Debussy: String Quartet No. 1 / Ravel: String Quartet In F / Introduction And Allegro

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Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10 Maurice Ravel (1875 -1937) String Quartet in F majorIntroduction and Allegro for harp, flute,clarinet and string quartet Claude Debussy wrote his first string quartet in 1893 and planned a second as part of the series of six chamber works of which only half were to be completed in 1915, when the composer was depressed by the war and the fatal disease, which brought about his death three years later. The existing string quartet, however, stands at the threshold of his career and at the threshold of the new music that a new century was to bring. At the Conservatoire Debussy had won the Prix de Rome in 1884. Early in 1887 he was able to return from his unwelcome obligatory stay at the Villa Medici in Rome and refused the expected provision of an overture for a public concert of his work in Rome, an event that consequently had to be cancelled.In his personal life at this time Debussy seems to have embraced a fin-de-si?¿cle hedonism that led him into a number of liaisons of an unfortunate kind. From 1888 he enjoyed a stormy relationship with Gaby Dupont that was to last nine years, interrupted by his engagement in 1894 to the singer Ther?¿se Roger, the cause of the end of his friendship with Chausson. Gabrielle Dupont tried to shoot herself in 1897, but survived. Two years later Debussy married his first wife, Dupont's friend Rosalie Texier, a mannequin, whom he deserted in 1904 for the married woman who was to become his second wife. The vie de Boh?¿me with Dupont, however, is also of the period of those remarkable settings of Verlaine, of the Prelude a l'apr?¿s-midi d'un faune based on Mallarme and of early work on the Maeterlinck opera Pelleas et Melisande.The string quartet looks forward in many ways to the musical language that Debussy was to develop as entirely his own, characteristic in its use of modal and whole-tone scales, in its subtle harmonies and texture and in its clarity of form. The four movements are thematically related, in the manner suggested by the work of Cesar Franck. The first movement retains the general shape of a classical first movement. The following scherzo is dominated by the viola theme with which it opens and leads to a slow movement that suggests the medieval or pre-Raphaelite world of Pelleas et Melisande. The final movement opens in contrapuntally angular fashion, proceeding to an allusive summary of something of what has passed. The quartet was given its first performance in December 1893 by the Ysa??e Quartet in Paris.If Debussy was to despise the Prix de Rome, for Ravel it was to prove a cause of public scandal. At the Conservatoire, which he had first entered in 1889, Ravel had variable success, and consistently failed to win the Prix de Rome even when he had established his reputation in the wider musical world of Paris. His failure to win the prize in 1905, caused in part by his d