Few torments are as unshakeable as that of unrequited love. Yet sublimated passion has led to more than its share of artistic masterpieces. For this Valentine’s Day, we’ll enjoy the fruits of others’ longing, on this week’s “Music for Marlboro.”

It’s been speculated that Johannes Brahms’ “Liebeslieder Waltzes” was the product of his frustrated affection for Clara Schumann, the wife of composer Robert Schumann. The dance-like settings for four voices and piano (four hands) are based on love songs from Georg Friedrich Daumer’s collection “Polydora.”

We’ll hear a performance from the 1971 Marlboro Music Festival, featuring soprano Kathryn Bouleyn, mezzo-soprano Mary Burgess, tenor Seth McCoy, and baritone John Magnuson, with Rudolf Serkin and Luis Batlle at the keyboard.

The remarkably prolific Indian summer of Czech master Leoš Janáček can attributed in part to the sublimated passion he felt for Kamila Stösslová, a married woman some 38 years his junior. Janacek’s String Quartet No. 2, composed in 1928, when the composer was about 74 years-old, was inspired by their long and intimate – though unconsummated – relationship, detailed in their more than 700 letters. The work has been described as a “manifesto on love.”

We’ll hear Janáček’s “Intimate Letters,” performed at the 2002 Marlboro Festival by violinists Nicholas Kendall and Hiroko Yajima, violist Richard O’Neill, and cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach.

Great composers’ romantic frustrations are our gain this week, on “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

Top (left to right): Janáček and his muse; bottom: Brahms, not yet “free but happy”