When French composer Vincent d’Indy first heard Ravel’s new quartet at its première in Paris on March 5, 1904, he enthusiastically said: “It is a piece worthy of any composer’s work at the end of a long career.” Ravel, however, was just 28 when he wrote the masterpiece that was to become a cornerstone of the string quartet repertoire and one of the most popular of all quartets. He composed it immediately before his exotic, sometimes voluptuous song cycle Shéhérazade. Ravel dedicated the quartet to Gabriel Fauré, whom he considered his true mentor, even though academic officialdom had expelled him from Fauré’s composition class at the Conservatoire for failing to write a fugue. Its roots, though, are intertwined with those of the D major quartet of César Franck, composed two decades earlier. And in between these two landmark works—the Franck and the Ravel—equally intertwined with both, lies a third masterpiece, the only quartet of Claude Debussy. 

Ravel, the youngest of the three composers, was enthusiastically absorbing the music of Debussy, 12 years his senior, when he began work on his string quartet. He went to every one of the first 30 performances of Debussy’s revolutionary opera Pelléas et Mélisande and had the sound of Debussy’s earlier quartet so much in his head that some of its lifeblood carried over into his own piece. He borrowed the use of Eastern exoticism and the modality of the harmony from Debussy. He also borrowed the richly scored textures and the idea of a pizzicato second movement. 

Both Ravel and Debussy, at ten-year intervals, followed Franck’s lead in using a single theme, transformed both melodically and harmonically throughout all four movements. Although generally freer in his use of the cyclical principle, with each appearance of the theme, Ravel makes subtle changes, using the thematic unity to bring about a constantly shifting sound world. Critics were quick to comment on the similarity of his quartet with that of Debussy following the première March 5, 1904. They divided themselves and the followers of the composers, into polarized camps. From this point on, the relationship of these two revolutionary French composers was to grow uneasy. Nevertheless, when Fauré criticized Ravel’s finale as a failure, Debussy was magnanimous in the way he reassured Ravel shortly before the première: “In the name of the gods of music and in my name too, do not alter a thing in your quartet.” He was backed up the following month by Jean Marnold, critic for the bi-weekly journal Le Mercure de France, who wrote: “A healthy and sensitive temperament of a pure musician is developing here...We should remember the name of Maurice Ravel. He is one of the masters of tomorrow.”