Classical Music | Music for Quartet

Recorded on 10/24/2012, uploaded on 04/17/2013

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who is best known for his operas, including La bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly, started his early music education with his uncle, Fortunato Magi. During his further study in Milan, the theater capital of Italy, he learned the fundamental principles of Wagnerian aesthetics. Here in Milan, he was also exposed to the French operatic style, which became one of the most important features of his art.

As Puccini himself acknowledged, his true talent lay "only in the theater," and so his non-operatic works are understandably few. But there are more of them than one might imagine. The string quartet was a medium for which Puccini had a certain undeniable affinity, and over the years he composed some five works or groups of pieces for it. While all of these string quartets have been virtually forgotten, I Crisantemi ("Chrysanthemums"), which Puccini wrote in 1890, has been popular as an encore since it was first penned. Written in a single night, the quartet was an elegiac response to the death of the Duke of Savoy. The work surely resonated deeply with the composer, as Puccini found his two fluid melodic ideas worthy enough to reuse in the last act of his opera Manon Lescaut of 1893.

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.