“I am thinking of not publishing any of my trios,” wrote the twenty-year-old Brahms in November 1853 to Schumann, his new mentor and friend. How many trios had he written, and what didn’t he like about them? Brahms was notorious for destroying his sketches, student pieces, incomplete works, and compositions that did not measure up to his high standard, so it is unlikely that any of these early trios will ever turn up. The fact that he had written other trios, however, does explain how his “first” Trio—that in B major, which he composed in 1853–54—could be such an accomplished work. It was the first chamber work he considered worthy of publication, and with Clara Schumann recommending it to Breitkopf & Härtel, the Trio was duly published in November of 1854.

Almost half a century later, in 1889, Simrock acquired rights from other publishers to the early works by Brahms that were not yet in his catalog, which raised the prospect of reissuing the Trio. The mature composer decided to revise this favored product of his youth by reining in some of its excesses. “You’ll never guess,” he wrote to Clara in September, “with what childish amusement I whiled away the beautiful summer days. I have rewritten my B major Trio and can call it op. 108 instead of op. 8. It will not be so wild as before—but whether it will be better—?”

His revisions resulted in a work of roughly two-thirds the length of the original. He tightened up the first movement by writing a new second theme preceded by a shorter transition, and by deleting a fugue, but he left the sublime first theme intact—all fifty-plus measures of it. Like many of Schubert’s melodious themes, this expansive theme and the original second theme were hard to treat developmentally, but his new second theme worked well in that regard.

Brahms had always excelled at writing scherzos and he found little to change in his 1854 version. His delicate, almost Mendelssohnian opening soon erupts in a tempestuous “ride to the hounds,” replete with hunting-horn calls. The trio luxuriates in a lovely theme that pairs instrumental lines in intervals of sixths and then thirds apart—sonorities much beloved by Brahms. The few changes the composer did make involved tightening up his coda.

Again in the slow movement Brahms retained his first theme, a pious dialogue between piano and strings, but he wrote a completely new middle section. The opening returns in a slightly varied guise that preserves the original version’s atmospheric modulations, but dispenses with an interpolated fast section that Brahms thought excessive.

As in the first and third movements, Brahms fit his finale with a new second theme, one that Clara disliked but which he considered much better suited to motivic development. He also substantially rewrote much of the remainder of the movement. The most striking feature of the finale, however, was present from the start: Brahms cast it in the minor mode, and though he traverses other keys in the course of the movement, the minor mode prevails even at the forceful close. This Trio, therefore, is one of the extremely rare pieces that flaunt custom by beginning in the major and concluding in the minor.

To the delight of American audiences it was long thought that the first performance of the Trio in the original version took place in New York of all unlikely places. William Mason, an American piano student of Liszt, had brought back a copy of the Trio and performed it on November 27, 1855, with Theodor Thomas and Karl Bergmann in Dodsworth’s Hall. More recent research has determined, however, that the work was first performed in Danzig (Germany) on October 13, 1855, played by Messrs. Haupt (piano), Braun (violin), and Klar (cello). Brahms himself gave the first public performance of the revised version in Budapest on January 10, 1890, with violinist Jenö Jubay and cellist David Popper. Vienna had to wait until February 22, when Brahms again took the piano part, this time with Arnold Rosé and Mr. Hummer.

Brahms did not consider the new version of his Trio a replacement of the old, but merely an alternative. He remained ambivalent about its merits, as did his friends who loved the familiar youthful work. Clara wrote in her diary, “The whole trio strikes me as better proportioned than it was, but I do not altogether like it.” And the musically sophisticated Elisabet von Herzogenberg wrote, “You had no right to intrude your masterly touch on this lovable, if sometimes vague, product of your youth,” though she ended by saying, “It is beautiful in its present form, and I gladly leave it to the musical philologues to remonstrate with you.” Posterity has decided overwhelmingly in favor of the revised version, which is now heard almost exclusively whenever the beloved B major Trio is programmed.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe