61, is an orchestral suite by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, written in 1887 as a tribute to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on the 100th anniversary of that composer's opera Don Giovanni.
This suite is scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and trumpets, four horns, timpani, cymbals, glockenspiel, harp and strings.
The great soprano Pauline Viardot-Garcia, who was the teacher of Tchaikovsky's one-time unofficial fiancée Désirée Artôt (and whom she may have persuaded not to go through with her plan to marry the composer), had purchased the manuscript of the opera in 1855 in London and kept it in a shrine in her home, where it was visited by many people.
(Curiously, the title role in the centenary production of Don Giovanni in Prague was sung by the man who replaced Tchaikovsky in Désirée Artôt's affections, her husband, the Spanish baritone Mariano Padilla y Ramos.)
[6] Also, while the gigue and minuet are effectively scored, Tchaikovsky's choice of them for his opening movements suggests that like many of his contemporaries he failed to make enough distinction between Mozart's lighter and more profound sides.
Tchaikovsky's apparent inability to see the real power and variety of Mozart's music may have been part of his psychological need to regard the past with wistfulness and associate it with lost purity and felicity.