String Quartet (Debussy)


completed his String Quartet in G minor, in 1893 when he was 31 years old. It is Debussy's only string quartet.

Background

That year Debussy had abandoned the opera Rodrigue et Chimène. He planned to write two string quartets, only one of which materialized. The string quartet was to be dedicated to composer Ernest Chausson, whose personal reservations eventually diverted the composer's original intentions.
The quartet received its premiere on December 29, 1893 by the Ysaÿe Quartet at the Société Nationale in Paris to mixed reactions.

Analysis

The work is in four movements:
Its sensuality and impressionistic tonal shifts are emblematic of its time and place while, with its cyclic structure, it constitutes a final divorce from the rules of classical harmony and points the way ahead. After its premiere, composer Guy Ropartz described the quartet as "dominated by the influence of young Russia ; there are poetic themes, rare sonorities, the first two movements being particularly remarkable."
Debussy wrote that "ny sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity." Pierre Boulez said that Debussy freed chamber music from "rigid structure, frozen rhetoric and rigid aesthetics."
Maurice Ravel, an Impressionist composer associated with Debussy, also wrote a single string quartet, a piece that is modeled on Debussy's.