Program Notes

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 10 (1893)

Notes for: July 31, 2012

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the influence of Richard Wagner dominated the music of Western Europe. Like other composers of the period, Debussy was swept along with the Wagnerian current – its rebellion against conventional rules of harmony and musical structure and its restless search for new forms of expression. In 1888 and 1889, to fully absorb Wagner’s epic music dramas, Debussy joined the annual pilgrimage of Wagner devotees to Bayreuth, the town in northern Bavaria that Wagner had selected for the yearly festival of his works.

Like his contemporary Gabriel Fauré, Debussy found Wagner’s heavy-handed emotionalism distasteful as a model for his own music. For a more congenial model, Debussy turned to the paintings of the French impressionists – Monet, Manet and Renoir – and to the poetry of the French symbolists – Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Their works suggested to him a new type of music in which the emphasis would be on understatement, ambiguity, atmosphere and the play of instrumental colors. To identify this new music, critics borrowed the term “impressionism” from the world of painting.

To express his new musical philosophy, Debussy created a new musical language. In keeping with the trend toward ambiguity, he preferred irregular and fragmentary phrases to long expanses of melody. He blended in such devices as unresolved dissonances, parallel chords, rapid and unexpected shifts in harmony, and the occasional use of medieval modes. He borrowed from Russian folk song the whole-tone scale consisting of six notes separated by whole steps. And, while he never abandoned tonality, he de-emphasized the tonic note – the “do” in the major and minor scales.

The first full-blown work of musical impressionism was Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, inspired by a poem of Mallarmé and completed in 1894. The composition immediately preceding that work was Debussy’s one and only string quartet, and it was thus a transitional composition. On the one hand, three of its four movements adhere to the traditional forms of the string quartet and take a fairly orthodox approach to thematic development. On the other, the quartet exhibits the composer’s growing preoccupation with atmosphere, delicacy of expression, and new musical sonorities.

Further, Debussy incorporated into the quartet the principle of cyclical structure developed by César Franck, who had become a pillar of the French musical establishment. Under that principle, musical material is repeated from movement to movement to give a work a sense of unity. But, while Franck indulged in long themes and repeated them in close to original form, Debussy uses a single brief motive and subjects it to substantial transformations.

The first movement, animé et très décidé, opens with the announcement of the cyclical motive, in 4/4 time, in strong rhythmic terms so that it will stick in the listener’s memory. Although in G minor, the motive suggests the Phrygian mode – a medieval mode that corresponds to an E minor scale with the second step flattened. The first movement is in sonata form, except that the second theme – presented by the first violin and viola moving in parallel ninths – plays no part in the development and does not reappear in the recapitulation. Instead, the development introduces a variant of the main theme, which then plays a major role in the rest of the movement.

The second movement, assez vif et bien rythmé, is a scherzo in which the main theme – stated by the violin with a pizzicato accompaniment – is a swiftly paced 6/8 transformation of the cyclical motive.

For the contrasting middle section, the first violin plays the cyclical motive in broad augmentation – one beat of the original motive becoming six beats of the variant – over murmuring 16ths in the lower strings. The first and middle sections make brief reappearances, and finally the main scherzo theme is played pizzicato in 15/8 time by all the strings. Some writers hear in this movement the influence of Javanese gamelan music, which impressed Debussy at the 1889 Paris Exhibition.

The third movement, andantino, doucement expressif, in A-B-A form, clearly anticipated The Afternoon of a Faun in its sensuous use of sound. The first section, played muted, is based on a dreamy melody stated by the first violin with the inner voices moving in parallel sixths. The cyclical motive does not appear until the middle section when, after a soliloquy with a modal flavor, the viola states it, 3/8, in substantially altered but still recognizable form. This section then builds up to the emotional climax of the quartet.

The finale is less structured than the other three movements. After a brief introduction, très modéré, the tempo switches to très mouvemente, we hear the cyclical motive in five different forms, the fourth being a fortissimo declaration fairly close to the original. The fifth appearance occurs in the coda; marked très vif, it races to an exciting conclusion.

Copyright © 2012 by Willard J. Hertz