i. Animé et très décidé
ii. Assez vif et bien rythmé
iii. Andantino, doucement expressif
iv. Très modéré – en animant peu à peu – Très mouvementé et avec passion

Debussy’s String Quartet was completed in February 1893 and first performed by the Ysaÿe Quartet on 29 December 1893, at Salle Pleyel – the 234th concert of the Société Nationale de Musique. This was almost exactly a year before Paris was shocked by the Prélude à L’après-midi d’un Faune, the most laconic manifestation of Debussy’s revolutionary creative spirit. The Quartet, conceived at the same time as the Prélude, is one of his earliest mature works – a piece that still has some roots in the musical language of César Franck – especially in its use of themes recurring throughout the work and in some of the harmonies – but in which a fresh and brilliant imagination can be heard, not least in the spectacularly inventive writing for string instruments (which influenced Ravel when he wrote his String Quartet a decade later).

Debussy’s Quartet is the only work to which he gave an opus number: the score of the first edition, published in 1894, describes it as ‘1er Quatuor … par C.A. Debussy. Op. 10’, though the programme for the first performance describes the work simply as ‘Quatuor’. The programme announced for this premiere provided a fascinating context for Debussy’s Quartet, played at the start of a programme that included Franck’s Violin Sonata and D’Indy’s First String Quartet. All three of these works were dedicated to the great violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (or to his quartet). The pairing of the Debussy with Franck’s masterpiece (played on this occasion by Ysaÿe and Vincent d’Indy) must have been particularly thought-provoking to the audience at the première: Franck’s most creative and poetic use of cyclic form coming immediately after Debussy’s work that uses some of the same techniques, but with some highly original features. For instance, the second movement makes extensive use of pizzicato, with hints of the Javanese music that Debussy had heard at the 1889 Exposition (and, incidentally, of the pizzicato ostinato Scherzo from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony – a work the young Debussy knew well, having played it as a piano duet with its dedicatee Nadezhda von Meck in 1880). The slow movement begins with little fragments of its theme split between the lower instruments before being introduced in full by the first violin, over rich chromatic harmonies that certainly have echoes of Franck, and with his pupil Ernest Chausson – a close friend of Debussy’s at the time before the two of them fell out. The finale has clear thematic links with the first. It starts hesitantly, gradually building up both tension and speed, on a melodic idea presented in a brilliant array of different guises before reaching the dazzling conclusion in G major. This finale gave Debussy a lot of trouble, as he told Chausson: “As for the last movement of the Quartet, I can’t get it into the shape I want and this is the third time of trying. It’s a hard slog!”

Nigel Simeone © 2012