Giacomo Puccini himself acknowledged that his true talent lay "only in the theater," and so his non-operatic works are understandably few. But there are more of them than the average concertgoer 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. All of these string quartet pieces have been virtually forgotten except for the elegy, Crisantemi ("Chrysanthemums"), that Puccini wrote in 1890—in a single night, he said—as a response to the death of the Duke of Savoy.

Crisantemi is a single, dark-hued, continuous movement. Puccini found his two liquid melodic ideas worthy enough to re-use in the last act of his opera, Manon Lescaut, of 1893. Almost never heard in its original string quartet guise, Crisantemi frequented the music stands of the world's orchestras in an arrangement for string orchestra throughout the twentieth century.

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