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The success of his Mood Indigo in 1930, Ellington’s first hit record, brought him world-wide fame, which led to appearances in Hollywood films, tours across America and Europe, and more than 200 recordings. In the mid-1940s, he began writing large-scale compositions in jazz style for his own band and for concert orchestra, including a series of suites, music for film and stage, and, in his last decade, sacred works. For his contributions to the world’s musical life, Ellington received literally hundreds of awards (their listing occupies thirteen pages in his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress), including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, honorary degrees from Columbia, Brown, Howard, Yale and eleven other colleges and universities, and membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His total creative catalog contains some 2,000 items: songs, short instrumental pieces, incidental music, musicals, ballets, scores for six films, two dozen suites for jazz and symphony orchestras (one of which is an adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker), and many sacred works for voices and instruments. He was working on an opera at the time of his death.

“The impact of Duke Ellington,” wrote Frank Tirro in Jazz: A History, “is not easily measured, for in his long and prolific career he set standards in so many areas: as a composer, harmonic innovator, ensemble leader, recording artist, arranger, patron of aspiring jazz musicians, and spokesman for Black Americans and Black American culture.” In an article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, André Hodier assessed that “Duke Ellington is generally recognized as the most important composer in jazz history.” Among the most enduring of Ellington’s hundreds of songs is the smoky In a Sentimental Mood from 1935. This arrangement is by pianist and University of Notre Dame faculty member Daniel Schlosberg.

He served as conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic for the 25 years after 1919 while continuing to concertize at home and abroad and remaining active as a composer. In addition to his work as a performer and composer, Dohnányi’s contributions to the musical life of his homeland included inspiring and performing the works of younger composers (notably Bartók and Kodály), reforming the Budapest Academy’s music curriculum, guiding the development of such talented pupils as Georg Solti, Géza Anda, and Annie Fischer, expanding the repertory of the nation’s performing groups, and serving as a model in musical matters through the strength of his personality and the quality of his musicianship.

In 1944, Dohnányi left Hungary, a victim of the raging political and militaristic tides that swept the country during World War II. He moved first to Austria, then to Argentina, and finally settled in Tallahassee in 1949 as pianist and Composer-in-Residence at Florida State University, where his students included Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and his grandson, conductor Christoph von Dohnányi, former music director of the Cleveland Orchestra. Though Dohnányi was in his seventies, his abilities remained unimpaired, and he continued an active musical life. He appeared regularly on campus and in guest engagements; his last public performance was as conductor of the FSU Symphony just three weeks before his death. He died in New York on February 9, 1960 during a recording session.

Dohnányi composed his Piano Quintet No. 2 in the summer and early autumn of 1914, during his tenure on the faculty of the Berlin Hochschule für Musik; he gave the work’s premiere in Berlin on November 12th with the Klinger Quartet. That was an anxious time for Germany. Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on June 28th, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria declared war on Serbia. War fever intensified in Berlin (H.W. Nevinson, war correspondent of London’s Daily News, reported that “up and down the wide road of Unter den Linden crowds paced incessantly by day and night, singing German war songs”), and on August 4th, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Franz Joseph’s ally, opened the hostilities against Russia, France and Britain that began World War I. Some of the anxiety of the summer of 1914 seems to have filtered into Dohnányi’s Piano Quintet No. 2, which he cast in the somber key of E-flat minor, though the work ends optimistically and frequently posits brighter emotions to counter its darker passages.

The Quintet opens with a hushed main theme begun with an upward leap that is intoned in octaves by violin and cello above a foreboding rumbling in the piano. The other strings repeat the theme before the piano adds a hymn-like idea in block chords and all the participants join in a rising, muscular strain with dotted rhythms. The tension subsides and the piano again plays the opening theme as a bridge to the movement’s formal second subject, a sweet, lyrical melody begun in duet by first violin and viola. The exposition closes with a luminous stream of chords in the piano. The brief development section treats, in turn, the rumbling figures of the opening, the hymn-like idea, the muscular strain and the main theme. The arrival at the recapitulation is marked by a sudden break in the music’s momentum, after which the viola recalls the main theme in long notes against a rippling keyboard background. The lyrical second subject and the piano’s luminous chord streams return before the movement closes quietly with an echo of the opening measures.

The Intermezzo begins in a lighthearted Viennese mood, a 1914 analogue to Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes, but it seems unable to commit fully to such frothy music-making and moves on to an anxious, scherzo-like passage. This feverish music provides some energy for a while but it soon disintegrates as well. The waltz is tried again, more assertively this time, but with little more conviction than before. The ensemble then remembers the lyrical second theme from the preceding movement but cannot sustain it, and the waltz and the scherzo are recalled again, but with waning enthusiasm. The Intermezzo comes to an unsettled (and unsettling) end, a mirror, perhaps, of Berlin’s apprehensive mood at the time of its creation and a prescient chamber counterpart to Maurice Ravel’s disturbing musical commentary on the fall of the ancient Habsburg empire, La Valse of 1920.

The finale is music of transformation. The movement starts with a stern canon, with each of the strings in turn imitating the winding melody first entrusted to the cello; the piano offers a solemn, prayer-like chorale in response. The canon begins again and grows more aggressive until the piano resolutely adds the main theme of the first movement as antagonist. These two ideas contend, and the canon melody is ultimately subdued to a final, quiet, isolated line in the cello. In a magnificent postlude, the doubt of the first movement’s main theme is transfigured into a serene, confident benediction.

Brahms began work on the piece in early 1862 as a string quintet with two cellos, the same scoring as Schubert’s incomparable C major Quintet, and by August he had the first three movements ready to send to his friend and mentor Clara Schumann and to the violinist Joseph Joachim. They both responded enthusiastically at first (“I do not know how to start telling you the great delight your Quintet has given me,” Clara wrote), but expressed reservations about the piece during the following months. “The details of the work show some proof of overpowering strength,” Joachim noted, “but what is lacking, to give me pure pleasure, is, in a word, charm.”

By February 1863, the String Quintet had been recast as a Sonata for Two Pianos, which Brahms performed with Karl Tausig at a concert in Vienna on April 17, 1864. The premiere met with little favor. Clara continued to be delighted with the work’s musical substance, but thought that “it cannot be called a Sonata. The first time I tried the work I had the feeling that it was an arrangement.... Please, remodel it once more!” One final time, during the summer of 1864, Brahms revised the score, this time as the Quintet for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello, an ensemble suggested to him by the conductor Hermann Levi. “The Quintet is beautiful beyond words,” Levi wrote. “You have turned a monotonous work for two pianos into a thing of great beauty, a masterpiece of chamber music.”

The opening movement, tempestuous and tragic in mood, is in a tightly packed sonata form. The dramatic main theme is stated immediately in unison by violin, cello, and piano, and then repeated with greater force by the entire ensemble. The complementary theme, given above an insistently repeated triplet figuration, is more subdued and lyrical in nature than the previous melody. The closing theme achieves a brighter tonality to offer a brief respite from the movement’s pervasive strong emotions. The development section treats the main and second themes, and ushers in the recapitulation on a great wave of sound.

Brahms’ Schubertian strain rises closest to the surface in the tender second movement. The outer sections of its three-part form (A–B–A) are based on a gentle, lyrical strain in sweet, close-interval harmonies, while the movement’s central portion uses a melody incorporating an octave-leap motive.

The Scherzo is one of Brahms’ most electrifying essays. The Scherzo proper contains three motivic elements: a rising theme of vague rhythmic identity; a snapping motive in strict, dotted rhythm; and a march-like strain in full chordal harmony. These three components are juxtaposed throughout the movement, with the dotted-rhythm theme being given special prominence, including a vigorous fugal working-out. The central trio grows from a theme that is a lyrical transformation of the Scherzo’s chordal march strain.

The Finale opens with a pensive slow introduction fueled by deeply felt chromatic harmonies, exactly the sort of passage that caused Arnold Schoenberg to label Brahms a “modernist.” The body of the movement, in fast tempo, is a hybrid of rondo and sonata forms. Despite the buoyant flavor of the movement’s thematic material, the tragic tenor of this great Quintet is maintained until its closing page.