Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)
String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10
Maurice Ravel (1875 -1937)
String Quartet in F major
Introduction and Allegro for harp, flute,
clarinet and string quartet
Claude Debussy wrote his first string quartet in 1893 and planned a second
as part of the series of six chamber works of which only half were to be completed
in 1915, when the composer was depressed by the war and the fatal disease, which
brought about his death three years later. The existing string quartet, however,
stands at the threshold of his career and at the threshold of the new music
that a new century was to bring. At the Conservatoire Debussy had won the Prix
de Rome in 1884. Early in 1887 he was able to return from his unwelcome
obligatory stay at the Villa Medici in Rome and refused the expected provision
of an overture for a public concert of his work in Rome, an event that consequently
had to be cancelled.
In his personal life at this time Debussy seems to have embraced a fin-de-siècle
hedonism that led him into a number of liaisons of an unfortunate kind. From
1888 he enjoyed a stormy relationship with Gaby Dupont that was to last nine
years, interrupted by his engagement in 1894 to the singer Thérèse Roger, the
cause of the end of his friendship with Chausson. Gabrielle Dupont tried to
shoot herself in 1897, but survived. Two years later Debussy married his first
wife, Dupont's friend Rosalie Texier, a mannequin, whom he deserted in 1904
for the married woman who was to become his second wife. The vie de Bohème with
Dupont, however, is also of the period of those remarkable settings of Verlaine,
of the Prélude á l'après-midi d'un faune based on Mallarmé and
of early work on the Maeterlinck opera Pelléas et Mélisande.
The string quartet looks forward in many ways to the musical language that
Debussy was to develop as entirely his own, characteristic in its use of modal
and whole-tone scales, in its subtle harmonies and texture and in its clarity
of form. The four movements are thematically related, in the manner suggested
by the work of César Franck. The first movement retains the general shape of
a classical first movement. The following scherzo is dominated by the viola
theme with which it opens and leads to a slow movement that suggests the medieval
or pre-Raphaelite world of Pelléas et Mélisande. The final movement opens
in contrapuntally angular fashion, proceeding to an allusive summary of something
of what has passed. The quartet was given its first performance in December
1893 by the Ysaÿe Quartet in Paris.
If Debussy was to despise the Prix de Rome, for Ravel it was to prove
a cause of public scandal. At the Conservatoire, which he had first entered
in 1889, Ravel had variable success, and consistently failed to win the Prix
de Rome even when he had established his reputation in the wider musical
world of Paris. His failure to win the prize in 1905, caused in part by his
deliberate unwillingness to follow the academic rules of the competition, led
to the resignation of the director of the Conservatoire, the conservative Dubois,
and his replacement by Ravel's teacher Gabriel Fauré.
Ravel wrote his only string quartet in 1902, dedicating it to his teacher
Fauré. The work was to excite comment and there were comparisons with Debussy's
quartet, which had obviously influenced the younger composer. Ravel was never
to disparage Debussy, but the latter grew to resent suggestions of Ravel's influence
on him, which at times seemed evident enough. The quartet opens with one of
those characteristically nostalgic melodies, replete with yearning for an unattainable
past, a mood of which Fauré was a master. The second theme suggests a theme
to be used a few years later in the Introduction and Allegro, here poignantly
announced by first violin and viola. There is a scherzo of subtle rhythmic complexity
with thematic links to the first movement and leading to a slow trio section
in which the resources of the quartet are fully explored. The slow movement
offers music of suggestive delicacy, evocative of a past world and this leads
to a lively final movement of rhythmic asymmetry but thematically re1ated to
what has gone before.
Ravel wrote his Introduction and Allegro for harp, flute, clarinet
and string quartet in 1905. Relatively simple in conception, this work contains
in it the spirit of an age and of a poetic national mood. The harp is beautifully
handled in music that expresses beyond the power of words that world on which
Ravel had earlier touched in his Pavane pour une infante défunte.
Keith Anderson
