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-Debussy and Ravel Quartets – A note
Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel only wrote one quartet each. Both of these are extremely impressionistic in style, correlating chronologically with the work of Monet and his contemporaries in France, full of colour, and rich in bold gestures.
Thirteen years younger than Debussy, Ravel wrote his quartet with the Debussy work very much in mind, and really I would not have thought twice if I had been told the two works were written by the same composer. The Debussy came first in 1893. Reading up on this piece this morning I read that before 1870 there was very little chamber music written in France, mainly because it was not considered to be a “serious” enough musical form when compared to the grandeur of the symphony and opera. This just seems strange to me, the complete reverse of how I consider classical music. The only real predecessor for Debussy and Ravel was apparently a long and intense quartet written by Franck, their compatriot and contemporary. Both of these quartets are said to have been influenced by Franck’s work.
The Debussy quartet in F is quite a complex, complicated piece for its time. The strong melodies of Schubert aren’t here, nor the bright energy of the late Beethoven quartets. There is a melodic line in Debussy’s composition, but it is buried beneath all kinds of diversions and offshoots that the music follows. Here and there the music returns to melodic forms, and occasional rhythmic sections apparently influenced by his discovery of gamelan music, though the influence is not obvious to me. On the whole though the quartet in four movements is a smorgasbord of slow yet detailed little patterns of colour that considered as a whole come together to form one work of considerable beauty, impressionism at its most beautiful, confident best.
The similarities between Debussy and Ravel, at least in their approach to string quartets is remarkable. I actually had no idea of the links between these two composers when I went looking for these quartets, but I can see why they were both mentioned in the same breath. Ravel’s quartet, written a decade after Debussy’s in 1903 is clearly strongly influenced by the Debussy. As the older composer had received a degree of derision for daring to write music in this form, so did Ravel. The younger composer found his quartet roundly criticised when he entered it for a number of musical prizes on its conception. Quite incredibly, even the person to whom Ravel dedicated the score, his teacher Gabriel Fauré was highly critical and the ensuing arguments caused Ravel to leave the Paris Conservatoire, where he had studied under Fauré for more than a decade.
Despite having listened to both of these compositions five or six times each over the last week (neither is particularly long, the Debussy twenty-five minutes and the Ravel just a few minutes longer) I really cannot find much to separate the two composers’ works. Debussy uses rhythm more abundantly, and maybe the Ravel has a slightly richer intensity to it, but both pieces work on similar lines, employing melody but hiding it behind a maze of diversions, filling the space with streams of bold colour. I like this music quite a bit, but somehow, like the impressionist painters there is a slight hint of style before content, and I don’t quite feel the degree of emotional pull in these works as perhaps can be heard in Schubert or Shostakovich. Ravel in particular was not a religious man, and unlike many of his predecessors chose not to use these grand themes in his music. I never thought I would ever say this, but perhaps the music loses some of its emotional impact through this.
From The Watchful Ear; excerpts, edited by MUSICON