Antonín Dvořák in the context of Leoš Janáček

The term string quartet is a type of musical composition or a group of four people who play them. Many composers from the mid-18th century onwards wrote string quartets. The associated musical ensemble consists of two violinists, a violist, and a cellist.

The string quartet was developed into its present form by the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, whose works in the 1750s established the ensemble as a group of four more-or-less equal partners. Since that time, the string quartet has been considered a prestigious form; writing for four instruments with broadly similar characteristics both constrains and tests a composer. String quartet composition flourished in the Classical era, and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert each wrote a number of them. Many Romantic and early-twentieth-century composers composed string quartets, including Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák, Janáček, and Debussy. There was a slight lull in string quartet composition later in the 19th century, but it received a resurgence in the 20th century, with the Second Viennese School, Bartók, Shostakovich, Babbitt, and Carter producing highly regarded examples of the genre, and it remains an important and refined musical form.

The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Latin: Academia Scientiarum et Artium Serbica; Serbian: Српска академија наука и уметности, САНУ, romanized: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, SANU) is a national academy and the most prominent academic institution in Serbia, founded in 1841 as Society of Serbian Letters (Serbian: Друштво србске словесности, ДСС, romanized: Društvo srbske slovesnosti, DSS).

The Academy's membership has included Nobel laureates Ivo Andrić, Leopold Ružička, Vladimir Prelog, Glenn T. Seaborg, Mikhail Sholokhov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Peter Handke as well as, Josif Pančić, Jovan Cvijić, Branislav Petronijević, Vlaho Bukovac, Mihajlo Pupin, Nikola Tesla, Milutin Milanković, Mihailo Petrović-Alas, Mehmed Meša Selimović, Danilo Kiš, Paja Jovanović, Dmitri Mendeleev, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Jacob Grimm, Antonín Dvořák, Henry Moore and many other scientists, scholars and artists of Serbian and foreign origin.

A sonatina (French: “sonatine”, German: “Sonatine") is a small sonata. As a musical term, sonatina has no single strict definition; it is rather a title applied by the composer to a piece that is in basic sonata form, but is shorter and lighter in character, or technically more elementary, than a typical sonata. The term has been in use at least since the late baroque; there is a one-page, one-movement harpsichord piece by Handel called "Sonatina". It is most often applied to solo keyboard works, but a number of composers have written sonatinas for violin and piano (see list under violin sonata), for example the Sonatina in G major for Violin and Piano by Antonín Dvořák, and occasionally for other instruments, for example the Clarinet Sonatina by Malcolm Arnold.

The symphonic poems of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt are a series of 13 orchestral works, numbered S.95–107. The first 12 were composed between 1848 and 1858 (though some use material conceived earlier); the last, Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe (From the Cradle to the Grave), followed in 1882. These works helped establish the genre of orchestral program music—compositions written to illustrate an extra-musical plan derived from a play, poem, painting or work of nature. They inspired the symphonic poems of Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Richard Strauss and others.

Liszt's intent, according to musicologist Hugh MacDonald, was for these single-movement works "to display the traditional logic of symphonic thought." In other words, Liszt wanted these works to display a complexity in their interplay of themes similar to that usually reserved for the opening movement of the Classical symphony; this principal self-contained section was normally considered the most important in the larger whole of the symphony in terms of academic achievement and musical architecture. At the same time, Liszt wanted to incorporate the abilities of program music to inspire listeners to imagine scenes, images, or moods. To capture these dramatic and evocative qualities while achieving the scale of an opening movement, he combined elements of overture and symphony in a modified sonata design. The composition of the symphonic poems proved daunting. They underwent a continual process of creative experimentation that included many stages of composition, rehearsal and revision to reach a balance of musical form.