In 1850, Robert Schumann was appointed music director of the city of Düsseldorf, where he settled with his family. For some time, although his skills as an orchestral conductor were, by common consent, limited (if not outright inadequate), his immense talent for composition and musical activities in general were appreciated both by the musicians of the local orchestra and an appreciative public. However, Schumann's standing in Düsseldorf would later experience a significant decline, exacerbating his already troubled mental state, which culminated in his suicide attempt of 1854 and subsequent mental breakdown.

In 1851, however, his personal and professional prospects were still anything but dim. In February of that year, he received a poetic work entitled "Märchenbilder" from its author, Louis Durey, who urged the composer to write a sonata inspired by his verses. In March 1851, Schumann responded to his request by composing not a Sonata, but rather four pieces for viola and piano, opus 113, which he called "Fairy Tale Pictures" (although he had mulled over various other titles for the work before making his choice). The work received its première on 12 November 1853 at a concert given by Schumann's wife, Clara, who joined forces for the occasion with the German virtuoso violinist and composer Wilhelm Josef von Wasielewski, who was also the work’s dedicatee. The four "character pieces" that make up opus 113 are among the few works from that era that were written especially for viola, and they spotlight the instrument's singular dark yet lyrical timbre. Stylistically, the pieces are positioned on the cusp between Schumann's imaginative and youthful (but in some ways utterly mature) romanticism and the more turbulent, restless and dark writing of his final works, which were written as his mental health began to deteriorate rapidly.

In 1954, shortly after he completed his celebrated Tenth Symphony and some thirty years after he composed the great opus 6 Suite for Two Pianos, Dmitri Shostakovich set to work on his Concertino for two pianos. His main goal was to write something he could play with his son Maxim, who was sixteen at the time. However, when the piece received its première in the Moscow Conservatory concert hall on 8 November 1954, it was played by Maxim and a fellow student at the Conservatory, Alla Maloletkova. (Of course, Shostakovich père and fils would record the Concertino together in 1956.) The work consists of one slow and one fast section. While the slow section is profoundly lyrical, sad and strongly reminiscent of the slow movements of some of his symphonies, the Allegretto is characteristically extroverted, light and playful. Stylistically, the Concertino has much in common with the music used to accompany silent films in the 1920s. The first piano part would seem to have been intended for Maxim (who would later develop into an excellent conductor and one of the best-known ambassadors of his great father's oeuvre), since it enjoys the lion's share of the virtuoso passages. One could also note that the piano writing has much in common with that of Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto from the following year (1957), which was also written for the composer's son.

Igor Stravinsky's collaboration with impresario Sergei Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes lasted for nearly two decades and is rightly considered one of the most important artistic collaborations in history. Its first fruit was the ballet The Firebird, which the young Stravinsky, who was still a complete unknown outside of Russia, composed in 1909-1910. But Stravinsky had already begun to envision scenes from a new ballet set in pagan Russia while he was working on The Firebird in the spring of 1910. He said he imagined "an imposing ceremony: wise elders sitting in a circle watching a young girl dance to her death – a sacrifice to appease the god of the spring". After the triumph of The Firebird, Diaghilev immediately proposed a new collaboration to the young composer, who shared his new idea with him – ideas that would lead, a few years later, to the famous ballet The Rite of Spring. Its première, on 29 May 1913, was perhaps the most scandalous in the history of music! Indeed, this date is conventionally taken to mark the birth of so-called ‘modern music’.

Though he had meant to, Stravinsky did not set to work on The Rite of Spring right after The Firebird. Knowing full well how demanding, time-consuming and laborious a process composing a ballet like the one he envisioned would be, he wanted to "reinvigorate himself compositionally" by writing a symphonic work in which the piano took the lead: a kind of "concerto piece". He said this of the process: "When composing the music, I had in mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios". Diaghilev appreciated the work from the start. Displaying enviable foresight, he persuaded Stravinsky to expand it into an entire ballet. Which is how Petrushka came into being, which was completed in May 1911 and premiered by the Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 13 June that same year, choreographed by Mikhail Fokine and conducted by Pierre Monteux. Some years later, Stravinsky returned to Petrushka's piano-led orchestral score and set out to turn sections of it into a work for solo piano, and specifically a Sonata. The legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein, a friend of Stravinsky in his Paris days, supported him in this undertaking. In fact, Rubinstein relates in his autobiography how he taught the composer to use the sustain pedal in specific ways, to help him render certain orchestral textures appropriately on the piano. However, the composer had not set out to produce a mechanistic, by-the-book transcription; what he aimed to do was transform those parts of the ballet into a new creation that would work on the piano and for the piano! By 1921, he had completed three sections of the ballet and these were published that same year as Three Movements from Petrushka. Since Stravinsky was obviously writing with Rubinstein's immense capabilities in mind, the enormous demands the work places on the pianist, due primarily to its multi-level construction, should come as no surprise. However, Rubinstein would neither premiere the work nor associate his name with it as a performer. Of course, many other pianists have adopted the piece as a calling card, using it to showcase their pianistic credentials before even the most discerning audiences.

Antonín Dvořák’s fourth and final piano trio was written between November 1890 and February 1891. It is one of the most famous works by the leading Czech Romantic composer as well as one of the most important in the piano trio repertoire. It received its première in Prague on 11 April 1891 with the composer at the keyboard; Dvořák would be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Prague in the course of the concert. The work proved such a hit, it would be performed soon afterwards on a forty-concert tour staged shortly before Dvořák left for New York (to serve as director of a newly-founded conservatory). The Trio was published in Europe during his time in the US (1892-1895) under the supervision of the composer's friend Johannes Brahms, who had been an ardent supporter of his work from the very start. The expressive depth and lyricism of the Trio’s themes are all the proof one needs of the composer's prolific melodic imagination.

The Trio’s subtitle, Dumky, is the plural of dumka, a dance of Ukrainian origin which was popular in Bohemia and Poland in the 19th century; its name can be translated as "a fleeting thought". The dance has three distinct sections, with fast and carefree giving way to slow and melancholic or elegiac, before the dancers end wildly and energetically. The trio consists of six parts, each of which constitutes a dumka in its own right. So, although the trio breaks new ground in the way it captures the simple beauty and unique quality of a traditional dance and eschews any of the established classical forms (sonata, theme and variations, rondo, etc.), its overall structure is arranged in such a way that it still recalls a traditionally structured trio. Thus, the first three movements are played without breaks, so they form a long single section comparable to a classical first movement, while the fourth, fifth and sixth parts resemble, respectively, the slow movement, scherzo and finale of a classical trio. Though, at first sight, the themes presented in each part may seem completely unrelated, closer analysis reveals that, in many cases, the fast theme in one part is derived from the slow theme of the part that preceded it.