Hungarian pianist, composer, and conductor Ernst von Dohnányi (1877–1960) spent the last eleven years of his life in America, in Tallahassee (Florida). From 1949, the old master worked as a professor of piano and composition at Florida State University, and in addition to teaching, he gave concerts and composed. Unlike in the earlier stages of his career, the majority of his American works were made to order (Table 1), and during these works, Dohnányi had a rather new situation in which he sometimes had to adapt to the wishes of the client.

Following the enlightening call for the workshop “Historical Perspectives on Musical Commissions” at the end of 2023, I searched for any comprehensive studies focusing on Béla Bartók and his commissions or Béla Bartók and his commissioners. Over the past century or so, numerous studies have been devoted to Bartók’s compositional output, utilizing a variety of approaches. This led me to believe that there should also be a number of studies on the subject in question. I was surprised to discover that, while one can read about the subject of commissions in works that examine the genesis and early history of individual compositions [1], and the correspondence between Bartók and Paul Sacher (one of his well-known patrons) was published in a dedicated volume a decade ago [2], there is currently no work that provides an overview of the works Bartók composed in response to commissions, competitions, and requests. This prompted me to apply for the workshop, prepare my paper and, subsequently, write a longer study on this subject. The latter is currently in progress and is expected to be published in Studia Musicologica – An International Journal of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2025.