Tchaikovsky: String Sextet in D minor ("Souvenir de Florence")

Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93) spent almost half his career outside Russia, absorbing the cultures of Europe’s great cities before retreating, like a hermit, into the woods of his homeland for concentrated work. He composed several musical travelogues, including the string sextet Souvenir de Florence: an exercise in Ital’yanshchina (musicologist Richard Taruskin’s term for Russian imitations of Italian music) that quotes nothing musically Italian. In this sense, the sextet differs from Tchaikovsky’s 1878 song “Pimpinella” and his Italian Capriccio of 1880. The Souvenir responds to Florence’s visual culture, especially the paintings commissioned by the Medici banking family.

Introduction

Tchaikovsky thought on and off about his Souvenir de Florence for years but didn’t get much done until May 1890, after he had drafted his opera The Queen of Spades. He conceived the sextet for the Chamber Music Society of St. Petersburg, which had made him an honorary member back in 1886, and which he wanted to impress with a challenging work in diverse idioms. The scoring is the same as Johannes Brahms’s two sextets: two violins, two violas, and two cellos. Tchaikovsky includes much-fussed-over fugal passages, dialogues between violin and cello, flippant trilling beneath smooth melodic lines, ppp (very soft) to ff (very loud) shifts in dynamics at the ends of phrases, and go-for-broke solos. Sections of the first movement recall The Queen of Spades, while the second alludes to Tchaikovsky’s ballet adagios. The Italian influence is visual: Tchaikovsky references the Mannerist paintings in the Uffizi Galleries, including Rosso Fiorentino’s Cherub Playing a Lute and several of Bronzino’s coolly elegant canvases.

History

Thanks to the generous financial backing of his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky spent several months in Italy, staying in Madrid, Rome, and the Tuscan capital of Florence, which in the second half of the 19th century hosted numerous Russian intellectuals and cultural figures, including the writers Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Turgenev. In 1878, Von Meck paid for Tchaikovsky’s stay at her Villa Bonciani on via Bonciani, near the Piazzale Michelangelo, which afforded a panoramic view of the city (requiring, Tchaikovsky learned, a tiring uphill hike). For his visit in 1890, during the final months of Von Meck’s support, he stayed at the Hotel Washington, close to the Arno River. Memories of the trip—the museums, food, and frivolity—remained with him when he returned to Moscow. In June and July 1890, he rented a house in the village of Frolovskoye (near Moscow), where he completed the first version of the sextet. In November, the Souvenir de Florence was privately performed in St. Petersburg, at the Hotel Rossiya, where Tchaikovsky had booked a suite and organized a run-through of the score by musicians from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, in the presence of Tchaikovsky’s composer colleagues. Displeased with what he heard, Tchaikovsky completed two sets of revisions before the official premiere on November 24, 1892, at the fourth chamber concert of the St. Petersburg branch of the Imperial Russian Music Society.

Tchaikovsky: Sextet for Strings in D minor ("Souvenir de Florence")

Form

The Souvenir de Florence is a string sextet—a quartet with extra layers. The instrumentation creates the paradoxical challenge of maintaining distinctness in a homogenous texture: only string instruments. Solving it bedeviled Tchaikovsky, and he sought advice from the intended performers (the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society and its founder Eugen Albrecht). He received feedback on dynamics, spacing between simultaneously sounding pitches, and the tempos required to minimize dissonance as the lines of notes weave around each other in the middle registers of the instruments. After hearing the sextet in a private setting on November 25, 1890, and then at a public concert a few days later, he touched up the coda of the sonata-form first movement, redid the middle of the third movement, and revised the finale start-to-finish. The changes took him until January 1892 to complete, owing to other obligations, and resulted in a composition that gently alludes to Italian musical idioms, in the mandolin-like accompaniment and pizzicato (plucked) strings of the first and second movements. The movements are otherwise dominated by Romantic waltz and salon tropes.

The first movement has been interpreted as a stylization of Italian street music sounds, though, again, no specific references have been detected. The inclusion of a duet between violin and cello links this movement with the aria-like second movement. The third movement opens broodingly, but cheers itself up in the quick, scherzo middle section. The fourth movement has the character of an urban dance, though closer listening evinces Tchaikovsky’s ingenuity: canons abound; the transition between the first and second themes introduces a six-voice fugato (quasi-fugue); the recapitulation is a double (two-theme) fugue combining the first theme and the transitional material between themes. The conclusion nods to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (the madcap ending of the overture to The Marriage of Figaro). Throughout, Tchaikovsky relies on sudden shifts in dynamics to maintain excitement. 

Analysis

The opening of the first movement is an expression of nonchalance—sprezzatura—that precipitates a large-scale conflict in meter, which sounds like 6/8 but is in fact 3/4. The strings casually open the movement by tossing up a dramatic dominant ninth chord that resolves to the tonic chord (D minor) in the second measure—a typical move at the climax of a phrase, but not the very beginning. This is followed by the studied carelessness of a chord sequence that doesn’t resolve. The cycle repeats, with the same misalignment of harmonic patterns and phrase lengths, leading to the sudden introduction of the Neapolitan, or E-flat major—a chord which lies outside the home key and a half-step above the tonic.

The slow introduction to the D-major second movement moves by block chords before allowing the first violin and first cello room to roam. The music elaborates a dominant ninth chord again, but without the nonchalance of the piece’s opening. Each of the pitches lingers, with a modulation to F suggested, but then dismissed. The third movement counters the first two movements by stressing the tonic chord of A minor before an impetuous crescendo, unexpectedly landing on a very loud F-sharp major chord. In this movement and the next, non-resolutions and harmonic aberrances are the cynosures in his music—the beautiful and strange things that attract attention.

Critical Thoughts

The Russian musical repertoire is dominated by orchestral and theatrical compositions. The bulk of the chamber repertoire was composed by Tchaikovsky, Sergei Taneyev, and, in the 20th century, Dmitri Shostakovich. If Tchaikovsky’s sextet has a precedent in the Russian tradition, it would be in Mikhail Glinka’s works: the latter trained in composition in Italy and produced a piano sextet in three movements in 1832. The blending of genres and long-breathed melodies suggests a critical response, on Tchaikovsky’s part, to Johannes Brahms’s technique of developing variation, which relies on the chaining of discrete motives (short series of notes) in dense textures. By comparison, Tchaikovsky’s score is an exercise in space—evocative, perhaps, of the austere grandeur of ancient Italian architecture.

Legacy

The 1892 St. Petersburg and Moscow premieres of the sextet (in its revised version) were followed by a performance of Anton Seidl’s string orchestra transcription in January 1893, at the Music Hall (Carnegie Hall) in New York City. The sextet was published in June 1893 by Pyotr Jurgenson’s firm, with an arrangement for two pianos appearing in October. Jurgenson also issued a separate edition of the sextet’s slow movement for solo piano, and for harmonium, and, through his foreign partners, ensured the distribution of Tchaikovsky’s music in Europe and the United States. Tchaikovsky’s revisions to the sextet’s first version are included in the 1952 edition of Tchaikovsky’s Complete Collected Works, edited by Alexander Goldenweiser. There are over 50 recordings of the score, including three by the Borodin String Quartet, supplemented by two string players.

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Article by Simon Morrison