Composed 1923-4; 26 minutes
“I have undertaken a quartet for strings, without piano. This is a genre that Beethoven in particular made famous, and causes those of us who are not Beethoven to be terrified of it!... I have spoken of this to no one.” Fauré, writing to his wife, was 78, in poor health, with little more than a year left to live. The String Quartet—his only quartet—is his final work, completed with determination and some anxiety, just days before double pneumonia left the revered composer too weak to put pen to paper. It was the first and only time that Fauré was to write a chamber work without the piano, an instrument that lies at the heart of the rest of his compositions.
Despite his inhibitions about the medium and his physical exhaustion, the quartet is a triumph. Its main key, E minor, was one that he had turned to for other meditative works—the Second Violin Sonata, for example, or the Tenth and Twelfth Nocturnes. Although most of the opening movement’s themes are drawn from drafts for an abandoned early violin concerto, the opening theme is given to viola—then answered by an elaborate violin arabesque. A beautifully lyrical and somewhat nostalgic second theme is shared between the two violins. The development is compact, moving seamlessly from its origins in music written 45 years earlier to the intricacies of Fauré’s late counterpoint and harmonic language.
The slow movement was the first to be written and is the focal point of the work. It opens majestically, with a serenity that is uplifting. The music moves through constantly shifting harmonic sequences, surging forward, as though striving for the unattainable. The finale has many outward characteristics of a scherzo. Its rhythms dance and the accompanying pizzicato octaves add buoyancy to the texture. Fauré himself described it as being in a “light and cheerful” mood. But it is hard to ignore a feeling of underlying melancholy and anguish in the writing, and the constant striving for something beyond. The quartet ends with an uplifting coda, an affirmative conclusion to a complex score.
