In 1924 the Breuning-Brache Quartet planned a concert devoted to young Danish composers. Shortly before the event, the ensemble decided to add to the programme a work by Rued Langgaard. Instead of giving the performers one of his existing works, Langgaard, a composer previously unnoticed in Denmark, wrote a completely new, highly expressive work within a week. That String Quartet No. 3 is among the most avant-garde achievements in the oeuvre of this Romantically inspired Danish composer and at the same time one of his most frequently performed works.
At first, Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10 was not warmly received. Written in 1893, it was first performed in Paris on 29 December by an ensemble newly put together at the initiative of Eugène Ysaÿe. Commentators accused Debussy of succumbing to Russian influences, supposedly resulting from his contacts with Nadezhda von Meck – his patroness at the time. And indeed, some exotic harmonic solutions can be heard in this work, such as the use of the Phrygian mode. For that reason, Debussy’s only string quartet may be treated as one of the first artistic manifestos of musical impressionism.
More than half of the string quartets by the second of the ‘Viennese Classics’ were written in the years 1772–1773. The last of them, composed in a minor key rarely found in the young genius’s chamber output, reveals strong influences from the Viennese environment, and also from Joseph Haydn. Mozart’s work, of a serious character, is rounded off with a fugue based on a chromatic theme.
Bartłomiej Gembicki, Jan Lech