String Quartet (Debussy)

String Quartet
by Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy in 1884
Key	G minor
Catalogue	L 85
Opus	Op. 10
Form	String quartet
Composed	1892–1893
Duration	About 25 minutes
Movements	Four
Premiere
Date	December 29, 1893 (1893-12-29)
Location	Société Nationale in Paris
Performers	Ysaÿe Quartet

Claude Debussy wrote his String Quartet in G minor, L 85, Op. 10 in 1893 when he was 31 years old. It is Debussy's only string quartet.

The previous year Debussy had abandoned the opera Rodrigue et Chimène. He planned to write two string quartets, only one of which materialized. The string quartet was to be dedicated to composer Ernest Chausson, whose personal reservations eventually diverted the composer's original intentions.

The quartet received its premiere on December 29, 1893 by the Ysaÿe Quartet at the Société Nationale in Paris to mixed reactions.

The work is in four movements:

Its sensuality and impressionistic tonal shifts make it a piece absolutely of its time and place while, with its cyclic structure, it constitutes a final divorce from the rules of classical harmony and points the way ahead. At the time of the premiere, composer Guy Ropartz described the quartet as a work, "dominated by the influence of young Russia (interestingly, Debussy's patroness in the early 1880s had been Nadezhda von Meck, better known for her support of Tchaikovsky); there are poetic themes, rare sonorities, the first two movements being particularly remarkable."

Debussy wrote that "[a]ny sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity."Pierre Boulez said that Debussy freed chamber music from "rigid structure, frozen rhetoric and rigid aesthetics."

Maurice Ravel, an Impressionist composer associated with Debussy, also wrote a single string quartet, a piece that is modeled on Debussy's own quartet.

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