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.