A couple of weeks ago we jumped headlong into a piece of music we’ve never talked about before—really, that I’d never listened to prior to about a month ago: Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G# minor. It’s the only string quartet Debussy ever wrote, and it debuted in Paris at the end of December, 1893.
In his book Modernism, historian Peter Gay calls Debussy one of the pacesetters of Modernism and portrays him even at a young age as someone unwilling to adjust his compositional inclinations to conform with what was expected. He writes that as a boy taking lessons, Debussy “irritated his piano teacher by devising sacrilegious little Preludes,” and that he would take orders “only from himself.” Later in life about his own music Debussy said, “I am too fond of my freedom, and my own ideas”
One conservative critic at the time called his compositions “bizarre, incomprehensible, and impossible to execute.” Well, the first two comments may, from some perspectives, be accurate; the third is most certainly not. Just listen to any recording.
The second movement of the quartet is more sedate than the first and it starts with some of the players playing pizzicato for the first time—that is, plucking the strings with their fingertips instead of using the bow. The overall impression is one of curious cats walking around something they can’t figure out and didn’t see come in. “Catlike” isn’t a bad description of the second movement in fact. When the viola and cello take the lead, the violins stand back and watch, and then vice versa. There’s more stillness in between the phrases in this movement than in the first. Periodic ascending phrases sort of separate the movement into manageable parts.
Then, pizzicato returns as if they’re again walking around and looking at what they’ve been pondering. Little two measure phrases are passed back and forth. Then the second movement flows right into the third without a pause, and this one is quieter still. There are sections in which only one instrument seems to have the floor, speaking for them all perhaps. Gradually you hear extended musings from the lower end of the scale and the others creep in, making it seem like they’ve been gone a while.
“There’s nothing descriptive about the music,” of Modernism, write music historians Howard McKinney and W.R. Anderson. “It simply strives to evoke in the listener’s mind something of the feeling which its creator experienced in writing it.” Such is one of the main goals of Modernism and Debussy’s music does it perfectly. It’s worth your attention.
