announcing the Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 180

This article is an expanded version of the Editorial Notes that can be found in the published edition. For the first time, this piece will be available exclusively in printed form. This exclusivity will continue until a publicly documented performance and a recording are realised. The edition will go into print in one month from today, to allow any interested sponsors to get in touch and be featured in the book.

A digital version will be released in 2025.

Pre-order the printed and digital version, plus get a PDF copy of these Editorial Notes for FREE here.

Videos of this piece can be found here: Allegro non troppo; Andante cantabile; Scherzo: Allegro non tanto – Trio – Scherzo; Finale: Allegro.

Due to the sheer length of this material (20+ minutes read), I am splitting it into 3 separate articles. Here goes the first one.

EDITORIAL NOTES

For the third episode of Phase 2 of the Dotzauer Project, focused on his chamber music works, the choice fell on what is possibly his most mature, complex, and deeply expressive piece. It is also his last chamber work, bearing Opus number 180, published in 1851, and the largest one of them all. Its instrumentation is most ambitious, and perhaps one of the best clues we have at understanding why such an epic piece could be so easily forgotten. It is, in fact, a massive, 32-minute-long Trio for piano, violin, and cello, in four movements, dedicated to the composer’s elder son, the pianist virtuoso Justus Friedrich Bernhard Dotzauer.

Against the giants

To be fair to history, composing a piano trio in 1851 and hoping it would remain popular was a hard bet by any composer. The seven trios by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) and the four by Franz Schubert (1797–1828) were already widely played, while two more giants had just joined the playground: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–47), with two trios: Op. 49 in 1839 and Op. 66 in 1845, and Robert Schumann (1810–56), with three: Op. 63 in 1847, Op. 80 in 1850, and Op. 110 in 1851. Immediately afterwards, whatever glimpse of hope might have remained would have been blown out of the water by the three masterpieces penned by Johannes Brahms (1833–97): Op. 8 in 1853; Op. 87 in 1882; and Op. 101 in 1886. However good a piece Dotzauer’s Trio might have been, his name alone meant there was no chance it could have survived the test of time.

To this, we may add a few additional points of reflection. All the great, immortal composers listed above were already known in life as full-time composers: they wrote symphonies, large scale works, and—besides—none of them had a full-time job as principal in an orchestra. At the same time, if we browse the newspapers of the time, we learn that the only major composition by Dotzauer that received an important review without being a pedagogical work for cello was his Große Sinfonie in d-moll.¹ Against all expectations, this piece received a four-page-long enthusiastic review, and it is a true pity that its material appears to be lost to us.

Dotzauer was a constant presence in the local press between 1806 and 1879—that’s nineteen years after his death—either with a review of one of his public concerts or of one of his publications. The abundant advertisements from publishing houses, moreover, contained hundreds of entries of his music.

Therefore, while Dotzauer was an absolute star in life, it is clear that he never aimed at being popular as a composer. Rather, that was an activity that almost every musician undertook, some with greater success than others. He was a successful cellist, both in chamber music, in orchestral life, and in solo performance, possibly one of the best of his generation. Beyond that, he was a genius of pedagogy, and his greatest achievements remain, to this day, his four cello schools.

With 183 catalogued works, twenty more without opus number, and at least fifty that were just rejected by publishers and therefore lost, though, the care he put into the creation of new music just cannot be ignored. Could the average quality of his music be the cause of his fall from grace? As one of the handful of people in the last half century to have dedicated a considerable amount of time to this composer, I have to abstain from any positive judgment, as it would inevitably be biased.

A blind listening test administered to several cellists and composers returned quite positive reactions:

Second rate but charming … post-Beethoven era, I would say a pianist or a string player with considerable piano skills. —

The trio is well written, and it seems enjoyable to play — well-balanced between the three instruments. It has Schubert-esque elements but also other details in the form and repetition of material. —

Beautiful piece! Even [digitally] it sounds pretty good. With real players it would make much more sense! —

I think it’s an excellent piece. It may have suffered because of how ‘out of style’ it likely was in the middle XIX century … but really a good piece. Better than nearly all Beethoven’s contemporaries. —

It is a very “professional” work. It just lacks a little inspiration (even if the ideas are superb at the base) and melodic flights of fancy. —

For 1850, it’s quite innovative, especially the Scherzo. I would have located that 25 years later. —

In the end, history will tell if giving this piece a second chance was a sound idea.

Hunting for the source

Dotzauer’s Trio in E moll für Pianoforte, Violine und Violoncello, Op. 180 was first documented in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Issue 35, from 1851 where, on page 96, we find the following announcement:

Bei W. Damköhler in Berlin erschien mit Eigenthumsrecht : Trio pour Piano, Violon et Violoncelle (dédié à Just. Frederic. Bernard. Dotzauer) par J. J. F. Dotzauer. Op. 180. Preis 2 1/2 Thlr.

This is an advertisement from the publisher Wilhelm Damköhler, who ran a “Verlagshandlung” (publishing house) in Berlin from October 1849 to July 1859, with distribution and delivery performed by Siegel & Stoll in Leipzig. Following the founder’s death on February 14, 1859, his business was sold to Edmund Stoll in Leipzig². The notice explains how the publisher, in Berlin, presented, with right of ownership, this Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello by J. J. F. Dotzauer, dedicated to his son Justus Frederich Bernhard, listed as Opus 180, and sold for two and a half Prussian thalers³. Sadly, this first edition appears not to be publicly available. Furthermore, no mention of performances is recorded in music-focused German news outlets.

The next time we read of this piece is in a couple of advertisements in Issue 70 (1874) of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and in the 1874 & 1875 issues of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. The advertisement—looking the same in all instances—is titled Werke für Kammermusik (Chamber Music Works) and subtitled with the full name of the publisher, ”F. E. C. Leuckart (Constantin Sander) in Leipzig”. The story of this publishing house is fascinating⁴, and it is, in some form, still running today under a different name and property.

It is interesting to see how Leuckart decided to publish this piece in 1874, twenty-one years after its original publication. Even further, the cover mentions how the work was distributed in France by Jacques Maho (later acquired by Jacques Hamelle, Alphonse Ledus, and, eventually, Wise Music Group). The piece may, after all, have recovered some popularity and even gotten a few performances.

The copy used to create this edition is stored at the New York City Public Library⁵, to whose personnel go my heartfelt thanks for making the material available for this research. It is made up of three elements, a full score (41 pp.) and two parts (7, 7 pp.), printed on 226 × 340 mm cream-coloured paper. It bears plate number FECL 2585 on all of them, even if the outer cover shows a faintly printed FECL 2071.

Several inconsistencies have been found between score and parts, and they are all listed in the Critical Notes at the end of the present volume.

Bottom Line

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1. Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, No. 40 (1838). Article N° 20 from May 16th. ↩
2. Thank you to Bernd Krause of Büro für Geschichtswissenschaften for finding this information. ↩
3. Based on the document “Purchasing power equivalents of historical amounts in German currencies” accessible here, the score and parts set of this piece was sold at the equivalent of about EUR 100 today (2024). Link for physical copy: https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/622372/d64726452d1eb2f62ce667f6784f89bb/mL/kaufkraftaequivalente-historischer-betraege-in-deutschen-waehrungen-data.pdf ↩
4. Read more here: https://imslp.org/wiki/F.E.C._Leuckart ↩
5. https://www.nypl.org/research/research-catalog/bib/b22809906 ↩