A distance of nearly ten years separates the dozen or so youthful string quartets composed by Franz Schubert during his initial teenage plunge into the realm of chamber music and the three late quartet masterpieces of 1824-1826. Schubert's mind—and his pen—were little occupied with string instruments between these two peaks, but he did find time in his astoundingly busy schedule to come up with two string trios, D. 471 and D. 581, both in B flat major and both composed during the month of September: D. 471 in 1816 and D. 581 in 1817. The String Trio in B flat major, D. 471 is, like so many of Schubert's instrumental works, an incomplete composition, comprising only a first movement and some thirty-nine bars of a second, slower one. It is nevertheless a much-loved piece of music in which we can fully hear the nineteen-year-old composer's deep admiration for the music of the Viennese masters whose legacy he inherited—Haydn somewhat, Mozart especially, and maybe Salieri, Schubert's own teacher until the end of 1816, a little bit. D. 471 certainly does not showcase Schubert's unique musical personality in the same way that the Lieder of 1815 and 1816 do; it seems to have been more Schubert's intent to draw a piece of music from the crystal-clear waters of true musical Classicism as he had absorbed it during his childhood in Vienna. It is music of sparkle and no little wit, to be played with a smile and a even a wink or two.

D. 471, scored for the usual string trio ensemble of violin, viola, and cello, is in effect a single-movement composition, as the unfinished second movement can really be performed only as a novelty item. The sole complete movement is an example of Classical sonata-allegro form, marked Allegro by the composer. The opening theme is given by the violin without introduction of any kind, to an accompaniment of oscillating eighth notes in the viola and a long-held B flat in the cello that soon enough breaks off to imitate a more articulated idea played by the violin in the second bar of the theme. After repeating this four-bar, pianissimo thought, Schubert moves on to offer up some light-hearted triplets in the violin and a rich twelve-bar transition, built around a B flat pedal-point in the viola part, to the second theme. In this second theme area (in F major) Schubert finds room for both some happy, spiccato mini-cadences and some brilliant, forte descending scales in octaves. The coda to the exposition is in three sections (the last of which is really a codetta to the coda), the sum total of which take up just as much time as the entire exposition-proper did.

Development is simple and straightforward in D. 471: most of the fifty-four-bar development section is spent making one or another use of the melodic gesture by which Schubert closed the final bar of the exposition (the main themes don't really appear at all, save the first theme in vague rhythmic outline and the second in one fleeting reference). All is as a Classicist would expect it to be in the recapitulation. The opening theme reappears unchanged, the second idea is recast to suit the tonic key, and the same alternation of tonic harmony with a pseudo-Neapolitan chord (as outlined by a quarter-note arpeggiation in the cello, to which the violin and viola add the piquant idea of an augmented sixth) that closed the exposition is reused to bring the entire movement to a colorful final cadence.

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