WoO 99 No. 2 – “Ma tu tremi, o mio tesoro”: Beethoven’s Italian Trio from Metastasio’s “La tempesta”
Hess 212 – Song 5: Trio “Ma tu tremi, o mio tesoro!”; for soprano, contralto and tenor; in G major; 20 bars and da capo; Thayer, song 5. [WoO 99, no. 6.] Text taken from Metastasio’s cantata La tempesta. Composed around 1792–4. [Published by Hess in SBG, vol. 1, 1959, p. 13.]
The text: “Ma tu tremi, o mio tesoro, ma tu palpiti, cor mio! Non temer; con te son io, né d’amor ti parlerò. Mentre folgori e baleni, sarò teco amata Nice, quando il ciel si rassereni, Nice ingrata, io partirò.”
Artaria 166 – page 10
Artaria 166 – page 11
The original is located in Berlin in the Staatsbibliothek, pages 10–11. This trio occupies the two full pages of the manuscript. It was catalogued by Willy Hess with the number 212 and by Giovanni Biamonti as Biamonti 60.
I do not agree with the example given by W. Hess in the appendix to the song in the first volume of the Gesamtausgabe: in the tenor part, bar 13, the first G, as can be seen from the example below, is dotted.
Bar 13
Nor do I agree with Hess’s second statement: the B in the contralto is clearly incorrect; I have kept the original note even though, in fact, two parallel octaves are created by contrary motion between soprano and contralto. Bar 17