Debussy

To be quite Franck

“At last,” said César Franck after the gratifyingly successful first performance of his String Quartet in Paris in 1890, “the public is beginning to understand me.” Two weeks later, at a late-night reception held in the Belgian composer’s honour in Tournai, the celebrated violinist Eugène Ysaÿe paid his distinguished compatriot the singular compliment of leading his quartet through an impromptu reading of the new score (which the composer just happened to have with him) and then going through it all again before letting him go to bed in the early hours of the morning. Having waited until he was 68 before addressing the most challenging of classical forms, and having produced a considerable masterpiece, César Franck could die a happy man - which he promptly did.

Only three years later, however, that deeply thoughtful product of Franck’s maturity was in a sense superseded by a comparatively slender score by a composer no more than thirty years old. This does not mean that Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor is a better work than Franck’s in D major. It has no pretensions to the structural scale represented by Franck’s extraordinary first movement, which is really two movements masterfully combined into one, and it makes no attempt to emulate Beethoven in profundity. On the other hand, while it owes much to Franck’s example in one way, in another way - in terms of sound and texture - it is quite different and, in France at least, it was quite new.

It is not insignificant that Eugène Ysayë, who was himself over sixty by now and whose quartet gave the not very successful first performance of Debussy’s Quartet in G minor in Paris in 1893, actually confessed to understanding not a note of it. That kind of incomprehension persisted for a while but now, as far as the world at large is concerned, the most representative of French (including Belgian) string quartets is not by César Franck but by Claude Debussy or Maurice Ravel.

Ravel’s String Quartet in F major, which was first performed in Paris in 1904, was written by an even younger composer: when he completed it he was only just 28. But Ravel had Debussy’s example to follow, of course, and he did not fail to avail himself of the opportunities offered by its scoring and its rhythmic flexibility. One of the most important qualities the two works have in common, however, derives straight from Franck’s Quartet in D major. Both Debussy and Ravel adopt Franck’s cyclic procedure, according to which one main theme not only recurs from movement to movement, more or less disguised, but also influences the character of much of the rest of the material in the work.

The difference is that, whereas Franck, the prophet of the cyclic principle, makes a drama out of his thematic reminiscences and structural cross-references, Debussy and Ravel are more subtle about these things, pretending they are not really there. Another difference is that, whereas Franck turned to the tried and tested German tradition for his models - most obviously of all in the Scherzo, which derives directly from Mendelssohn - Debussy and Ravel quite deliberately looked somewhere else. Both of them had been to the Exposition Universelle in 1889, which was a revelation of sounds from exotic cultures (particularly for Debussy, who was 13 years older and so much more capable to taking it all in), and both of them were aware of music written in traditional European forms but outside the traditional European musical centres - by Grieg in Norway, for example, and Borodin in Russia.

Grieg’s String Quartet in G minor, completed in 1878 and published in the following year, is also cyclic in form and its main theme is melodically (though not rhythmically) the same as that of Debussy’s Quartet in G minor. Grieg was influential too, and Borodin more so, in demonstrating that the texture does not necessarily have to be contrapuntal. Borodin’s irresistibly scored Second Quartet in D major of 1882, is the supreme proof that a single, shapely line of melody, effectively coloured and harmonised, is no less suitable material for the string quartet than for the orchestra or the piano. Debussy and Ravel were both too skilled in counterpoint, both too thoroughly well-trained at the Conservatoire, to go as far as Borodin in that direction but his example, particularly for Ravel - whose last movement makes clear allusions to Borodin’s in D major - liberated their inspiration in creating the purely voluptuous sound, the aural sensation which has no intellectual motivation.

For the followers of César Franck - which means basically those composers associated with the Schola Cantorum founded by Vincent d’Indy in Paris 1894 - such an attitude was irresponsible and unacceptable. Unfortunately, no worthy successor to Franck’s Quartet in D major emerged from that area, in spite of the accomplished efforts of d’Indy himself. Unfortunately too, neither Debussy nor Ravel returned to the medium. At least they had proved that - unlike the great professional, Camille Saint-Saëns, who avoided the string quartet until he was 64, or the great lyricist, Gabriel Fauré, whose solitary and serene String Quartet in E minor was his very last work - they were not overawed by the medium. In fact, in his austerely effective Sonata for violin and cello, dedicated to the memory of Debussy in 1922, Ravel demonstrated that he could do it with, so to speak, one hand tied behind his back.

Frankly, after the concentrated survey of most of the best of French and Russian chamber music offered by this uniquely valuable festival, the conclusion will surely be that, while the Russians found all they wanted in the string quartet, the French were generally happier with a piano or, at least, a harp to hand. The opportunity to blend piano with string or wind sound - in Franck and Chausson and particularly in Fauré, Poulenc and Messiaen - was a powerful stimulus to the French imagination, and the force of tradition in mixed ensembles - between, say, the Saint-Saëns Piano Trio of 1868 and the Ravel Piano Trio of 1914 - is clearly stronger.

The handful of successful string quartets by French (and Belgian) composers are all the more precious for that.

Gerald Larner©

Gerald Larner, a writer and music critic associated mainly with The Times, is writing biographies of Emmanuel Chabrier and Maurice Ravel