For many years the official line on Tchaikovsky's piano music has been that it represents a weak point in his repertory, that the large narrations made possible by the full orchestral canvas were essential for the full flowering of his musical imagination and emotional self-knowledge. Nevertheless, public opinion has always been out in front of critical opinion in appreciating Tchaikovsky's music, and a number of his piano pieces have persisted as recital and recording favorites since their dates of composition. One of these is the Chant sans paroles, the "Song Without Words," Op.2, No. 3. This three-minute work was written in 1867 as part of a collection of three short piano pieces called Souvenir de Haspal, a musical set of postcards commemorating a vacation the composer and his brother Modest took in the summer of that year. True, the piece is less "Tchaikovskian" than the composer's beloved orchestral masterpieces. True, it fits squarely into the tradition of the European piano miniature, and specifically of the Songs Without Words that go back to Mendelssohn. But the musical public, caring little about such abstract judgments, has discovered anew with each new generation the work's lovely principal melody, a simple thing in two parts in which the ornament in the first part is picked up as the main figure, in a lower register, in the second. The work as a whole has a simple ternary structure. Nowadays the Chant sans paroles is a fixture of albums of the Romantic Moments—Classical Music For Lovers variety.

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