Beyond the considerable analytical literature devoted to it, the trio enjoys a special place in Schubert's biography because of its central position in the only concert during his lifetime devoted exclusively to his own works. Further, the synergy between theory and musicology has produced a perspective that the composer's creative strategies, particularly in the second movement, served as a musical tribute to the recently deceased Beethoven, the predecessor who loomed largest in Schubert's compositional thought. This study's foregoing argument—establishing the musical relationship between “Ave Maria” and the trio's first movement, and documenting the former as a much-admired song beginning with its debut performances by Johann Michael Vogl and the composer—provides the foundation for the proposal that the choice of this self-quotation was part of Schubert's plan to commemorate his forebear. The principal facts surrounding this concert have been well rehearsed in recent scholarship, and certain details are repeated here only to provide the evidentiary adhesive for the thesis that Schubert quoted this particular song with the expectation that some in his audience would recognize and appreciate the homage.

Carl Maria von Bocklet (piano), Josef Bohm (violin), and Josef Linke (cello) played the trio on March 26, 1828, in the hall of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde at a performance announced as a “private concert” to benefit the composer. In letter and diary, those in attendance indicated that the event was a triumph, artistically and financially: “I shall never forget how glorious it was” (Franz von Hartmann); “enormous applause, good receipts” (Eduard von Bauernfeld); “everybody was lost in a frenzy of admiration and rapture” in the “packed” hall (Marie von Pratobevera, who emphasized that “only compositions by himself were given, and gloriously”); and Schubert himself (in letters separately offering the trio to the firms of Schott and Probst): such “extraordinary applause” from a “jam-packed” audience that he had been invited to repeat the concert. Despite the favorable if brief German notices following the premiere, no one in the Viennese press took notice despite the fact that three local journals had published an announcement of the concert on March 25.