Palazzetto Bru Zane - Centre de Musique Romantique Française

At the dawn of the nineteenth century in France, many trios were written with the possibility of performance by alternative instruments: for piano (or harpsichord), violin (or flute), cello (or bassoon). The keyboard was nevertheless still predominant.

Until around 1815, this repertoire, intended for the private use of amateur musicians, was rarely performed in public. It consists of works by composers who were French by birth or by adoption (Pleyel, for example), and ones by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The genre flourished in Germany under the influence of virtuoso pianists, and Parisian artists regarded the trios of Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn as models of the genre. Thus, Onslow came to be known, largely because of his ten or so trios, as the "French Beethoven". The four-movement form became common, with brilliant piano parts that nevertheless left room for expressive lyricism from the strings.

While many authors (Chopin, David and Reber, for instance) had composed piano trios occasionally up till then, the founding of the Société Nationale de Musique in 1871 led to a flurry of such compositions, with Saint-Saëns, Dubois, Widor and Castillon, then Fauré, Debussy and Ravel turning to the genre. Among those trios, the five written between 1844 and 1860 by Théodore Gouvy pay tribute to the Germanic aesthetic, and especially to that of Mendelssohn.