Claude Debussy

Trio

This critical edition of the Trio is an excerpt from the COMPLETE WORKS OF CLAUDE DEBUSSY, Series III, volume 1.

Debussy's Piano Trio, his second surviving instrumental work, dates from late summer 1880, just as the composer was turning eighteen. The Trio was long thought to have survived only in an autograph score of its opening movement, plus a cello part showing three more movements. In the early 1980s the musicologist Ellwood Derr discovered Debussy's score of those remaining three movements in the University of Michigan music library (Ann Arbor), among a bequest of musical miscellanea from the French pianist Maurice Dumesnil. Dumesnil had acquired the manuscript in 1932 from Debussy's widow Emma. Debussy's Trio, his first major work, shows an astonishingly bold and accomplished young musician with evident ease at the piano.