In their efforts to break away from the strictures of the classical period, 19^th century composers often wrote short compositions to express a mood or sentiment rather than to work out musical ideas in a formal fashion. Written mostly for the piano, these so-called "character pieces" generally bore titles suggesting smallness or casualness. Thus, Beethoven wrote bagatelles; Schubert, impromptus and moments musicaux; Mendelssohn, "songs without words" and "children’s pieces"; Brahms, intermezzi; and Chopin, nocturnes, preludes and ballades.

Schumann was perhaps the most imaginative coiner of designations, contributing phantasiestücke (fantasy pieces), nachtstücke (night pieces), albumblätter (album leaves), novelettes, arabeskes and humoreskes. Further, he invented such descriptive titles as Papillons (Butterflies), Carnaval (Carnival), Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), Märchenbilder (Fairy Pictures), Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Fables), and Faschingsschwank aus Wien (Carnival Prank from Vienna). Schumann was the first to extend these fanciful titles from the solo piano to chamber music, particularly to informal hausmusik, works designed for family performance in the living room.

For two of these informal works, Schumann took the word märchen – literally "fairy tales" – from a favorite narrative form in 19^th century German literature.

In its literary setting, the term had two possible meanings. On the one hand, it could denote simple folk tales such as those collected by the brothers Grimm or tales written in imitation of folk style. On the other hand, it could refer to deeply philosophical or allegorical tales by such writers as Goethe and E.T.A. Hoffman. Either way, a märchen was usually set in a fantastic realm rather than in the real world.

Schumann read these tales for his own enjoyment and to his children, and was inspired to create musical counterparts. For example, in his Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), Op. 82, he composed nine short piano pieces with titles like "Lonely Flowers," "Friendly Landscape" and "Prophet Bird" to depict musically the enchanted forest scenes portrayed in literary märchen. He then went a step further, composing two märchen-inspired works without any specific scenes in mind – that is, works that expressed in general terms the märchen’s fanciful world.

Each of the two works – Märchenbilder, Op. 113, composed in 1851, and Märchenerzählungen, Op. 132, composed two years later – was created for an unusual and distinctive combination of instruments. Thus, Schuman composed the former piece for viola and piano rather than the usual violin and piano, and in the latter he added a clarinet to this unusual grouping.

Schumann had two reasons for this choice of instruments. First, he wanted a darker sound to portray the märchen world, and with its lower range, the viola seemed more appropriate than the customary violin. Then, in Op. 132, a clarinet seemed more suitable as an additional instrument than a flute or oboe, since the viola and clarinet have a similar range and a matching rich, dark sound, making possible an intimate dialogue.

Second, to enhance the marketability of the two märchen-related works for domestic use, Schumann wrote them for the viola, whose repertory is thin compared with the wealth of material for the violin. While in each case he offered the violin as an alternative, they have remained mainly viola pieces.

In Fairy Tales, Op. 132, Schumann returned to the writing of the informal "miniatures" that he favored in earlier years but with the darker coloration of the viola. The third movement is particularly poignant, with the viola and clarinet sharing a song-like theme over rocking 16th notes in the piano.

The movement captions can be translated as follows: "Lively, not too fast;" "Lively and clearly accented;" "Calmly, with tender expression;" and "Lively, clearly accented."

The Hungarian Zoltán Kodály was a man of many parts. In addition to his composing, he was an educator, serving as professor and then assistant director at the Budapest Academy of Music. He was a music critic for newspapers and journals in Hungary and the author of numerous scholarly writings on central European folk music. And he was an internationally recognized music educator; his "Kodály method" for developing musical literacy in schoolchildren has been adapted to many other countries including the United States.

Perhaps most important, he was a leading ethno-musicologist, working with Béla Bartók in compiling and editing more than 3,000 Hungarian folk songs – that is, authentic Magyar songs free from the gypsy encrustations heard in European cafes. Over a 10-year period, starting in 1905, Kodály and Bartók spent their summers touring Hungarian villages and recording songs on wax or jotting them down in notation as the villagers sang them. This pioneer effort resulted in a series of authoritative folk-song collections and studies, starting in 1905 and extending over the next 60 years.

Like Bartók, in his composing Kodály was committed to furthering the musical heritage of his country, drawing his subjects from Hungarian literature and folklore and seasoning his music with the pungent vigor of Hungarian peasant idioms. In this regard, Bartók paid his friend the highest praise: "If I were asked," he wrote, "in whose music the spirit of Hungary is most perfectly embodied, I would reply, in Kodály’s. His music is a profession of faith in the spirit of Hungary. His work as a composer is entirely rooted in the soil of Hungarian folk music."

But unlike Bartók, Kodály wrote mainly in a late romantic style, conservative in its harmonic language and easily accessible to modern audiences. Several of his nationalist compositions have a won a permanent place in the international repertoire – his national opera Hary Janos and the orchestral suite drawn from it, "Peacock" Variations, Galanta and Marosszék Dances for orchestra, and Psalmus Hungaricus for chorus and orchestra.

Kodály composed the Duo for Violin and Cello in 1914 at the height of his interest in Hungarian folk music, and the work reflects that interest. Folk elements and idioms abound – for example, the use of five-tone scales and early modal church scales, abrupt changes in mood, extravagant ornamentation, and long rhapsodic passages as if the instruments were telling a story or reciting a poem. You might imagine yourself in the square of a Hungarian village on a summer evening listening to the local fiddler and cellist extemporize – except that the music demands virtuoso technical skills far beyond the average village musician.

The first movement is in conventional sonata form – that is, with the presentation of two themes, their development, and their restatement. The first theme is declaimed at the outset by the cello, with the violin punctuating with double-stop chords; then the violin takes up the theme. The second theme is ushered in by a bouncing pizzicato figure in the cello, against which the violin offers a more tranquil melody. When the themes return later in the movement, the instrumental roles are reversed, with the violin shrieking the first theme in its highest register and the cello launching the second theme.

The second movement introduces a mood of despair – Kodály’s biographer László Eösze speculates that it may reflect the composer’s sense of foreboding on the imminence of World War I. Three thematic elements are heard in the opening measures – the first, a moody monologue for the cello; the second, an undulating figure for the violin, and the third, an outcry by the violin high in the instrument. These elements are developed with mounting tension, and the music then dies down into a state of weariness and desperation.

The third movement opens with a long and highly rhapsodic solo for the violin. The music then breaks into a series of highly accented dances, played at a presto pace. To this listener, however, the feeling of sadness carries over from the preceding movement, and the emphatic chords ending the work underscore the composer’s depressed mood.

Dohnányi – sometimes known by his Germanized name Ernst von Dohnányi – was the oldest of the three and the first to achieve fame outside Hungary. In 1895, his Opus 1, a piano quintet, was acclaimed by Brahms. In 1898, he made his reputation as a pianist in London with a performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto, and his introduction into the repertory of some neglected works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. In 1899, his First Piano Concerto won the Bösendorfer Prize in Vienna. By 1900, he was considered the greatest Hungarian pianist and composer after Liszt.

In 1915, Dohnányi returned to Budapest and undertook the reshaping and modernizing of Hungary’s musical life. He became a teacher of conducting and piano and then director of the Budapest Academy of Music; chief conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic, a post he held for 25 years; and music director of the Hungarian radio. In addition to his own music, he introduced the music of Bartók and Kodály, as both conductor and pianist, at home and abroad.

His career was interrupted by the rise of Nazi influences in Hungary and by World War II. In 1941, he resigned as director of the Academy rather than comply with anti-Jewish legislation affecting his faculty members. He kept Jewish members of the orchestra until the German occupation, when he disbanded the ensemble. In November, 1944, he went to Austria; while he took no part in that country’s political or musical life, that decision drew criticism from anti-Nazis for many years.

After World War II, Dohnányi lived in London and then Argentina and finally settled in the United States. In September, 1949, he became pianist and composer-in-residence at Florida State University, and remained in that position until his death in New York while making phonograph records. While in the U. S., he was joined by his grandson, Christoph von Dohnányi, who came to study conducting with Leonard Bernstein and returned in 1984 to become music director of the Cleveland Orchestra.

In his own compositions, Brahms was Dohnányi’s primary influence – unlike Bartók, he was interested not in finding new paths but in expressing his late Romantic heritage in late 19th century forms. A conservative by nature, he sought in these forms a framework for his lyrical gifts and frequent flashes of musical wit. He was particularly successful in chamber music, and his nine major works in this field are of high originality and craftsmanship.

Composed in 1937, the C Major Sextet calls for the unusual combination of piano, clarinet, horn, violin, viola and cello. Its primary structural characteristic is its striving for organic unity through the use from movement to movement of the same thematic germ – namely, two descending notes. The rhythm of the notes and the interval between then varies, but the pattern is the mainspring of the entire sextet.

The first movement, marked allegro appassionato, is in traditional sonata form. It opens with a horn call over an agitated accompaniment, the theme beginning with the two descending notes and then expanding on them. The more lyrical second theme, presented by the violin, presents the pattern in repeated dropping thirds. In the third theme, more mysterious in tone, the two-note pattern starts a dropping line which then rises.

The second movement, although titled "Intermezzo," is marked adagio and is in effect the slow movement. The first theme, introduced by the piano and strings in rich harmony, further elaborates the descending two-note pattern but in a more leisurely flow. The mood is interrupted by a stumbling dotted rhythm in the piano against which the winds intone a broad Brahms-like melody generated by the two-note pattern and building up to a climax.

The scherzo opens with the clarinet playing another, more delicate, expansion of the dropping two-note pattern. For contrast, there is an agitated middle section. These two elements alternate, leading eventually to a recollection in swaying rhythm of the horn theme of the first movement.

The fourth movement is pure mischief. The main theme is a dance tune in the style of 1930s European jazz; the two-note pattern now appears at the end of each phrase, the second note repeated twice for emphasis. This theme alternates with other material, notably a corny waltz. The sextet ends with a return to the horn call of the opening movement and a final bow by the two-note pattern, this time going uphill.