Quartets by Debussy and Ravel

Synopsis

While hardly twins, the String Quartets of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel are often linked in the minds of music lovers and record companies. Admired today for their grace and sheer beauty, back when these quartets were first performed in Paris, reactions were quite different.

Debussy's work premiered on today's date in 1893, played by the Ysaÿe Quartet. One critic wrote the music was "strange and bizarre, with too many echoes of the streets of Cairo and the gamelan." The gamelan reference was a dig at Debussy's enthusiasm for the Indonesian bronze gong ensemble that he—and many Europeans—heard for the first time at the Paris Exposition of 1889, which bought musical performers from around the globe to that city.

Ravel completed his Quartet ten years after Debussy's. It's dedicated to his teacher Gabriel Fauré, and was first played by the Heymann Quartet on March 5, 1904. Ravel submitted it to both the Prix de Rome and the Conservatoire de Paris. It was rejected by both institutions, and Fauré described the Quartet's last movement as "stunted, badly balanced, in fact a failure."

Now if Debussy were a modern-day American, he might have sent Ravel a note saying: "I feel your pain" or "Been there, done that" —but what he actually wrote to Ravel was: "In the name of the gods of music and in my own, do not touch a single note you have written in your Quartet!"

And you know what? Debussy was right.

Music Played in Today's Program

On This Day

Births

• 1850 - Spanish composer Tomás Bretón, in Salamanca;

• 1876 - Spanish composer, cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, in Vendrell, Catalonia;

• 1912 - Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks, in Melbourne;

Deaths

• 1785 - German composer Johann Heinrich Rolle, in Magdeburg, age 69;

• 1900 - Russian composer Vassili Sergeievitch Kalinnikov (Gregorian date: Jan. 11, 1901);

Premieres

• 1733 - Porpora: opera "Arianna in Nasso" (Ariadne on Naxos) opens the first London season of "The Opera of the Nobility," a company formed to rival Handel's "Royal Academy"; This date is according to the Julian "Old Style" calendar still in use in England that year; Under the Gregorian "New Style" calendar in use today, this premiere actually occurred 11 days later, on Jan. 9, 1734;

• 1882 - Brahms: Piano Trio No. 2 in C, Op. 87, and String Quintet No. 1 in F, Op. 88, in Frankfurt, with a violinist named Heermann and a cellist name Müller, with Brahms at the pianist; Brahms had completed the work during his summer holiday in Bad Ischl (near Salzburg), and had participated in a reading of the new work at a private home in Bad Ischl; On that occasion, as a joke, Brahms introducing the trio as having been composed by his friend, the composer and pianist Ignaz Brull, who was also in Bad Ischl at the time;

• 1893 - Debussy: String Quartet, in Paris, by the Ysaye Quartet;

• 1906 - Sibelius: tone poem, "Pohjola's Daughter," in St. Petersburg, Russia;

• 1916 - Max Bruch: Concerto for two pianos and orchestra, by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting, with duo-pianists Rose and Ottilie Sultro;

Others

• 1903 - First concert by the Seattle Symphony at Christensen's Hall in Seattle under the baton of violinist Harry F. West; The program includes music of Massenet, Bruch, Schubert and Rossini;