LDV64.5

20 BRAHMS_TRIOS OP.8, 87, 101 & 114 This imposing gravity, which yet is never ponderous – a cliché long attributed to it by anti-German currents in France –was immediately perceived by the Schumanns in the torrents of music of the first two piano sonatas, opp.1 and 2, which gush forth irrepressibly, like lava from a volcano. Gravity there is, to be sure, but also savagery, which Brahms had to tame through recourse to formal frameworks, as we have seen. The next step proved the Schumanns right again. TheFirstTrio for piano, violinandcello inBmajor op.8, composed in 1854, ayear after the sonatas and in a similar style, spectacularly affirms all these characteristics at once, along with that orchestral fabric which also made the sonatas so innovative (Schumann found ‘veiled symphonies’ in them). One is dumbfounded by the maturity of this twenty-one-year-old composer! Even if, opportunely, Brahms revised his work (he was still feeling his way in certain places) much later, in 1889, the sustained inspiration and all that goes to make up his genius are already present there, as much as in the staggering Third Piano Sonata.