Claude Debussy -- String Quartet in G Minor (1893)
I. Animé et très décidé II. Assez vif et bien rythmé III. Andantino, doucement expressif IV. Très modéré - En animant peu à peu - Très mouvementé et avec passion
Claude Debussy wrote his sole String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10 in 1893. The previous year Debussy had abandoned the opera Rodrigue et Chimène. He planned to write two string quartets only one of which materialized. The quartet received its premiere on December 29, 1893 by the Ysaÿe Quartet at the Société Nationale in Paris. \"Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity,\" Debussy wrote. Pierre Boulez said that Debussy freed chamber music from \"rigid structure, frozen rhetoric and rigid aesthetics.\"