In October 1788, Mozart wrote the Piano Trio in G major K564. It is a sign of the times that it was first published in England, not in Vienna. And it is a sign of the conservative tastes of publishers and public that, when it was finally issued in Vienna the following year, it was still advertised, like its predecessors, as being ‘for harpsichord or forte piano with the accompaniment of a violin and violoncello’.
Mozart may have led the new fashion for the piano, but many households still had their harpsichords, and the predominant model for piano trios was still the ‘accompanied sonatas’, which Haydn was to continue writing long after Mozart’s death in 1791.
Indeed, this trio has a rather more ‘domestic’ feel than those Mozart wrote earlier in the year. It is simpler and shorter, perhaps aimed deliberately at the amateur market rather than for Mozart himself to play.
Some writers have been disappointed to find this lighter work at the end of Mozart’s sequence of trios, and it is true that it says what it has to say without unnecessary complication. But Mozart at his most direct is just as difficult to play as Mozart at his most subtle and complex. He gives the impression of having put every note in precisely the right place, creating elegant and lyrical structures that require absolute clarity and precision.
Here is the Mozart Piano trio KV 564:
