Beethoven's Clarinet Trio, Op. 38

Excerpted from LP notes of Archiv Produktion [a.k.a. DGG] Recording 2533 118.

Beethoven's Septet Op. 20 for clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and double bass, first performed in 1800, was for many years his most popular and most successful work. It appealed greatly both to connoisseurs and to music lovers alike. Its popularity can be estimated by the large numbers of copies printed, and from the numerous transcriptions which were made for the most contrasting forces, ranging from an ensemble of eleven wind instruments to a simple arrangement for guitar; the most unexpected of them was, perhaps, a version of the Adagio as a song to the words "Innocent as a violet". Beethoven himself is said to have spoken about it rather critically in later years, once remarking that it possessed "natural feeling, but too little art". It is, however, to the directness of themusical experiences which this work has to offer, to its freedom from any problematic elements despite the fact that it never descends to the trivial, that the Septet owed its widespread popularity.

Beethoven's own reported sayings show that he was not averse to such arrangements when they helped his original compositions to become more widely known without distorting their basic musical content. The version of the Septet as a Piano Trio published in 1805 as Op. 38 is one of the few instances of an arrangement of an original work made by Beethoven himself. This particular arrangement was not made with a view to "greater distribution and profit", but had a more personal purpose behind it. Beethoven dedicated this version to the Viennese professor of medicine, Johann Adam Schmidt, whom he had consulted since about 1801 on account of his increasing deafness.