Composed 1887-92; 36 minutes

Tchaikovsky returned from Italy in 1890 with more than a picturesque French subtitle evoking one of that country’s most celebrated cities. He brought back a second ‘souvenir’ from Florence—a rapturous, operatic love duet for violin and cello, unveiled in the slow movement of his String Sextet, Op. 70, his final chamber work. He noted down the theme during a three-month stay in the Tuscan capital while completing The Queen of Spades, his last full-length opera. The rest of the sextet is bright, buoyant, and deeply Russian in spirit, charged with emotional intensity across its four movements.

Once the initial sketches were in place, Tchaikovsky worked at speed—the main draft took less than two weeks, the scoring another eleven days. Yet he was uneasy. After a workshop reading and a public performance for the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society, he set the score aside. “I’m hampered not by lack of ideas but by the novelty of the form,” he wrote to his brother Modest. “There must be six independent and, at the same time, homogeneous parts.” To pianist Alexander Siloti he confessed: “I constantly feel as though I am in fact writing for the orchestra and just rearranging it for six string instruments.” Substantial revisions to the third and fourth movements, along with lighter editing elsewhere, finally brought the work into focus. Tchaikovsky warmed to it—enough to contemplate a second sextet.

A decade earlier he had demonstrated his instinct for string writing in the Serenade for Strings, Op. 48. The six-part texture of Souvenir de Florence carries a similar sweep and has proved adaptable to orchestral performance, though its impact in sextet form is more concentrated and visceral. “The first movement must be played with a great deal of passion and drive,” Tchaikovsky instructs. “The second, lilting. The third, facetious. The fourth, gay and determined.”

In the slow movement the Italian ‘souvenir’ unfolds as a lyrical melody with the grace and lift of a ballet pas de deux. A ghostly middle section interrupts, before the dance returns. The scherzo and finale erupt with folk-inflected vigor and unmistakably Russian urgency. The finale’s fugal writing—aimed at the Society’s largely German membership—delighted both audience and composer. “Ah Modest,” he wrote, “my sextet is wonderful and the fugue at the end is charming. It is terrible how thrilled I am with my own work...”

— Program notes copyright © 2026 Keith Horner.
Comments welcomed: khornernotes@gmail.com