The plot: Pot and Lid are engaged to be married, but Pot succumbs to the flattery of Stirring Stick, and Dishcloth flirts with Lid but is challenged to a duel by Broom. Pot changes her mind about Stirring Stick, but meanwhile Lid has walked out of the kitchen in a huff. The situation is cleared up when an enormous foot appears from the wings and kicks Lid back on the stage. Pot and Lid kiss and make up, while Stirring Stick goes off with Dishcloth.

The four movements of the sextet are entitled: "Prologue," "Tango," "Charleston" and "Final." In the full ballet, "Tango" is subtitled, "Danse d’amour;" "Charleston" accompanies the duel between Lid and Broom; and "Final" involves an opening piano solo marked "Tempo di marcia" and switches among 2/4, 3/8 and 4/8 rhythms.

Jazz influences are heard through much of the sextet, the piano playing in dissonance, the trumpet muted in the style of the jazz bands of the day, and the cello and double bass playing pizzicato also in jazz style.

In 1963, Rochberg stunned musical circles when, as a leading American composer and chairman of the prestigious music department at the University of Pennsylvania, he turned his back on the Schoenberg twelve-tone system and returned to tonality. (Under the system, traditional keys are abandoned and all twelve notes in the chromatic scale are treated as equals.) A convert to the twelve-tone system in 1950, Rochberg deserted it after his son died and he found it limiting in emotion and inadequate to express his grief and rage.

Rochberg added to the uproar in 1972 when his String Quartet No. 3, with evocations of late Beethoven and Mahler, won a prestigious Naumburg Chamber Music Award. His use of tonality and quotations from past composers in this and other compositions caused critics and musicologists to classify him as a "neo-romantic" composer like Benjamin Britten and Samuel Barber. His reputation was then enhanced by a collection of his writings, The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music, in which he reviewed his search for an appropriate musical path and argued for a balance between structure and feeling, tonality and atonality.

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Rochberg attended the Mannes College of Music, where one of his teachers was the conductor George Szell. After military service in World War II, he studied at the Curtis Institute, where his teachers included Gian Carlo Menotti, and at the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the faculty at Curtis in 1948, and then returned to Pennsylvania in 1954 as a teacher and composer.

Rochberg’s early compositions were influenced by Stravinsky and Bartók. In 1950, while on a Fulbright fellowship in Rome, he became interested in the Schoenberg system because, he felt, it would have a liberating effect on his imagination. Until his epiphany in 1963, he exploited twelve-tone devices extensively, particularly in his lauded Symphony No. 2, Second String Quartet and First Piano Trio.

This trio for clarinet, horn and piano was composed initially in 1947, before Rochberg’s Schoenbergian period, and then revised in 1980 after his return to tonality. Its harmonic language is therefore quite conservative, and the music embodies both forward- and backward-looking elements.

The first movement, tagged "freely and with much expression," features busy counterpoint and the repeated use of leaping intervals of the fourth. The horn opens with a long cadenza introduction, and the clarinet then presents as a main theme a jaunty treatment of the introduction. Piano thumping ushers in a march-like second theme. After development of this material with increasing intensity, a clarinet cadenza leads to the close.

The second movement, adagio, begins with a haunting pianissimo passage of two-part harmony between the clarinet and muted horn. This passage is developed by the solo piano and then by all three instruments with considerable imagination and freedom, almost improvisatory in spirit.

The third movement opens with another adagio, starting with a fanfare-like passage and then structured in a series of separate rhythmic cells. Eventually, this gives way to an animated dance, marked allegro giocosamente (playfully).

Probably no other work of Beethoven was as great a source of irritation to the composer as the Septet, Opus 20. The problem was audience response – not too little but too much. The septet achieved so much popularity during Beethoven’s lifetime that it overshadowed works that, in his judgment, were of greater merit or importance.

The first public performance of the septet took place at the Imperial National Court Theater in Vienna in April, 1800, at the first of several concerts sponsored by Beethoven mainly to show off his own music. Concerts were long in those days, the program in this instance also including the first performance of the First Symphony, a Beethoven piano concerto, a Mozart symphony, excerpts from Haydn’s The Creation, and improvisations by Beethoven at the piano. According to a newspaper review, the orchestral playing in the symphony was slipshod, but the septet, calling for only seven musicians, was neater and immediately won the audience. Within a year, the septet was being performed throughout Europe.

At first, Beethoven recognized the septet’s commercial value and encouraged his publisher to issue it not only in its original instrumentation – clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and double bass – but in other arrangements as well. Thus, he suggested that the winds be replaced by a second violin, second viola and second cello. He also suggested that it be arranged as a work for flute "perhaps as a quintet." "This," he explained, "would help the amateur flautists, who have already approached me on the subject, and they would swarm around and feed on it like hungry insects." (Emphasis in the original).

Later he himself transcribed the septet as a trio for piano, violin and clarinet for his physician, Dr. Johann Schmidt – the doctor played the violin and his daughter, the piano. Beethoven published the work in this form as Opus 38.

Soon, however, Beethoven grew tired of the work and became fed up with its repeated performance. His friend, Carl Czerny, recorded: "He could not endure his septet and grew angry because of the universal applause that it received." Several years later, an English visitor told Beethoven how much his septet was admired in London. "That damned thing!" the composer responded with some vehemence. "I wish it were burned!"

The reason for the septet’s popularity – and for Beethoven’s impatience – was that it was in one respect an old-fashioned piece of music. In effect, the septet was a throwback to the "divertimento" style of the middle 18^th century, the style prevailing before Haydn’s development of the symphony and string quartet. Instead of four movements designed for serious playing and listening, the septet was a six-movement work of lighter musical weight. It thus made fewer demands on audiences, and was welcomed by them mainly as musical entertainment – like a serenade.

But, notwithstanding Beethoven’s low opinion of the music, the septet was in another respect one of the more forward-looking works of Beethoven’s early years. In it, Beethoven broke important new ground in the use of wind instruments in chamber music. Previous composers had combined one featured wind instrument with a string group – Mozart, for example, in his Clarinet Quintet. The septet, however, was the first successful effort to combine three featured winds with strings, each instrument with its own independent musical line. While Beethoven himself was to go no further in that direction, the septet paved the way for chamber music by other composers for or with wind instruments.

In the septet, Beethoven combines the winds and strings in two ways. In some sections, he divides the ensemble into two groups, each with a leader. Thus, the strings are led by the violin and the winds by the clarinet. As a result, the septet often sounds like a chamber concerto for two instruments. In other sections, Beethoven allows each of the instruments, with one exception, to express its characteristic tone quality through solo passages. The exception is the double bass, which is used throughout to provide a harmonic foundation.

The first movement opens with a slow, dignified introduction in which the wind and string groups offset one another. This is followed by the main section in sonata form with the main theme presented first by the violin and then by the clarinet. The second theme is played first by the strings and then by the winds, with each wind adding tonal seasoning. The horn comes into its own in the development and the coda.

The second movement, andante cantabile, is in an undulating 9/8 rhythm. The main theme is stated by the clarinet and then the bassoon. The cello and horn have short solos in the development.

Beethoven borrowed the theme for the third movement, a minuet, from a piano sonata, Opus 49, No. 2, which despite its opus number was written in 1796, but the treatment here is completely different. The trio features a tricky passage in triplets for the horn.

The fourth movement is a theme with five variations and a coda. According to Beethoven’s friend Czerny, the theme was based on a Rhenish folksong, "Ach Schiffer, lieber Schiffer". Strings dominate the theme and the first two sections. The winds become prominent in the remaining variations and coda. This is followed by a scherzo, propelled by a downward phrase for the horn. The trio features a long cello solo.

The most serious music in the septet is the introduction to the finale, in slow march time and a funereal minor. The main section, presto reverts to the major but with occasional minor shadows. The violin presents the main theme, with an unusual tonal coloring resulting from the composer’s instruction that it be played entirely on the instrument’s lowest string. The movement is again in sonata form, but with a cadenza for the violin to usher in the restatement of the main theme.