String Quartet in E minor Op.16 (1903)

Sonate: animé

Sérénade: vif

Chant funèbre: largement, sans lenteur

Danses: vif, populaire

Magnard is one of those composers, like his Parisian colleague Chausson, who are better known to the world at large for they way they died than for anything they achieved in their lifetime. Magnard’s death was the result not of a bizarre accident, like Chausson’s, but of a quixotic act of defiance in the first world war. Determined to keep enemy soldiers out of his home at Baron as the German army advanced from Compiègne to Nanteuil in September 1914, he shot from an upstairs window at a corporal and a sergeant on the terrace below and died when they set fire to the house in reparation. Many of his manuscripts perished with him.

The story is worth telling because it is so indicative of Magnard’s courage, his stubbornness, his refusal to compromise, which also characterised his approach to his art. “The artist who does not find his strength in denial is near either to death or to dishonour,” he is quoted as saying. There is no better example of his high creative ideals than the Quartet in E minor which he completed in 1903 and which was first performed in Paris the following year. The critics were baffled by it, partly because it was not very well played but mainly because it is a work of such ambitious late-Beethoven proportions that, as most of them confessed, one hearing was not enough to form a definitive opinion. One can sympathise with them even now. The musical language, which is firmly tonal in spite of widespread modal harmonies, is no problem. The difficulty is in the large-scale structures of the first and third movements which, though entirely logical, are difficult to grasp, not least because of the contrapuntal activity that involves the melodic material in textures of such complexity as to reduce the profile of the main themes. Ravel’s String Quartet in F, which was first performed in Paris just a few days earlier, is far more realistic in that respect.

Strangely enough, while Ravel’s Quartet is cyclic in form, like Debussy’s and Franck’s, Magnard’s is not, in spite of his admiration for Franck and his attachment to the Franckiste stronghold of the Schola Cantorum. But, if there are no thematic connections between the four movements, there is no lack of melodic interest. The first movement (headed Sonate, although the third and fourth movements are also in sonata form) begins abruptly with the energetic exposition of a first-subject group with as many as five themes contained within it. The contrastingly lyrical second subject, approached by way of a bridge passage including a suddenly expressive violin solo, balances the first in length but is dominated by one theme, a melody rising on violin in yearning chromatic intervals. Although the development, much of it devoted to the second subject, is by no means perfunctory and although the recapitulation of the second subject seems to settle the argument in favour of E major, there is still room for more development in a coda that subsides into resignation.

Wisely, after that opening, Magnard continues not with a slow movement but a conventionally shaped scherzo, or Sérénade as he calls it, to lighten the atmosphere and give the analytical brain a rest. Even so, while another composer might have chosen to offset the pattering figuration of the outer sections with legato melody in the middle section, he initiates a fugue - the first of two to be heard before the end of the last movement.

The heart of the work is the Chant funèbre, the funereal sentiment of which is clearly evident in the C minor melody introduced by second violin in the opening bars. There is, however, a consolatory message on viola and that instrument performs a similar function after the cello has uttered its sad second subject in G minor. In spite of the persistence of an agitated figure that arises on the cello not far into the development and survives into the recapitulation, the viola’s consolatory message proves, in an unexpectedly and ethereally ecstatic ending, to have been no illusion.

The last movement, Danses, is a E-major celebration of his hard-won serenity. As in the first movement, the first-subject group is the more vigorous, but in a cheerful E major in this case, and the second-subject group the more lyrical, not least in a melody rising high on the E-string of the first violin. Magnard is too serious-minded a composer, however, to let us off so lightly: the central episode of the development is a fugue but, based as it is on an attractively waltz-like theme, an entertaining one. It is sustained just long enough to generate the impetus to lead into the recapitulation and a happily unfussy ending.