After an award of the Légion d'honneur and some gentle prodding, Fauré—now completely deaf—gave up his directorship of the Paris Conservatoire on October 1, 1920. On the second day of 1922, with the triumph of his Piano Quintet No. 2 the previous spring fading into memory, he wrote to his friend Fernand Bourgeat, "I feel dreadfully the onset of old age and I regret not finding my freedom sooner...I've done good work even so. I've finished a 13th nocturne." In March, from Nice, he wrote to his wife, "I'm doing absolutely nothing and haven't thought of two notes worth writing down since I've been here. Have I come to the end of my resources?" Jacques Durand, his publisher, had suggested in January that he compose a trio for piano, violin, and cello, but Fauré would not take up the challenge until April in Paris. Staying at Argèles through July to revisit childhood haunts, he asked that sketches for the Trio be sent after him—only to contract bronchial pneumonia near the end of the month. By mid-August he was back in Annecy-le-Vieux, in Savoy, where the Piano Quintet No. 2 had taken shape over the summers of 1919 and 1920. "I've started a trio for clarinet (or violin), cello, and piano," he wrote to his wife on September 26, 1922. "The trouble is that I can't work for long at a time. My worst tribulation is perpetual fatigue." Returning to Paris for the winter, he completed the Trio in mid-February 1923. Durand published it the same year as a Trio for piano, violin, and violoncello, probably with the composer's assent—the violin part contains passages of double-stopping—while the idea of using a clarinet seems to have quietly fallen by the wayside.

Despite its small scale and general restraint, much happens in the succinct opening Allegro ma non troppo. Two long-breathed melodies—the first wavering between elegy and lament, the second trailing a childhood memory of distant bells—receive a replete exposition and contrapuntal development, with a new exposition (rather than a recapitulation) and development rounded with a coda of defiant despair. The Andantino, the most extensive of the Trio's three movements and the one with which Fauré had begun the composition, opens with a fiat of the most lambent lyricism shared by violin and cello, answered by a piquantly harmonized, heart-stopping melody on the piano from whose interplay he spins a delicate, exquisitely modulated, but puissant pathos. Much has been made of the resemblance of the Finale's opening rappel à l'ordre and the cry "Ridi, Pagliaccio" from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci (e.g., "La commedia è finita"). Tempting as that may be, an allusion was unintended. More remarkable is that the phrase, several times repeated, introduces an elegantly rumbustious, thumpingly accented, plein air rustic dance—a last surprise from the old magician. The premiere was given at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique on May 12, 1923, by Robert Krettly, violin; Jacques Patté, cello; and Tatiana Sanzévitch, piano.

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