Opinion: A new light

Claude Debussy in 1908
I sometimes get the nagging feeling, listening to piano trios, that there’s something missing. Something in the middle of the texture, perhaps? An emollient voice tempering the soloistic onslaught? Or am I simply a viola player envious because of my instrument’s absence from such a popular chamber music genre?
If the viola has suffered from being overshadowed by the violin and cello, Claude Debussy is one composer who helped it find an identity elsewhere. His Sonata for flute, viola and harp, completed in the autumn of 1915, may not have been the first time these instruments made a threesome together – there is a 1905 Terzettino by Théodore Dubois, the director of the Paris Conservatoire who warned students off attending the premiere of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. And Arnold Bax almost certainly wrote his Elegiac Trio of 1916 at around the same time, unaware of Debussy’s Sonata, which the composer himself only got to hear in December 1916. But it was surely Debussy’s renown that triggered the proliferation of works for this line-up – easily enough repertoire to keep a regular ensemble going.

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