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The stunning discoveries came many years later, when the eminent American composer and Berg scholar George Perle (1915–2009) first described a copy of the printed score with extensive handwritten annotations in Berg’s hand. Berg had given that copy to Hanna Fuchs-Robettin of Prague, sister of the writer Franz Werfel. After Fuchs-Robettin’s death, her daughter inherited the score, and shared it with Perle in the 1970s. It turned out that Berg and Fuchs-Robettin were passionately in love with one another, but since they were both married and divorce was not an option for either, their relationship was doomed from the start. The Lyric Suite was nothing less than a coded love letter to Fuchs-Robettin.

Much of the work’s thematic material is derived from the notes A– B-flat–B-natural–F (A-B-H-F, using the German note names), which are the initials of Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs. Berg integrated these motifs into a 12-tone row, according to a technique he had taken over from his former teacher Arnold Schoenberg. By using tone rows, Berg ensured motivic unity and at the same time maximized pitch variety. But he never wanted his listener to focus on such technical matters but insisted on the primacy of the expression of feelings.

In 1928, Berg arranged the second, third, and fourth movements of his Lyric Suite for string orchestra at the request of Emil Hertzka, director of Universal Editions in Vienna. This version was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic under Jascha Horenstein, on January 31, 1929.

Instrumentation: Strings

Korngold’s father was deeply disappointed that Erich had given up ‟serious” composition in favor of the movies. To his last day, the old man kept exhorting his son to return to concert music. Finally, towards the end of Julius’s life, Erich wrote a string quartet (his third) and, after his father’s death, he returned to a project started years earlier but never completed: a concerto for violin and orchestra.

The concerto was originally intended for the great violinist Bronislaw Huberman, but he was unable to perform it piece due to his poor health, so the work was premiered by Jascha Heifetz in St. Louis on February 15, 1947.

At this point in Korngold’s career, the two aspects of his creative world—concert and film music—had become completely intertwined. His movie scores (of which the most famous are Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood) were symphonic, even operatic, in their scope. The Violin Concerto, conversely, owes much to Korngold’s work in the film industry. Many of the major themes were taken over from movie scores, and there are moments where the instrumentation and the thematic development also bring back Hollywood memories.

In Korngold’s personal style, elements inherited from Mahler and Richard Strauss are treated with the light touch perfected at the Warner Brothers studios. This approach revived the genre of the Romantic concerto at a time when most modern composers and critics were ready to bury it. At first, the concerto found little favor with violinists, despite Heifetz’s strong advocacy. Since the 1970s, however, it has enjoyed a spectacular comeback, with numerous recordings and frequent concert performances all over the world.

Instrumentation: Solo violin, two flutes (second doubles piccolo), two oboes (second doubles English Horn), two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons (second doubles contrabassoon), four horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani, harp, celesta, bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, gong, vibraphone, xylophone, chimes, strings

Beethoven had always sympathized with the French Revolution, which broke out when he was at the impressionable age of 19. Like many intellectuals of his time, he was fascinated by the reforms Napoleon introduced as First Consul of the Republic. At the same time, he despised tyranny in all its forms, and when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, he saw that event as a betrayal of the revolution. He had planned to dedicate his new symphony to Bonaparte but, according to an eyewitness, he flew into a wild rage upon hearing the news, and tore up the dedication, replacing it with an inscription that was more impersonal but also more universal: Sinfonia Eroica, composta per festeggiare il Sovvenire di un grand Uomo, or “Heroic Symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.”

The opening Allegro con brio is Beethoven’s longest symphony movement aside from the finale of the Ninth. In it, some of the basic procedures of classical sonata form are carried to a point where they take on an entirely new meaning: they become elements of a drama of unprecedented intensity. The themes are shorter than in most earlier symphonies and more open-ended, lending themselves particularly well to modifications of various sorts. It is by transforming, fragmenting, and reintegrating his motifs that Beethoven expresses the idea of struggle that is so unmistakably present throughout this movement. 

The second movement bears the title Marcia funebre (“Funeral March”). The music begins softly and rises to a powerful, dramatic climax. The main theme’s final return is interrupted by rests after every three or four notes, as if the violins were so overcome by grief that they could barely play the melody.

In the third and fourth movements, Beethoven managed to ease the feeling of tragedy without letting the tension subside. The third-movement Scherzo begins with two notes repeated in an undertone that evolve into a theme only gradually. In the somewhat more relaxed Trio, the three horns take center stage, playing a melody that starts out as a hunting call.

The main theme of the last movement appears in no fewer than four of Beethoven's compositions.  Beethoven first used it in a simple contra-dance for orchestra, then in the last movement of the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus (both in 1800–1801), followed by the Variations for Piano, Op. 35 (1802), and lastly, in the Third Symphony. The elaborate set of variations in the “Eroica” finale is integrated into a single, continuous musical form, culminating in a short Presto section that gives the symphony its dynamic conclusion.

Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings