Debussy: String Quartet in G minor

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) composed only one string quartet (published, confusingly, as his “1st Quartet”). Although labelled Op. 10 it was his only work to appear with an opus number, and it was also his last work to be given a key (G minor). All these facts somehow symbolize Debussy’s rebellious character and fondness for teasing convention, though the quartet itself is by no means one of his most groundbreaking works.

Introduction

Debussy was not a string player, and his quartet is not exploratory in the manner of his piano music; nor is it, for the most part, “impressionistic” in the sense of nearly contemporaneous works such as his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, 1894) or the orchestral Nocturnes (1897–99). Its essential character is open and forthright, in the spirit of its first theme. From a technical point of view its most striking feature is that it is cyclic: the same material is used, in varied form, in at least three of the four movements—a unifying mechanism Debussy probably took from the composer César Franck, who had taught him organ-playing and improvisation at the Paris Conservatoire.

History

The quartet was composed in 1893 alongside other, predominantly vocal works: the Proses lyriques (four songs to Debussy’s own texts, 1892–93); an opera called Rodrigue et Chimène, which he abandoned in favor of the one opera he did eventually complete, Pelléas et Mélisande (1893–1902); and the orchestral Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, inspired by a Stéphane Mallarmé poem. In this company the quartet has an unusually abstract character, concerned primarily with its materials, and with strong workmanship.

Debussy: Quartet in G minor for Strings, Op. 10

The first performance was given in December 1893 by the Ysaÿe Quartet (led by the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe) at a concert of the Paris Société Nationale that also included Franck’s Violin Sonata, Gabriel Fauré’s Elégie for cello and piano, and Vincent d’Indy’s String Quartet, Op. 35. Debussy’s work is also dedicated to the Ysaÿe Quartet. The following year he offered them a set of three Nocturnes for violin and orchestra, but nothing came of this, except for a few sketches (unconnected, it seems, with the well-known Nocturnes of three years later). On the other hand, Debussy promised his friend—the composer Ernest Chausson, who had disliked the “first” quartet—to write a second one specially for him. Sadly, he never did.

Form

On the face of it the quartet’s form is conventional. It has four movements: fast, fast, slow, fast, as if Debussy were studiously following classical models. There was no great French tradition of quartet writing, nor any particular tradition of the public performance of chamber music. (It was symptomatic that the premiere was given by a foreign quartet.) One might also feel that in adopting a cyclic method, Debussy was providing himself with artificial scaffolding, a sort of objective mechanism for generating thematic material.

However, this is not at all the feeling the music itself gives. The form is in fact extremely free—no more than superficially classical—and the key sequence is, by any orthodox standard, wayward, with a slow movement, in the remote key of D-flat major, disrupted by a central section in the enharmonic (equivalent) parallel minor key (C-sharp minor), after which Debussy works his way back to the finale’s G minor, by way of a harmonically complicated slow introduction.

Analysis

The first movement launches, without preliminaries, into the theme that will, in various forms, dominate much of the quartet. Though nominally in G minor, it has a modal (Phrygian) flavor—flattened second and seventh scale degrees (A-flat and F-natural)—providing a quasi-antique coloring. There is a more lyrical second theme, in a modal (also Phrygian) B-flat minor, but this never reappears. Instead, what amounts to the development section introduces a new, more lyrical theme, marked “Un peu retenu” (slightly held back), and the rest of the movement consists of a dialogue between this and the opening theme, with a mere nod towards the kind of formal recapitulation one expects of a Classical-era sonata movement.

The scherzo second movement, in a sort of G major (i.e., with modal inflections), sports three versions of the original first-movement theme: a dance melody for solo viola, freely extended and punctuated by pizzicato (plucked) G-major chords in the other instruments; then a slower violin theme, drawn across the continuing dance tempo; and, finally, an abrupt violin figure—a mere gesture—leading back to the violin theme and, in due course, the dance music, now pizzicato on all four instruments.

The lyrical main theme of the slow movement (“Andantino, doucement expressif”), in D-flat major, digresses for a time from the cyclic material, as if taking a brief holiday from the intellectual core of the work. A middle section in C-sharp minor—introduced once again by solo viola—might seem to be searching for that connection, particularly by way of a triplet figure that was also important in the first-movement theme. But though the search is intense, it remains unfulfilled, and eventually the music settles back into the original, independent melody.

The finale gropes its way back to G minor by way of a slow introduction that picks up the Andantino’s D-flat major, then slithers from E major back to G minor via a chromatic theme in triplets that hints at—but doesn’t quite follow—the shape of the main first-movement theme. The movement proper, marked “Très mouvementé,” starts with yet another version of this material which soon, however, crystallizes back into the actual first-movement idea, in the slower (augmented) version from the scherzo. Then, in a breathless coda, Debussy ties the threads of the whole quartet.

Critical Thoughts

Why Chausson disliked this quartet is hard to say, but he may have been disconcerted by its formal and harmonic freedom: in promising him a second quartet, Debussy undertook “to ennoble my forms.” Having long since rejected the proprieties of correct (“noble”) Classical design, he here allows his thematic treatment to control the form in an essentially freewheeling way: he visits remote keys like some musical nomad, then sews everything up in the final movement by clinching the family connections of all his main themes. The French composer Albéric Magnard found it “barbarous, formless, but of an admirable rhythmic savagery and harmonic truculence,” while the Belgian critic Octave Maus praised “this highly seductive art, at once simple and complicated.” Perhaps the most striking aspect of the quartet—in the popular view of Debussy as an Impressionist—is how little he explores the “misty,” Whistler-esque qualities of string sounds that are such a feature of his instrumentation in orchestral works of the 1890s, including Pelléas et Mélisande and the Nocturnes. He seems to be working consciously with the economy of just four instruments, and hardly ever takes refuge in sonority for its own sake.

Legacy

Not only did Debussy never again write for string quartet, he wrote no chamber music (apart from a pair of short, single-movement rhapsodies, for saxophone and clarinet, respectively, with piano) until the cello, flute/viola/harp, and violin sonatas of his final years. In the end it was probably his sudden obsession with piano music, inspired by Maurice Ravel’s piano work Jeux d’eau of 1901–02, that steered him away from chamber ensembles, though it’s also possible that he felt restricted by the intimacy and purity of the genre. On the other hand, Ravel’s own String Quartet, composed in 1902–04, was undoubtedly influenced—if not inspired—by Debussy’s (and Ravel had previously pinched a theme from Debussy’s first movement for his Prix de Rome cantata, Alcyone [1902]).

Nor did Debussy again use cyclic form, apart from a single instance between the outer movements of his Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp (1915). One can suggest that intellectual devices of that kind were essentially foreign to his profoundly sensual attitude to musical design. The quartet is really a brilliant sacrifice on the altar of good breeding, not untinged by a certain ironic refusal to behave quite correctly in the hallowed sanctuary.

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Article by Stephen Walsh