During his lifetime Menotti was generally esteemed as a writer for the theater, having composed 28 operas including such successes as Amelia Goes to the Ball, The Old Maid and the Thief (initially for radio) The Medium, The Telephone, The Consul, Amahl and the Night Visitors (initially for television) and The Saint of Bleecker Street. The truth of the matter, however, is that, while Amahl is still a perennial Christmas favorite, Menotti’s operas in recent years have lost much of their initial impact, and the 20 operas he wrote after 1956 are now largely forgotten.

Menotti partially made up for this fall-off by producing music in other forms – several ballets and choral works, six concertos for various instruments, a symphony, a stage play with music, and a raft of chamber music. As an outlet for his music in all forms, moreover, he founded two festivals – the Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, and its American counterpart, the Spoleto Festival US in Charleston, South Carolina. The two festivals have given American musicians, composers and choreographers an important venue for performance of new works, and the events still draw large and enthusiastic audiences every spring and summer.

Menotti was an Italian-born composer who spent most of his life in the United States. He began his formal musical training at Milan’s Verdi Conservatory, but after the death of his father, he and his mother emigrated to the United States, where he enrolled in Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute. Fellow students included Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber, and Barber became Menotti’s partner in life and work, sharing a house in Mount Kisco, New York, for over 40 years.

In 1950 Menotti won the Pulitzer Prize for The Consul, and in 1955 a second Pulitzer for The Saint of Bleecker Street. In 1984 he was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors for achievement in the arts, and in 1991 he was chosen Musical America’s "Musician of the Year."

In 1973, Menotti wrote this Suite for Two Cellos and Piano for performance at the Spoleto festival in Italy by the great cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and his young Canadian student and assistant, Denis Brott. According to critic Will Crutchfield in The New York Times: "The suite testified that his chamber music, though not questing or gripping, has been sensitively conceived, and skillfully and affectionately carried out, to a degree that has been elusive in the operas."

There are four movements. The "Introduction" is a declamatory piece for the two cellos in a dotted rhythm over heavy chords in the piano. The "Scherzo" is more playful with technical demands on all three instruments. The "Arioso" is an eloquent duet for the two cellos with the piano again largely in an accompaniment role. The "Finale" is a fast, lively summing up for all three instruments.

Mendelssohn was arguably the most precocious young composer in the history of western music. When he was only 16 years old, he composed his Octet for Strings, a work without precedent, calling for eight independent string instruments – four violins, two violas and two cellos – and still a repertory favorite with musicians and audiences. Not even Mozart or Schubert produced an instrumental work of such maturity or inventiveness at so early an age.

The following year Mendelssohn followed up his Octet with this string quintet – two violins, two violas and a cello. Without the brilliant originality of the Octet, this work also demonstrated the young composer’s mastery of the classical structures he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart. It also incorporated Mendelssohn’s advances in writing for the violin – advances resulting from his contact as a teenager with some of the foremost musicians of his day.

Young Felix’s achievements resulted from a fortunate coincidence of talent and opportunity. When he was a growing up, his father, a wealthy Berlin banker, made a practice of inviting professional musicians to his home on Sunday mornings to join the family in informal music-making. These weekly concerts gave the young composer a "workshop" in which to experiment with his creative ideas.

But this arrangement had one limitation. In those days, wind players were considered socially inferior, and the Sunday visitors were all string and piano players. Mendelssohn’s early instrumental works, consequently, were for strings alone or strings with piano. In addition to the usual chamber-music forms, he produced 12 "string symphonies" to give his imagination freer rein in varying his instrumental combinations.

Equally important in Mendelssohn’s development, at the age of 15 he began violin lessons with the young concertmaster of the Berlin court orchestra and founder of the Berlin Philharmonic, Edward Rietz. Rietz was seven years older than Mendelssohn, and the two became close friends and colleagues – Rietz was, in fact, the concertmaster at Mendelssohn’s historic performance in 1829 of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. From Rietz Mendelssohn gained further insight into the capabilities of the violin, which he incorporated into his music.

Unlike the Octet, which was published as initially composed, the quintet went through considerable revision. Originally the work consisted of four movements – Allegro con moto, Scherzo, Minuet and Trio and Allegro vivace. However, in 1832 while in Paris on a concert tours, Mendelssohn learned of Rietz’s sudden death. As a farewell tribute to his teacher and friend, Mendelssohn composed an Intermezzo captioned "Nachruf" (In Memoriam) as a second movement for the quintet. He then made the original scherzo the third movement, discarded the minuet and trio, and published the work in this revised form as Op. 18.

In composing the quintet, the young Mendelssohn fell back on the classic forms he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart while anticipating the structural freedom and heightened individual expression that were becoming the hallmarks of Romantic music.

The first movement, allegro con moto, for example, is cast in classical sonata form, and its first theme is reminiscent of a Mozart minuet. Instead of proceeding to a second theme, however, Mendelssohn first presents a highly rhythmic transient theme, introduced by the cello and accompanied by slow moving violas. This theme is extended at some length and takes on added importance in the development.

Eventually, there is a second theme whose playful cross rhythms interact with the three-four meter of the first theme. All of these elements are subjected in the long development to skilled contrapuntal treatment and harmonic warmth leading to an impressive climax.

The Intermezzo, andante sostenuto, is also in 3/4 rhythm and sonata form and is the emotional heart of the quintet. In addition to being a memorial to Rietz, Mendelssohn wanted to pay tribute to another violinist, Pierre Marie Baillot, a concert artist who was then bringing Mendelssohn’s new compositions to the attention of Parisian audiences. The texture, consequently, takes on the concerto-style of violin writing, exploiting the full expressive range of the two violins, while preserving the independent parts characteristic of chamber music for the other instruments. Note also the brief four-note descending figure that starts the main theme and the way it is movingly used to add pathos throughout the movement.

The third movement, allegro di molto, is the Scherzo, although it departs from convention in being in duple rather than triple time and has no contrasting "trio." It is another example of the light, tripping, "fairyland" scherzos that Mendelssohn originated in the Octet and became his specialty. The mock-serious theme is introduced canonically – that is, in overlapping entrances first by the second viola, then sequentially by the first viola, second violin, cello, and first violin.

The fourth movement, allegro vivace, is in the sonata-rondo form that was a favorite of Mozart. The main theme recurs as a refrain with intervening episodes, but one of the episodes is a development of the main theme. In this case, the Mendelssohn touch is the incorporation in the development of five-part counterpoint, with two fugal episodes, and the final blending of all these elements into the brilliant conclusion.

The C Minor Piano Quartet was perhaps the most painfully autobiographical of Brahms’s instrumental works. Although completed in 1875, its roots went back 20 years to the most stressful period of his life – namely, his ill-fated love affair with Clara Schumann, wife of composer Robert Schumann. Brahms himself pointed out the impact of that traumatic experience on this quartet, and a summary of the affair will set the stage.

Brahms met Robert and Clara Schumann in September, 1853, when, at the suggestion of mutual friends, he knocked on their door in Düsseldorf. At the time, Robert, 43, was a prominent composer, conductor and music journalist, and Clara, 34, was a leading concert pianist. Brahms, only 20, was still a struggling young composer. Brahms played his music for the Schumanns, and they were deeply impressed. Clara added Brahms’s piano works to her concert programs, and Schumann, in a widely read article, proclaimed that here at last was the heir to Beethoven.

Brahms became a frequent visitor and intimate family friend of the Schumanns, and witnessed Robert’s growing mental illness. Then, in February, 1854, Brahms read in a newspaper that Schumann had attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine. He hurried to Düsseldorf to help Clara and her six children in any way he could, and he became virtually a full-time guest in the Schumann home. In March, Robert was institutionalized. His doctors prohibited Clara from visiting him on the grounds that he would be upset by such visits, and Brahms became the primary contact between husband and wife. Then in the autumn, Clara embarked on an extensive concert tour to support her family, pay Robert’s medical bills, and continue bringing Robert’s works to the public. In effect, she left her household in Brahms’s care; he took over some of Clara’s teaching, helped the servants look after the children, and took charge of the family’s financial affairs – rent, servants’ wages, school fees, even investments.

While deeply distressed by Robert’s declining health, Brahms’s devotion to Clara soon turned to love. With complete candor, he expressed his feelings in letters to Clara while she was on tour or on his rare absences from Düsseldorf. Did Clara reciprocate? Since Brahms subsequently destroyed all her responses, we cannot be sure, but the entries in her diary suggest that she found him exciting and attractive and his attentions flattering. There is no evidence, however, that the affair was ever consummated physically.

Schumann died in the asylum in July, 1856. During the following year, Brahms again expressed his love to Clara, but one or both parties apparently decided against marriage. We can only speculate on the possible reasons: the 14-year difference in their ages; Clara’s six children; her reputation as a concert pianist while he was still making his mark as a composer; his inhibitions – despite other affairs, he never did marry. Brahms’s ardor cooled, but Clara and he remained close friends until her death 40 years later, and Clara was always among the first to hear and to criticize Brahms’s compositions.

In the winter of 1855-56 – at the height of his affair with Clara and his anxiety over Robert’s health – Brahms wrote a piano quartet in C sharp minor. It was performed privately with friends, but Brahms was dissatisfied. His customary practice when dissatisfied with a composition was to destroy the manuscript. In this case, he set the work aside, suggesting that it had a special meaning for him and that he planned to return to it.

And there matters rested until the winter of 1873-74 when Brahms took the quartet from the shelf and began a process of revision and reorganization that lasted until the summer of 1875. He throughly revised the first movement, dropping the key a half-step from C sharp minor to C minor; composed new slow and final movements; and added a scherzo, using material from the finale of the original. The revised quartet was then given its first performance in Vienna the following November.

But Brahms was still not ready to sign off. When he played the revised quartet for Clara, she was impressed by the last three movements but was critical of the first. Brahms accordingly made further alterations to the first movement in the printer’s proofs.

The original quartet undoubtedly reflected the emotional distress of his relations with Clara, and in conversations and correspondence Brahms implied that these tensions applied as well to the revision. He often referred to his stay with the Schumanns as his "Wertherzeit", an allusion to Goethe’s popular romantic hero, Werther, who shoots himself because of his anguished and guilt-ridden love for a married woman whose husband he admires. He also used the Werther image in connection with both the original quartet and the revision.

The first movement – common to both the original and the revised quartet – sets a mood of darkness and melancholy. After a solid piano chord, the strings present the moody first theme, starting with a striking two-note phrase. A recent Brahms biographer, Malcolm MacDonald, suggests that the phrase "speaks the name ‘Clara’ " and that the theme’s continuation is a version of the "Clara motive" that Schumann used in his music for her. At any rate, the two-note pattern plays a key role in the movement. The second theme is also of interest. The piano presents the eight-measure theme, and it seems unusually lyrical for so tense a movement. But Brahms then subjects the theme to four variations of increasing intensity, restoring the dark mood of the opening. The development begins with the two-note motive from the first theme, and its repetition and intensification leads to a restless treatment of the second theme’s second variation. The first and second themes are restated – the former in a strenuous new form and the latter with three new variations and a repeat of the second variation. The coda leaves the tension of the movement unresolved.

The second movement is the added scherzo – fast, vigorous, and intense, and, like the first movement, in a minor key. Instead of the contrasting middle section customary in a scherzo, the main section leads without pause to an episode that, while in a major key, scarcely changes the mood.

The deeply felt slow movement is thought by some biographers to be a declaration of love for Clara. The cello presents the main theme in a long solo written for the most part in the instrument’s higher register. The music gathers intensity as the first violin joins in. The second theme is a gentle syncopated strain introduced by the first violin. When the first theme returns, it is presented by the piano in octaves accompanied by a pizzicato figure for the viola and cello.

The fourth movement returns to the dark mood of the first. The first violin opens the movement with a 28-measure statement of the first theme accompanied by agitated eighth-notes in the piano. The second theme, stated by the violin, continues this restlessness, but the third theme, a chorale-like strain in the violin and viola, provides some relief. The development is based largely on the main and chorale themes, spun out at some length with much of it marked "tranquil and always very soft." In the coda, the piano hammers out the chorale tune in a strong C major, but a sense of fatalism persists, and the quartet ends on a note of resignation.