In composing a piano trio, I fulfilled a long-fostered desire. This is a genre which, like the string quartet tradition, can slightly intimidate any composer. I too waited patiently but anxiously to make my own contribution. The pre-history of the piece is closely tied to my Music Epic about the devil, La Trahison orale (Oral Betrayal), which I wrote in 1981-83. When conceiving this work, I had already decided to compose character pieces, relatively short numbers with a particular mood, which could be compared gesturally to songs without words. It may seem strange that today, one can once again compose music with this kind of literary background; yet the development of music history shows that things don't go in a straight line, but are stirred and tangled up by aesthetic needs. I didn't specify an instrumentation for Trahison orale, instead, I produced a sort of piano score, since this seemed to me the most suitable way of realising what I had in mind. One of the essential lessons we can learn from the Romantic era is the primacy of musical substance over specific timbres. So long as the power of imagination is sufficiently impressive, it can be truly expressed by a variety of sonic resources. From the very start, I had in mind a paraphrase of my Music Epic for the classical combination of violin, cello and piano. I now worked this up as a three-movement composition, with a hint of a rondo about it. One might compare this piano trio to a polyphonic web of character pieces, in which prominent features keep emerging, following through, stopping abruptly, coming up from the background to the surface, and slowly disappearing. Nevertheless, this is absolute music in the classic sense - concealing the true causes of the absolute. M.K.