Trio in drei Sätzen (1984)
(for piano trio)

By composing a piano trio, I have fulfilled a long-cherished wish. It is a genre, comparable to the tradition of the string quartet, for which every composer should be quietly in awe. I also waited patiently, but anxiously, to pay my dues.

The prehistory of the piece is closely linked to my musical epic about the devil, La Trahison Orale (The Oral Betrayal), which I wrote in 1981-83. When conceiving this work, I decided to compose character pieces, relatively short numbers with a distinct atmosphere, which could be compared in gesture to songs without words. It may seem strange that it is possible to compose music with such a literary background again today, but the development of music history shows that nothing is straightforward, but rather, shaken up by aesthetic demands, intertwined.

For Trahison Orale I did not prescribe a specific instrumentation, but produced a kind of piano reduction, because this seemed to me the most suitable form for realizing my intention. One of the essential lessons we can learn from Romanticism is the primacy of musical substance over a specific timbre: if the imagination is memorable enough, then it can find an expression worthy of it with interchangeable sound means. From the very beginning, I envisioned a paraphrase of my musical epic with the classical instrumentation of violin, violoncello and piano. I have now worked this out in the form of a three-movement work and surrounded its course with the touch of a rondo. You could compare this piano trio to a polyphonic structure of character pieces, in which distinctive features appear again and again, follow each other, stop abruptly, rise quickly from the background to the surface and slowly disappear. It is nevertheless absolute music in the classical sense - concealing the true reasons for the absolute.

M.K.
(Translation by Edition Peters)