Carl Frühling (1868-1937)
Trio in A Minor, Op. 40 (for clarinet, cello and piano)
Carl Frühling was an Austrian pianist and composer of the late Romantic era active in Vienna. He was born in a city known at the time as Lemberg, the capital of Galicia, today known as Lviv, Ukraine. He studied piano and composition at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, graduating with the Liszt prize. Between the last decade of the 19th century the end of World War I, Frühling would have been best known as a pianist: an accompanist to noteworthy instrumentalists and singers as well as often playing chamber music with Vienna’s premiere string quartet, the Rosé Quartet. He was also a relatively prolific composer producing a poorly documented catalogue of more than one hundred works featuring especial music for solo piano, art songs and chamber music. The rampant inflation following the war left Frühling in dire financial straits and the fact that he was Jewish no doubt added untold difficulties. He career suffered and by the time of his death in 1937, he and his music were all but forgotten. “Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music” published in 1929 and revised in 1963 contains but a single line listing his Op. 30 piano quintet without a biography or any commentary while even the latest Grove Dictionary offers only a few short paragraphs. Yet it would seem that Frühling was a fine composer.
Frühling’s op. 40 Trio for clarinet, cello and piano was published in Leipzig in 1925 but it is uncertain when he actually composed it. Based on the opus number, it is conjectured that it dates from around the turn of the 20th century and this is somewhat corroborated by its 19th century Romantic style by turns reminiscent of Brahms, Schumann and occasional Wagner. Perhaps directly inspired by the Brahms clarinet trio of 1891 for the same instrumentation, Frühling’s trio is a marvelous chamber music work that seems to have been rediscovered in very recent years and honored by a handful of recordings and concert performances.
The trio comprises four movements. The first movement might be construed as a relaxed sonata-allegro form – at a moderato tempo - with multiple themes, a modicum of development and some wonderful elaborations in the recapitulation. The first theme is stated by the clarinet in a minor mode imbued with the characteristic melancholy often associated with the instrument. The second theme brightens the mood with a duo for clarinet and cello in the major mode and a more lively motion. As throughout the trio, the textures maintain an artful balance among the parts. A delightful scherzo follows that, depending the tempo, tends towards a waltz or even a folk-like German Ländler. Though not explicitly marked, two contrasting sections suggest a scherzo with two trios, each pleasingly lyrical and inventive. The third movement is the longest, a slow movement that is most certainly the trio’s “center of gravity.” Mournful and meditative, its harmonic peregrinations lift the music through a series of unresolved plateaus that evoke a kind of unfulfilled longing, no doubt of Wagnerian influence. The finale is vividly Schumannesque with its rhythmically quirky profile, chromaticism and sudden juxtapositions of mood and character in a purely musical narrative that seems to be telling a story nonetheless. Despite the apparent and natural influences of three first-rate Germanic predecessors (Brahms, Wagner and Schumann), Frühling’s own voices prevails inviting us to explore other treasures in his otherwise overlooked oeuvre.
