Classical Music | Music for Quartet

Recorded on 12/01/2010, uploaded on 04/19/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes
Crisantemi ("Chrysanthemums")

Puccini wrote little instrumental music, and most of it came from his student years. He wrote Crisantemi one evening in January 1890 upon hearing of the death of 44-year-old Amadeo of Savoy, a member of the Italian royal family who had briefly served as King of Spain in the 1870s. (Italians regard chrysanthemums as a sign of death and mourning.) He based his elegy on two plaintive melodies in C-sharp minor. The first is restless, building its power from chromatic motives moving in contrary motion. In the middle, a mournful melody for the first violin sounds over pulsations in the viola; the first violin and cello then repeat the melody, doubling at the octave, with the pedal in the second violin. A brief return of the opening music closes the elegy. Both melodies of Crisantemi appear in Manon Lescaut (1893): the second theme forms part of an impassioned aria in Act III, and the first recurs throughout Act IV, when Manon is dying—in the "desert wasteland" of Louisiana.     Notes by Brian J. Hart