String Quartet in G Minor

Debussy’s String Quartet, completed and first performed in 1893, was originally planned as one of a pair; the manuscript is headed Premier quatuor (First String Quartet), although its companion work never materialised. Debussy had intended to dedicate the Quartet to his older colleague, Ernest Chausson, but at the premiere Chausson disliked aspects of the music, and the friendship between the two composers began to cool. That first performance was given by the quartet ensemble led by the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, and the occasion sharply divided opinion. There was much resistance to Debussy’s way of constructing each of the four movements by a process of free association of ideas, rather than through traditional development. Other listeners, however, were excited by Debussy’s new and radically individual approach. This partly relates to the “cyclical” method of César Franck, where a musical idea recurs in various transformations throughout a work: the first movement’s vigorous opening theme, for instance, reappears in this way in the scherzo-like second movement and the finale. But the music’s idiom is entirely different from Franck’s Wagner-influenced style. The poised loveliness of the lyrical slow movement is offset by the pace and panache of the others; the scherzo makes striking use of speedy pizzicato (plucked notes) on all four instruments, an effect taken up by Ravel in his own String Quartet (1903).