The three trios of Op. 9 were written between the years 1796-1798. Beethoven was only about 27 years old and had just begun to sprout his compositional wings. These were some of his first attempts, following only a few piano sonatas and earlier miscellaneous works. Previously Beethoven had been known chiefly as a keyboard player who, according to Cramer's Magazine, "plays the clavier very skillfully and with power, reads at sight very well and -- to put it in a nutshell -- he plays chiefly The Well-Tempered Clavichord of Sebastian Bach. which Herr Neefe (Christian Gottlob Neffe, his first real composition teacher) put into his hands. Whoever knows this collection of preludes and fugues in all the keys -- which might almost be called the ne plus ultra of our art -- will know what this means ... This youthful genius is deserving of help to enable him to travel. He would surely become a second Mozart were he to continue as he has begun."
According to Paul Bekker, a well known Beethoven biographer, "these trios are not only examples of Beethoven's work in its maturity, but in many ways surpass the Op. 18 quartets, and it is due to the superficiality of a too hurried and restless musical culture that works of such importance should have been so long neglected . . . None of his previously published works equaled them in gravity, in logic, in mastery of form and matter. They bear all the characteristic marks of Beethoven's great work for strings, the absolute intellectual clarity, the firmness of structure, and the sure poetic touch.
There is, indeed, a strong symphonic element in these Trios. It is frequently mentioned as a remarkable fact that Beethoven wrote no symphony before his thirtieth year, but it should not be forgotten that his symphonic bent was displayed much earlier in two directions -- in his love of dabbling in orchestral color as displayed in the works for wind instruments, and in his tendency to symphonic structure in the colorless yet intellectually weightier String Trios.
-- Kendall Durelle Briggs
