Sulkhan Fyodorovich Tsintsadze (August 23, 1925 in Gori, Transcaucasian SSR, Soviet Union – September 15, 1991 in Tbilisi, Georgia) was one of Georgia's foremost composers.

Education
Tsintsadze studied the cello until 1942 with E.N. Kapelniski in Tbilisi at the Gymnasium of Music. He furthered his studies of the cello at the Conservatory of Tbilisi with K. Minjar. From the years 1945 to 1953 he went to the Moscow Conservatory to study the cello with Semyon Matveyevich Kozolupov and composition with Semyon Semyonovich Bogatyryov.

Career
He began his musical career in the 1940s as the cellist in the Georgian State String Quartet. His first composition, based on Georgian folk songs and being a collection of miniatures for string quartet, was an immediate success. He also wrote several operas, ballets, symphonies and concertos, but it was his compositions for string quartet which came to take pride of place amongst his works and which made a notable contribution to Georgian music. Tsintsadze's compositions are based on the traditional forms as well as styles and characteristics used by composers such as Shostakovich and Shebalin. Georgian folklore is ever present in his music.

Sulkhan Tsintsadze was one of Georgia's leading composers. He was awarded the People's Artist of Georgia (1961) and People's Artist of the USSR (1987) titles, and was a holder of the USSR Stalin Prize (1950), Zakharia Paliashvili Prize (1977), and Shota Rustaveli Prize (1981).

Works
His Sixth Quartet constitutes one of Tsintsadze's finest creations: on the one hand, it represents the culmination in the development and maturation of the composer's individual style; on the other, it reflects his continued search for new means of expression. A composition consisting of one movement yet divided into five structurally open sections, with its development based on monothematic techniques that serve to integrate the parts into a whole, this quartet is written in a form close to that of rondo-sonata, with a prominent role being given to variational continuation. The first section, marked Andante sostenuto, in which the theme is expounded, is wrought with emotion; in the ensuing Allegro assai the musical development is of a dramatic intensity that finds its culmination in the fugato; in the third section, also marked Andante sostenuto, the theme, filled with concealed sorrow, moves from sighs of lament to a rhythmic acceleration; in the Allegro scherzando, which sounds not unlike a grotesque and fantastic dance, the theme is subjected to a number of contrapuntal devices; finally, in the Andante molto sostenuto, the theme returns in its tragic colouring, as if posing a question to which there comes no reply.

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