Piano Trio in Gm

When Smetana composed his Piano trio in the autumn of 1855, it acted as a catharsis to help his grief over the death of his four-year-old daughter Friederike. This very emotional work was also his first large-scale piece of chamber music. Unfortunately, its first public performance in December 1855 was not a great success, and so Smetana embarked on a prolonged process to rework it. By the late 1850s, it had reached its current form. Smetana always liked to perform it, but only found a publisher for it in 1880, when one of his pupils invited the Hamburg publisher Hugo Pohle to a performance at short notice. Smetana specialist Milan Pospíšil has based this Henle Urtext edition on the first edition by Pohle, but has also drawn upon the earlier sources. This has helped him to clear up several discrepancies which appeared in the first edition.

• Piano Trio g minor op. 15