The poet, musician and journalist Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart characterized the key of B-flat major in his "Aesthetics of Tonal Art" as follows: "cheerful love, good conscience, hope, longing for a better world." A few decades later, his fellow composer Franz Schubert, phonetically related to him by surname, wrote his Piano Trio in B flat major. We do not know for sure whether Schubart's writings were familiar to him - but it cannot be excluded. The great trio in B-flat major was composed a year before Schubert died, a time already strongly marked by the composer's illness and possible premonition of death. If one understands the work as a kind of swan song, it conveys one thing above all in its drama and emotionality, which flash up again and again: the hope of finding peace through the departure into another, better world.

For very personal reasons, we as an ensemble programmatically link Schubert's trio with a work that is contradictory at first glance: Claude Debussy wrote his only composition for this instrumentation in 1880 at the age of 18. The reason for working on a piano trio was his patroness at the time, Mrs. Nadezhda von Meck: she was already protégéing Tchaikovsky. Under the impression of his beginning studies in the metropolis of Paris on the one hand, and his suddenly sophisticated lifestyle on the journeys throughout Europe on the other, Debussy created an early work full of energy, optimism and joyful expectation in Italy - similar to Schubert's, only with a clearly life-affirming expression. To work on these pieces during a study stay in Italy, which was made possible for us also by a generous patron, was a great source of inspiration for us. Not least in times of a pandemic that has lasted for years, both works call us to never close our own horizons to what lies ahead.