Every one of Brahms’s chamber works with winds, therefore, is something special. Comparing them to more traditional genres—the Horn Trio, for instance, is sometimes described as a piano trio with a horn instead of a cello—only highlights their singularity. The first publication of the Horn Trio included an alternative cello part, but even in an outwardly normalized performance by a piano trio (which Brahms thought sounded “awful”), the cello would still sound as if it were trying to imitate the horn. This is music that could not have been written for any other instrument than the horn.
The idiomatic horn writing in the Trio is, however, not what one might initially expect. The most predictable side of the horn’s musical persona, the hunting style, comes to the fore only in the finale. What stands out in the first three movements is the lyrical, or, as one contemporary reviewer put it, the “dark” side of the instrument. In this respect it is important that Brahms wrote his Trio not for the modern valve horn, but for the valveless hand horn, an instrument he also preferred in his orchestral works. By the time Brahms wrote his Trio, and especially in German-speaking Europe, the valve horn had rapidly gained popularity because of its greater ease of playing chromatically. For Brahms, this technical advantage came at the expense of a loss of the horn’s true character: a diversity in timbre across the range; a much darker sound quality, because of the many stopped notes; and a greater overall expressivity. Whenever he could, Brahms tried to convince players to perform his Trio on the hand horn. You can play it on a modern horn, he once wrote, but then “all poetry is lost.”
dr.Steven Vande Moortele-Toronto University