Kegelstatt Trio instance of clarinet-viola-piano trio
The Kegelstatt Trio, K. 498, is a piano trio for clarinet, viola and piano in E-flat major by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.History
Mozart wrote the piano trio on 10 sheets (19 pages) in Vienna and dated the manuscript on 5 August 1786. According to Mozart's 17-year-old student Karoline Pichler, the work was dedicated to another student of Mozart's, Franziska von Jacquin; Mozart and the von Jacquin family – father Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin and his youngest son Gottfried – were quite close friends. They performed house concerts together, where Nikolaus played the flute and Franziska the piano. In a letter to Gottfried from 15 January 1787, Mozart praises Franziska's studiousness and diligence. Mozart dedicated a number of works to the von Jacquin family. One year later, Mozart wrote two Lieder, "Als Luise die Briefe ihres ungetreuen Liebhabers verbrannte" (K. 520) and "Das Traumbild" (K. 530) explicitly for Gottfried von Jacquin to use under his own name.
The German word Kegelstatt means "a place where skittles are played", akin to a duckpin bowling alley. Mozart wrote that he composed the 12 Duos for Two (French) Horns (not basset horns as is commonly thought), K. 487, "while playing skittles"; on the first page of the autograph manuscript of K. 487, Mozart inscribed the following: "Wienn den 27.t Jullius 1786 untern Kegelscheiben" (Vienna, 27 July 1786 while playing skittles). A week and a half later, Mozart composed and dated the trio E♭ K. 498. He entered this work into his list of compositions simply as: "Ein Terzett für klavier, Clarinett und Viola" (A trio for piano, clarinet and viola). There is no evidence that Mozart gave any nickname to the K. 498 trio; the moniker Kegelstatt first appears ascribed to the K. 498 trio in Ludwig von Köchel's 1862 thematic catalogue of Mozart's music.This clarinet-viola-piano trio was first played in the von Jacquin's house; Anton Stadler played clarinet, Mozart the viola, and Franziska von Jacquin the piano. The clarinet was still a relatively new instrument in Mozart's time, and this trio, along with his Clarinet Quintet and Clarinet Concerto (the latter two for basset clarinets in A), helped increase the instrument's popularity.
The trio was published in 1788 by Artaria, transcribed – probably with Mozart's consent – for violin, viola and piano, and the original clarinet part was described as an "alternative part": La parte del Violino si può eseguire anche con un Clarinetto. Due to this unusual scoring, the piece is sometimes adapted to fit other types of trios; e.g. a clarinet-violin-piano trio, a violin-cello-piano trio, a clarinet-cello-piano trio, or a violin-viola-piano trio, as in that first publication by Artaria.No composer before Mozart had written for this combination of instruments. In the 19th century Robert Schumann wrote Märchenerzählungen (Op. 132), Max Bruch in 1910 "Eight pieces for clarinet, viola, and piano" (Op. 83) and Carl Reinecke "Trio for piano, clarinet and viola" (Op. 246).
In March 1894 the manuscript came into the possession of the musicologist and composer Charles Théodore Malherbe when he bought it from Leo Sachs, a banker in Paris, who had bought it from Johann Anton André who bought it as part of a large purchase of manuscripts from Mozart's widow Constanze (the Mozart Nachlass) in 1841. In 1912 it was donated to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, Malherbe collection, Ms 222.
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