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Hugo Wolf always wanted to express through music his longtime love for the bright colors, zestful life-style, and beautiful landscape of Italy, or "the South" as he called it. These feelings, which he conveyed with great eloquence in the forty-eight-song collection Italienishes Liederbuch (1890-1896), also came across very clearly in his delicious miniature for string quartet, the "Italian Serenade."

Recent scholarship reveals that the piece was originally a one-movement string quartet that Wolf wrote from May 2 to 4, 1887. Five years later, he prepared a string orchestra transcription, which was subsequently published. In a letter to a friend, he indicated plans to compose two more movements for the orchestra version, an Intermezzo and Tarantella, making it a three-movement suite. He sketched out forty-five measures of the second movement, and finished forty measures of the third movement. Both, though, were left as fragments.

After a few measures of introduction, the jocular, saucy main tune enters, followed by several related motifs. The music comes to a stop and a more serious, expressive theme is heard. This hint of solemnity is soon banished, though, as the music starts to drift back to the gaiety of the opening and a return of the initial theme. At the end of this section, the cello plays an intense, passionate recitative. The response of the other players, though, indicates that Wolf meant it as a caricature of an emotional outburst and not to be taken too seriously. The next part, even more mocking and humorous, has the first violin playing an "out at the elbows" melody over a slightly grotesque accompaniment. Another short melodramatic recitative ends this section and gives way to the final return of the principal theme. The coda then brings back the introductory measure and the piece ends with a typical Italian gesture, a disdainful shrug of the shoulders.

Stravinsky composed the Three Pieces for String Quartet in 1914, in Salvan, Switzerland, one year after his epochal ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps ("The Rite of Spring"). The work marks a turning point between the end of the rich style of composing characterized by Le Sacre du Printemps, and takes the first steps toward a leaner, more austere style. Stravinsky himself observed that the "Three Pieces" marked 'an important change' in his music, and, indeed, over the following years his music developed the ideas that first appeared in this work.

Originally the Three Pieces did not have titles, just metronome markings to indicate the tempos. Stravinsky added the titles, "Danse," "Excentrique," and "Cantique," fifteen years later when he orchestrated all three and added one more to create his Four Etudes for Orchestra. The titles succinctly describe the three short parts, which are, in the words of Stravinsky expert Eric Walter White, "really contrasting studies in popular, fantastic and liturgical moods."

The first and shortest piece, "Danse," has a chanting melody consisting of just four notes played over and over again in varied rhythmic patterns by the first violin. It represents a primitive folk dance style that was to become important in Stravinsky's later, so-called "Russian" pieces. Throughout this brief movement, each instrument maintains a single, unique method of tone production: the first violin uses the entire length of the bow; the second violin plays with short strokes at the bottom (frog) of the bow; the viola sustains one note Ponticello (near the bridge), while plucking a note with the left hand: and the cello plays a repeated (ostinato) figure which is plucked (Pizzicato) throughout. This unconventional approach allows each instrument to maintain its own distinct character and independence, with virtually no interaction between the four parts.

"Excentrique" comes next. Stravinsky explained that it was "inspired...by the eccentric movements and postures of the great clown, Little Tick," whom the composer had seen at a circus in London. The music is fragmented into what Stravinsky calls "jerky, spastic movement," but in a joking, good-humored way.

The third piece is much more serious-"Cantique" ("Canticle"), which Stravinsky described as "choral and religious in character." Slowly and solemnly, he intones a five-measure chant that uses only three notes (similar to the four-note repeated pattern in the first piece), and which is interrupted by two-measure, faster moving responses, until the music fades away with the viola's final notes.

The three great composers of the Viennese Classical school, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, dedicated major chamber works to Frederick William II, King of Prussia from 1786 to 1797, who was a fine cellist and an enthusiastic quartet player. The compositions -- the six quartets of Haydn's Op. 50; Mozart's last three quartets, K. 575, 589, and 590; and Beethoven's two cello sonatas, Op. 5 -- all provided the music-loving monarch with cello parts of interest and importance. Haydn composed the quartets from 1784 to 1786, and when he delivered the manuscript to King Frederick, the ruler was so pleased that he gave the composer a gold ring. Haydn treasured the ring more than any other gift that he received; he always wore it as a source of inspiration while composing.

The first violin alone states the germinal motif of the Allegro -- a long note followed by four rapid descending notes. The rest of the movement, in effect, grows from this terse musical idea. The theme undergoes various transformations -- some quite similar to the original, others much further afield.

The deeply felt, minor-key Poco Adagio is essentially monothematic, since the second theme is the same as the first, although in major. The melody, too, is slightly altered, giving it a supplicating air not present in the original. Around the relatively simple melody, Haydn weaves a rich tapestry of fast-moving countermelodies, with a particularly prominent and difficult part, a gesture, no doubt, to King Frederick.

The Menuetto, in traditional three-part form, is most striking in its contrasts. The first part is loud, forceful, and robust. The trio is tender and graceful. Towards the end there are a few long pauses that impart a feeling of tentative hesitancy just before the shortened repeat of the virile Menuetto.

The quartet derived its nickname, "The Frog," from the opening of the Finale, in which the violinist uses a technique known as bariolage, a quick back-and-forth playing of the same note on two strings. Someone, not Haydn, decided the effect resembled a frog's croaking, and the name stuck. After the light, tripping bariolage tune, Haydn introduces a smooth second theme that is remarkably similar to the opening of the first movement. But the bariolage remains the point, and it permeates the movement -- even to the very last notes.

Brahms was reticent to tackle the musical forms that Beethoven had raised to such magnificent heights, the symphony and the string quartet. He worked on his first symphony for ten years before allowing its publication, and he wrote and destroyed some twenty string quartets before the publication of his Opus 51, which he took eight years to complete.

Melvin Berger observes that while the first Opus 51 quartet "was written under the specter of Beethoven . . .the spirit that informs the second belongs to Bach" in its wealth of polyphonic devices, especially canon. Canon is the strictest form of musical imitation in which two or more instruments take up, in succession, a musical phrase, note for note.

Brahms weaves the violinist Joseph Joachim's musical motto Frei, aber einsam ("Free, but lonely") into the quartet in the gracefully arching three-note motto (F-A-E). This motif appears as part of the first and last movements' opening themes. The first movement's development section honors Bach in its "outstanding demonstration of polyphonic writing, replete with canons, inversions, and retrograde motion, in which the melody is, respectively, imitated, turned upside down, and played backward" (Berger).

In "Brahms the Progressive," Schoenberg praises the consoling and beautiful theme of the Andante for its superior development of musical ideas and its structural intricacies. Accompanied by viola and cello, the first violin introduces the warmly lyrical melody; after a contrasting outburst, the cello concludes the movement with a re-statement of the elegant theme.

Stephen Hefling says that the third movement opens calmly with a "ghost of a minuet." Its tranquil tune is interrupted by two sparkling interludes followed by polyphonic sections in canon. In a remarkable double canon the first violin and viola play a theme from the interlude while the cello and second violin play a variant of the minuetto theme.

Structurally, the bustling Finale alternates between a czardas, a fast Hungarian dance, and a relaxed waltz. The coda begins quietly with the first theme in canon between cello and first violin; the instruments eventually pick up speed and volume to bring the quartet to a brilliant conclusion.