. Full of typographical errors and lacking source documentation, the first edition was superseded by authoritative critical urtexts, published by Edicions Tritó and Casa-Boileau in 2013. Still, numerous notational dilemmas persist, and the overall aesthetic cohesiveness of the work remains a challenge to potential interpreters.The present paper situates Granados’s sole essay for piano, violin and cello in the context of his overall output, as an antecedent to the more refined handling of many of the same compositional traits in the Goyescas and other more mature compositions. It also seeks to elucidate both practical and conceptual obstacles to the trio’s integration into the repertory, including a thorough comparison of inconsistencies among source materials.
Highlights
Resumen Dada la extensión de la carrera de Enrique Granados como artista de música de camara, es poco curioso que escribe tan pocas obras en este genero
Cellist Pau Casals, and the composer at the piano, is the only documented performance of the work during the composer’s lifetime, a new edition of the work by Editorial de Música Boileau alludes to another performance in Barcelona in the same year with the identical personnel
The Appendix to the present paper provides a table for divergent readings between these two printed editions and the autograph
Summary
One of the most vexing notational dilemmas to confront interpreters of the Trio concerns the rhythm of the theme marked “Cantabile,” which makes its first appearance at m. 78 of the first movement (Ex. 5). At bar 93, the piano part provides a dissonant bass note E, which resolves harmonically at the downbeat of 94, as the piano expounds the “canción popular” theme yet again This phrase may be taken as a sort of developmental reworking of the material. In one context (bars 40 and 269) the single 3⁄4 measures are interpolated in the midst of a section in 2/4, linking a passage in running sixteenth notes with a flourish in sixteenth-‐note sextuplets marked “A tempo.”. The 3⁄4 measures provide eighth notes in the piano part, essentially an arpeggiated statement of a first-‐inversion triad with an ornamental turn This coincidence would suggest a clear kinship between the passages and a common rhythmic interpretation. The shifts from common time to 2/4 at 11-‐16 and again at 23-‐24 seem less justifiable, in the reassignment of this same violin theme to the cello at 130, Granados deletes two beats over the course of a twenty-‐two beat phrase (twenty-‐four in the prototype at 11): mathematics required a single bar of 2/4 somewhere, the composer’s solution is questionable
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