Piano Quartet in B minor

completed by Vincent d’Indy

Dans un emportement douloureux (très animé)

Lent et passionné

How Guillaume Lekeu would have developed if typhoid had not killed him when he was only just 24 it is impossible to say. The highly expressive and melodious Violin Sonata in G major he had written for his Belgian compatriot Eugène Ysaÿe less than two years earlier suggests that he had the potential at least to equal the achievement of Chausson - another Franck pupil who met an early death in the 1890s, but in his mid-forties in his case rather than his mid-twenties. The even more accomplished and even more passionate Piano Quartet in B minor, which Lekeu was working on when he died, reveals a genius comparable to that of César Franck himself.

On the other hand, he might have burned himself out. “I will never write anything trivial,” he once said, adding that his music might be “bizarre, deranged, horrible, whatever you like, but it will at least be original.” And he spared no effort in attempting to express himself: “My piano groans, screams and squeals … terrified no doubt by the strange harmonies I have to get down,” he wrote as he struggled with his Piano Quartet. He was worried, too, by the way this “wild and untamable” work was getting longer and longer. In fact, it was an ambitious project that might well have extended to 45 minutes or more if he had completed the three movements he had in mind.

The first movement, which alone lasts more than 15 minutes, is a complex construction with a logic all the more difficult to follow because of the similarity between its main themes. But logic is not the point here. As Lekeu wrote, it is “a poem of the heart, where a thousand sentiments collide, where caresses slip in and insinuate themselves in an effort to calm the darkest thoughts, where cries of anguish are followed by appeals for happiness, where the most miserable despair is followed by cries of love in an effort to dominate it, just as eternal pain endeavours to crush the joy of life.”

A “nocturne” or “love scene” according to the composer, the second movement, which makes extensive use of themes from the first, is as intimate as its predecessor is dramatic. In completing it after Lekeu’s death, fellow Franck pupil Vincent d’Indy did not so much work out its possible development as bring it to a suitable conclusion.