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Grieg and Debussy String Quartets
Edvard Grieg: String Quartet in G minor, Op. 27
Claude Debussy: String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10

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As far as is known, Edvard Grieg and Claude Debussy barely knew each other, and such contact as they had was unfortunate. Debussy came to think of the Norwegian master as "anti-French" because, in 1900, as a protest against the "Dreyfus Case", Grieg refused to allow his music to be played in France. When in 1903 he agreed to conduct a concert of his works in Paris, the patriotic Debussy wrote a wittily dismissive critique of the event in the satirical magazine Gil Blas, which caused serious offence.

Yet Debussy was aware of Norwegian folk music from an early age (as a child, he knew a Norwegian carpenter who used to sing folksongs) and he must certainly have given Grieg's music close attention, for there are echoes of the older composer in several of his earlier works. In many ways the two composers draw closest to each other - while their individual personalities are very clearly defined - in their string quartets.

Grieg and Debussy each published a single string quartet - in 1878 and 1893 respectively and, in each case, in G minor - although both composers harboured ambitions to write more than one. In fact, Grieg wrote an early Quartet (1861-2) that has been lost, and much later in his career (1891) he began another, though only two movements were ever finished. This leaves the G minor Quartet, Op. 27 of 1878, as his only extant complete work for the medium.

As for Debussy, fifteen years later he labelled his G minor Quartet "Premier Quatuor", a clear indication that he contemplated a second essay in the form. (In fact, he even published the work as his Op. 10 - a number appar- ently quite arbitrarily chosen, since no other work of Debussy bears an opus designation.) It seems that he sketched part of a second quartet - which he said would bring "more dignity to the form" - during 1894, but all trace of this work has been lost.

Although on the superficial levels of musical language and style the G minor Quartets of Grieg and Debussy are very different, they have much in common. They are both unusually ambitious designs, in full-scale four movement form, by composers more celebrated for shorter pieces, even (in Grieg's case) for lyrical miniatures. Both works represent the fully developed, central European, classic-Romantic style of sonata-form composition -in its Austro-German (Grieg) and French (Debussy) manifestations. However, each composer combines this basic language with more exotic elements: Grieg from Norwegian and Italian folk music and Debussy from Javanese Gamelan, and both composers show the influence of the Russian Nationalist school of composers. Both works tend to minimize counterpoint - often felt to be a sine qua non of quartet composition - in favour of full, quasi-orchestral homophonic textures. And both Quartets ensure structural coherence through the use of a motto theme that appears in all four movements. There is, in fact, good reason to suspect that Debussy had Grieg's quartet specifically in mind as a partial model for his own, and especially in this matter of the motto-theme, an idea which he takes up and pursues in a far more thoroughgoing way than does Grieg himself.

Grieg completed his String Quartet in February 1878 and submitted it to the criticism of the German violinist Robert Heckmann, who led a quartet in Cologne. As a result of Heckmann's comments he revised the score in several places, after which the Heckmann Quartet gave the work a highly successful premiere in Cologne during October of the same year.

The first movement is a large sonata-allegro, prefaced by a slower introduction (Un poco Andante) where the motto theme is enunciated by all four instruments in unison - a sonorous, somewhat melancholy idea which Grieg derived from the song Spillemaend (The Fiddlers), which he had composed in 1876. The opening subject of the main movement is restless and febrile, in the "G minor" tradition that stems from Mozart's Symphony No. 40 (we may also think here of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" Quartet and the C minor Quartet of Brahms). The second subject, however, proves to be an especially lyrical form of the motto theme, so that the two subjects are highly polarized in mood and texture. Their emotional opposition makes for a dramatic and agitated development section, the first subject's headlong momentum continually being interrupted and pulled back by the motto elements, and also by the massive repealed chords which are a feature of the movement. Grieg's rich chromatic harmony increases the passionate mood. The recapitulation is regular, but leads into a highly atmospheric coda, where a mood of tragedy culminates in the second subject being played as a lament by the cello, against a ghostly sul ponticello accompaniment from the other three instruments.

Grieg entitled his second movement "Romanze" (like that of Brahms' C minor Quartet). Its songful, almost serenade-like music immediately reintroduces the cello as the leader with the other instruments making a choric response. This relaxed and attractive idea is contrasted, once again, with a restless, agitated subject, and as the movement proceeds these two elements alternate, with the agitated idea providing a livelier counter-subject in restatements of the serenade. The movement fades out on an ethereal chord of harmonics. The ensuing Intermezzo, with its intriguing play of triple- and duple-time metres, is the one in which Norwegian folk associations come nearest the surface. The central trio is indeed built upon a Norwegian folk dance tune, which is heard first upon the cello and passed from instrument to instrument. Here too rustic vigour is contrasted with a more melancholy reflective lyricism.

Like the first movement, the finale has a slow introduction based upon the motto theme, now heard in more fragmentary form. Its tragic accents are however banished by the main movement, which refers to a very different kind of folk-music from that of the third movement. For this finale is cast as a saltarello, the fast triple-time dance which Mendeissohn had chosen for the finale of his Italian Symphony. The light-heartedness of the dance is short-lived, however, for Grieg combines it with impassioned references to the descending sequence of the motto, so that the saltarello's Mediterranean gaiety seems to be capering along the edge of a glacier of Nordic melancholy. Towards the end of the movement Grieg makes cyclic references to the first movement and the Intermezzo, before the final proclamation of the motto closes the work in a mood of grim determination.

Debussy completed his String Quartet in February 1893, and it was premiered in December of that year in Paris by the quartet led by his friend, the great Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaÿe. It may be considered the first work of Debussy's creative maturity - and also the last work in which he aspired to produce a major utterance in a "classical" genre before turning to the much more radical and poetic ideas which manifested in the following year with Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune. In one sense Debussy's Quartet belongs to the tradition of cyclic form recently exemplified by, for example, Cesar Franck's String Quartet of 1889. But in fact the work is a subtle fusion of cyclic form with variation form, for it is virtuoso built upon a single theme - the "motto" stated at the outset which ramifies, throughout all four movements, continually being transformed in rhythm, mode and harmony.

The result is a highly paradoxical composition, which baffled contemporary reviewers even as it elicited their admiration. To some extent it resembles an intricate mosaic rather than an example of organic growth, yet growth is taking place all the time, as the central idea changes to reveal new offshoots and possibilities through its prismatic transformations. The music has extraordinary flexibility in phraseology and harmony, aspiring towards Debussy's ideal of "infinite arabesque". Yet this coexists with an extreme tendency to balance and equipoise attained by multitudinous literal repetitions of 2-bar phrases, and the strong, definite contrasts of character between the different movements.

The first movement opens with a resolute announcement of the motto theme, in the Phrygian mode. During this movement the theme remains almost unchanged melodically and rhythmically, but is harmonized in many different ways and dissolved in many different kinds of virtuoso figuration. Although the movement is arranged like a sonata-form design, episodes of Massenet-like elegance replace true development - and both they and the nominal "second subject", which appears very late, are themselves derived from the main motto idea. Swift, bold modulations add interest and a strong sense of purpose, and the movement ends with tremendous decisiveness.

The ensuing G major scherzo was thought the most striking and original movement at the Quartet's premiere. Debussy's combination here of arco and highly percussive pizzicato playing was influenced by his experience of Javanese and Annomite Gamelan ensembles at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, though he may also have been imitating gypsy music. The main theme (viola, with pizzicato accompaniment) and the secondary subject (violin, with shimmering arco tremolandi) are both derivatives of the motto idea.

The slow movement begins with a melancholy transition passage, which guides the tonality from G to its polar opposite, D flat major. This is much the most romantic movement of the work, and shows the clear influence of the Russian Nationalist composers (above all, perhaps, Borodin) in its impassioned soliloquies for viola and cello. Here the variation technique is used with increasing freedom to create a long ecstatic span and a climax both intense and contemplative, which already looks towards the world of the opera "Pelleas et Melisande".

The finale is the most episodic of the movements in its construction. It begins with a slowish recitative-like introduction, led by the cello, moving us from D flat back towards G. It then accelerates through a gigue-like fugato, closely related to the first theme of the scherzo, into the main Allegro in G minor. The motto theme is now reshaped to the purposes of a summatory finale, which nevertheless introduces reminiscences of the other three movements before rising to a climax, almost orchestral in it's amplitude of sonority, and a joyous coda in G major.

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