Horn Trio in E-flat major, Op. 40

This piece is built around one of the most distinctive sound combinations in chamber music: natural horn, violin, and piano. Brahms wrote it during the summer of 1865 in the Black Forest, shortly after his mother's death, and it reportedly came to him on a morning walk through the woods. Unusually for Brahms, it opens with a slow Andante movement in a loose rondo shape rather than sonata form, with the three instruments trading a gentle, wide-arching melody; the emotional core arrives in the third movement, an Adagio mesto marked 'sorrowful', which opens with four bars of solo piano low in the instrument's register before the violin and horn enter, and near its close contains what many listeners hear as a quiet pre-echo of the finale's fanfare theme.

What to listen for

In the third movement's middle section, listen for the piano's low, deliberate chords setting up a passage where the horn and violin move in close parallel motion, the texture stripped back to almost nothing. Then, near the movement's end, a simple stepwise figure appears slowly in the violin that will return at speed as the horn's opening call in the finale, so the two movements are quietly linked before the shift in tempo arrives.

Recommended rendition

The period-instrument recording by Isabelle Faust (violin), Teunis van der Zwart (natural horn), and Alexander Melnikov (piano) has been frequently cited for its clarity of texture and the natural horn's characteristically open, woody tone.

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