Ferenc Farkas was born in 1905 into a musical family; his mother played the piano, and his father played the cimbalom, a Roma dulcimer. After studying in Budapest and Rome in the 1920s, he eventually moved to Vienna and Copenhagen, where he wrote music for Scandinavian films. He eventually returned to Hungary and, from 1949 to 1975, was a professor of composition at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. He earned a reputation as one of the leading Hungarian composers and teachers of his generation, including György Ligeti among his many famous students.

Although Farkas occasionally veered into 20th-century atonality, his music is mainly melodic and folk-infused. His Early Hungarian Dances from the 17th Century are an excellent illustration of Hungarian music’s impact on Farkas’ own compositions. As Farkas described the work,

In Hungarian music, folk songs are obviously of great importance, but our ancient airs and dances play a more modest role. For this work, I was influenced by 17th-century dances, written by unknown amateurs in a relatively simple style. Most of these dances were written between the 14th and 18th centuries in the usual form of tablature notation. My interest in this music was first captured in the 1940s. I was so fascinated that I decided to give these melodies new life. I assembled small eight-bar dances into trios, which I put together in the form of rondos, and, using the harmony and counterpoint of the Old Baroque, I tried to recreate the atmosphere of a “provincial” Hungarian Baroque style.

Franz Schubert was born into a typical 19th-century family: music was simply part of everyday life. The composer began writing chamber music as a teenager, not because he was expected to be a virtuoso but to have new things to play with his family. He had two brothers who were accomplished violinists, his father played the cello, and Schubert filled out the quartet on the viola. Schubert was not thinking about anything beyond the walls of his own home when he composed this music, yet the early quartets display some of the characteristics that typify later masterpieces like the Death and the Maiden quartet, like frequent use of tremolo and dramatic key changes. Given the circumstances that led to his interest in chamber works, it makes complete sense that when Schubert was asked at the end of his life to whom he wished to dedicate his E-flat Piano Trio, D. 929, he responded, “This work is dedicated to nobody, save those who find pleasure in it.”

Schubert did write chamber music intended for more accomplished players, particularly between 1824 and 1828 in the last five years of his life. As he wrote to his friend Leopold Kupelwieser on March 31, 1824, “I have written very few new songs, but instead I have tried my hand at several kinds of instrumental music and composed two string quartets [no less than the great A-minor Rosamunde and Death and the Maiden] and an octet ...The latest news in Vienna is that Beethoven is giving a concert, at which his new symphony, three selections from the new Mass, and a new overture are to be performed.” (The works by Beethoven to which Schubert refers—all performed at the same concert—were the Ninth Symphony, the Consecration of the House Overture, and the Missa Solemnis.)

Commissioned by Count Ferdinand von Troyer, one of Beethoven’s students and chief steward to Archduke Rudolph, Emperor Leopold II’s youngest brother, Schubert’s Octet came to life in just a few weeks between February and March 1824. The first performance occurred privately in April at the home of one of Troyer’s friends in Vienna, with Troyer himself on clarinet and Ignaz Schuppanzigh, whose string quartet premiered nearly all of Beethoven’s late string quartets, as first violin. Schuppanzigh led the Octet’s first public performance in 1827, too. The complete score was not published until the late 1880s.

A clarinet player, Troyer asked Schubert for a work modeled on Beethoven’s popular Septet for Winds and Strings, and Schubert complied. The instrumentation is nearly identical—clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, and cello—though Schubert adds a second violin. He also retains Beethoven’s six-movement form, based on the 18th-century serenade. And like Beethoven, Schubert begins the outer movements with slow introductions and uses both the outmoded minuet and forward-looking scherzo forms. Schubert’s unique flair for drama is entirely on display throughout the hour-long work, however. In the final movement, Schubert incorporates a quote from his song, “The Gods of Greece,” a setting of a poem about loss and the restorative powers of music:

Fair world, where are you? Return again,
sweet springtime of nature!
Alas, only in the magic land of song
does your fabled memory live on.

During the Octet’s composition, Schubert was going through personal travails. As he divulged to a friend, “I feel myself the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair over this makes things worse and worse instead of better.” As in “The Gods of Greece,” the “magic land of song” saves the day, and the dark mood of the Octet’s final movement ultimately gives way to light. As Schubert famously said, “When I attempted to sing of love, it turned to pain. And when I tried to sing of sorrow, it turned to love.”

Born in Hamburg in 1809, Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy spent much of his childhood in Berlin, where his wealthy parents became well-known arts patrons. Professional musicians often came to the house to perform for and with the family, and as a result, Mendelssohn got to know Rossini and Goethe, among others. They also ensured that their talented son, who excelled as a composer, pianist, organist, conductor, and visual artist, had the best possible instruction.

During one of their family Sunday musicals in 1847, Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny collapsed at the piano and died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Felix was too distraught to attend her funeral, and on doctor’s orders, he headed to Switzerland to recover. It was during this trip that he composed the F-minor Quartet. He wrote to his younger sister Rebecca, “I force myself to be industrious in the hope that later on I may feel like working and enjoying it.” After returning home and then to Berlin for a performance of Elijah, however, he saw the room in which his sister had collapsed. An observer wrote,

One of his Walpurgisnacht Choruses still remained at the piano open at the very page she had been playing. Nothing had been moved since her death, either in this room or the one where she died. They showed him both. He was excessively agitated, his grief burst out afresh, or more even than before. He told the King that it was impossible for him to superintend Elijah, and he returned to Leipzig.

Mendelssohn died two months later of a paralytic stroke at the age of 38. Published after his death, the F-minor Quartet illustrates the composer’s anguish. The first movement is full of bittersweet anger, while the ensuing Allegro is frantic and anguished. The third movement begins in a reflective mood, but gives way in the finale to the quartet’s opening despair.

Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1943, David Maslanka studied composition at Oberlin College with Joseph Wood. After a year at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, he earned his master’s and Ph.D. in music theory and composition at Michigan State University, working primarily with H. Owen Reed. Maslanka’s wind music is especially well-known. About a third of his oeuvre are pieces for wind ensemble, including eight symphonies, 17 concertos, a Mass, concert pieces, and many chamber works. Following his death in 2017, his music has been preserved and circulated by his son Matthew, an accomplished euphonium player and trombonist as well as an engraver and copyist whose projects included the Pixar film The Incredibles 2.

One of Maslanka’s lesser-known chamber works, the Wind Quintet No. 4, was commissioned by The Florida West Coast Symphony and premiered in 2008 by its resident Florida Wind Quintet. Gayle Williams wrote in the Herald-Tribune before the work’s premiere, “In remarks made from the stage before the performance, Maslanka said that music connects the soul to the mind. He said he has no idea where the music or the consciousness comes from, but it is the most essential part of who we are. He also said that music, for us, in the space and time of the world, is about the transformation of pain and suffering.”