If a composer chooses to break away from the favored musical style of his day, it often takes longer for him to emerge as an important creator. Such was the case with Claude Debussy who waited until his thirties to fully reveal his genius. From adolescence, Debussy marched to his own drummer. When he won the Paris Conservatoire’s most coveted Prix de Rome, which supported several years of leisurely study and creative work in Rome, he left that gilded cage after just two years and in early 1887 returned to his parents’ modest home in Paris. He had his own path to find and believed that sending “correctly” written scores back to the Conservatoire would only delay him.

Although Debussy twice made the required pilgrimage to Bayreuth to hear Wagner’s music dramas, he did not fall under that composer’s intoxicating spell as did so many composers of that era. Instead, he was more moved by hearing a Javanese gamelan orchestra play at Paris’ World Exhibition of 1889.

Debussy’s art was much cooler and more subtle than Wagner’s and César Franck’s and closer in its aesthetic to the music of the upcoming 20th century. And so when his only string quartet, his first masterpiece, was introduced to Paris on December 29, 1893 by the Ysaÿe Quartet (headed by the famous Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe), it was not very warmly received. Its harmonies seemed strange, and when the musicians began plucking their strings during the second-movement scherzo—Debussy’s tribute to that Javanese gamelan orchestra—some complained that he was trying to write for a guitar quartet. Critics and audiences began to appreciate Debussy’s new conception of beauty only after the premiere of his sensuous Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun in December 1894, a work written simultaneously with the Quartet in 1892–93.

Debussy did borrow one technique from Franck, whose then popular Quartet he had heard and enjoyed in 1890. That was the use of a “motto” theme that recurs in various transformations throughout the piece—a procedure known as ‘cyclical form.’ Firmly articulated by all four instruments, his motto theme opens the first movement. It has a crisp rhythmic profile, spiced by syncopations, that will help us recognize it on its many reappearances. This contrasts with more flowing melodic ideas and airier textures and eventually with a poignantly rocking second theme sung by the first violin. The movement’s development section is signaled by a dramatic declaration of the motto theme in rich double stops. But it is the emotional power of the rocking theme that is explored most thoroughly in this section.

The magical second-movement scherzo takes the Quartet into a new sound world with its virtuosic use of pizzicato. A new version of the motto appears immediately in the viola as the other instruments ping an intricate rhythmic accompaniment. It alternates with a contrasting trio section floating a slower version of the motto in the first violin over the whirling glitter of the other instruments.

A lovely and melancholy nocturne in the dark key of D-flat Major, the slow third movement begins with all the strings muted. Eventually, the viola leads-off a middle section with a plaintive song, punctuated by organ-like chords from the others. With the mutes now removed, this song rises through the instruments to a passionate climax in the first violin. Then the muted opening music returns and soars to an ethereal close.

The finale opens with a slow introduction that provides a link to the preceding movement, retaining its melancholy and its key of D-flat Major. Then we hear in the cello a reminiscence of movement two’s scherzo music with its quirky version of the motto theme. This leads to the finale proper, back in the home key of G Minor, with its exciting treatment of fragments of the motto. And we eventually hear movement two’s slower trio music again, serenely sung by the first violin in its low register. This section rises to a climax in which the first violin very slowly and grandly proclaims the motto theme in bold octaves over a tremulous accompaniment. Ultimately, Debussy brightens his music to G Major for a fast, brilliant conclusion in which the motto bubbles through all four instruments.

No other composer had a career path that matched Leoš Janácˇek’s. Born to a poor family of musician/teachers in Moravia, he worked for decades in diligent obscurity as a teacher and conductor in Moravia’s capital, Brno. The greatest period of his creativity came after his 60th birthday in the twelve years after his opera Jenufa finally had its triumphant premiere in Prague in 1916. During that extraordinary decade, he wrote his two string quartets, the Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass, and his finest operas Kát’a Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropoulos Affair, and From the House of the Dead—most of the works for which he is renowned today.

Because most of his major works were composed well after the 20th century was underway, Janácˇek developed a much more modern voice than was typical for someone born in 1854. And he was first and foremost a dramatist in music and one of the 20th century’s greatest operatic composers. All his music, whether vocal or instrumental, sprang from the rhythms of the Czech language he loved so passionately. Russian literature was also an enduring inspiration, as Janácˇek reacted against the dominance of the Austrian Empire and its culture over his country and embraced a pan-Slavic ideal.

Tolstoy’s short story The Kreutzer Sonata, which relates a tragic tale of a love triangle between an insanely jealous husband, his unhappy wife, and a violinist who gives her a brief taste of love and freedom, apparently percolated in Janácˇek’s imagination for many years. First he worked on a piano trio on the subject, then tossed it away in favor of a string quartet. His “Kreutzer Sonata” Quartet was largely written in the remarkable space of just ten days in 1923. A virtual opera without words in which the four players represent the powerful emotions and even the individual characters of the story, it completely transformed the traditionally abstract nature of string quartet writing. We can trace the story through the four compact, emotionally intense movements. In the first movement’s introduction, we are caught-up in the emotional conflict between husband and wife: she represented by the anguished yearning of the opening motive and he by the obsessive jealousy of the cello’s theme. In movement two, a foppish tune introduces the lover—a dandified violinist who entertains St. Petersburg society. Despite his personal insignificance, he arouses music of ardent love from the frustrated woman. Ominous passages of sul ponticello (on the bridge) playing foreshadow the catastrophe ahead. In movement three, first violin and cello paraphrase the lovely second theme from the first movement of Beethoven’s famous Kreutzer Sonata for violin and piano, which ignites the couple’s love as they play it together. Passion reaches its climax but is undercut by continued sul ponticello threats of danger. The opening yearning motive returns for the finale and is expanded into music of tragic sorrow, representing the extinguishing of the wife’s hopes and ultimately her life. But Janácˇek’s music here is less a description of the husband’s violence than a passionate protest against the injustice of her fate. Unlike Tolstoy who took the husband’s side in his story, Janácˇek’s sympathies were all with the woman.

As Beethoven’s health worsened and his relationship with his nephew Karl slid toward catastrophe, his commitment to the creation of his late string quartets never wavered. As 1825 turned to 1826, the last full year of his life, he had completed the set of three quartets comprising Opus 127 (E-flat Major), Opus 132 (A Minor), and Opus 130 (B-flat Major) commissioned by Prince Nicolas Galitzin. However, ideas still burned in his imagination, as Karl Holz, the second violinist of the composer’s favored Schuppanzigh Quartet and his amanuensis at this time, recalled. “ ‘My dear friend, I have just had another new idea,’ he used to say, in a joking manner and with shining eyes, when we would go out for a walk; and he wrote down some notes in a little pocket sketchbook. ‘But that belongs to the quartet after the next one since the next one already has too many movements.’ ” Almost without pause, he embarked on a new quartet, the extraordinary Opus 131 in C-sharp Minor. When it was completed sometime in the summer of 1826, he told Holz he thought it was his greatest. Most Beethoven scholars and string players would agree.

The C-sharp Minor was dedicated to an unexpected person—Lieutenant-Marshal Baron von Stutterheim. On July 30, 1826, as Beethoven was putting the finishing touches on Opus 131, his torturous relationship with Karl van Beethoven came to a disastrous climax, as the young man attempted suicide with a bullet to his head. Miraculously, he survived, and the devastated composer realized he could no longer keep his nephew in an iron grip. After Karl recovered, he expressed his gratitude to the Baron, who gave the youth a place in his regiment.

Beethoven never heard a performance of the C-sharp Minor. Reportedly, a performance had been scheduled for that September, but the musicians involved had found the work too difficult to master. Holz, however, participated in a most unusual performance for Franz Schubert in November 1828, just five days before the composer died; Schubert, who idolized Beethoven, had made a special request to hear this work. “The King of Harmony had sent the King of Song a friendly bidding to the crossing,” Holz wrote of this emotional occasion.

In this Quartet, Beethoven continued the process of stretching the normal dimensions of the string quartet. The A Minor had five movements and the B-flat Major had six; now the C-sharp Minor had an unprecedented seven. It also continued the juxtaposition of movements of extreme expressive contrast within a single work, which had been a striking feature of the B-flat-Major Quartet. Nonetheless, it is also considered to be Beethoven’s most fully integrated quartet, with melodic and rhythmic elements carried through from movement to movement, and an overall harmonic structure that binds together the wide range of keys of its movements.

And it continued something else from Opus 130—Beethoven’s obsession with the fugue. That Quartet had originally ended with the astounding, iconoclastic Grosse Fuge; now Beethoven made the unusual choice of opening his Opus 131 with another fugue, but of a very different character. In a slow Adagio ma non troppo tempo, this first-movement fugue has a grave, otherworldly beauty and deep emotional expressiveness. Though its dynamics are generally quiet, Beethoven uses many tiny crescendos and stinging accents to intensify the emotional affect, as we hear immediately in the presentation of the fugue theme. The theme’s first five notes incorporate the yearning, poignant sound of pairs of half-steps (the smallest step in the scale): B-sharp and C-sharp, A and G-sharp. This movement by half-steps will be a core motive both melodically and harmonically throughout the Quartet.

All four voices enter in descending order on the theme. Then Beethoven begins breaking the theme apart and altering it so that we don’t hear it in its entirety again until nearly the movement’s end. A beautiful episode opens with the first violin on high joined by the second violin in a graceful duet; the viola and cello follow suit. The climax of the fugue begins with the viola re-presenting the fugue subject after a long absence. Below it, the cello plays it in augmentation, or twice as slow. Above, the two violins begin a dramatic phase of leaping lines, sharper rhythms, and strong accents culminating in a series of violently accented dissonances between the first violin and the cello. The fugue comes to an uneasy conclusion on a series of C-sharp Major chords, growing progressively softer.

Beethoven makes one movement flow into the next throughout the Quartet; here, the quiet close on C-sharp paves the way for a half-step rise to D Major for the second movement. (We will not hear C-sharp Minor again until the last movement.) Very different in mood and substance from the fugue, this is a giddy dance in a bouncing 6/8 meter that follows no traditional form. Again, Beethoven plays subtly with dynamics, using sudden bursts of loud and soft. 

The tiny movement three is really not a full-scale movement at all but a transition to the centerpiece of the Quartet, the theme and variations. It begins enigmatically as a series of recitative-like gestures, then slows to Adagio and a shimmering cadenza for the first violin, landing on the doorstep of A Major, the key of movement four.

The heart of this Quartet is movement four’s superb theme and six variations. Marked “molto cantabile” (very songful), the peaceful theme seems simple and straightforward but has built-in complexities. It is presented in continuous overlapping phrases between the two violins, and nearly every strong beat is de-emphasized. The half-step motive is also incorporated into the melody. The musical flow continues seamlessly into the first variation, which begins as a dialogue between the three lower voices and the high-flying violin and becomes progressively more elaborately ornamental. In a faster tempo, variation two is a merry dance over a chugging accompaniment, which also grows more elaborate and vigorous. Variation three, whose expressive tempo marking “lusinghiero” means “seductive,” is a series of Bachian two-voice canons, begun by the cello and viola. Trills soon intensify the phrases, dissolving into the very slow variation four; this quiet variation contrasts flowing scales with pizzicato punctuations. No. 5 is a strangely becalmed variation in which rhythmic pulse and melody almost completely vanish. Beethoven scholar Joseph Kerman calls No. 6 the “hymn variation”; Michael Steinberg describes it as “music of spellbinding stillness.” Pulsing steadily on repeated notes, the instruments move in lock- step together, but the cello soon interjects a little growling motive that threatens to destabilize this unified serenity. A transitional passage of solo cadenzas and trills prepares the way for the return of the original theme in the first violin. In an extended and adventurous coda, Beethoven develops the theme, sending it through a series of distant keys before it magically vanishes.

Again a huge emotional shift, and we hear movement five—a crazy, brainless scherzo in E Major and a breakneck Presto tempo. It is prone to sudden breakdowns as well as explosions of pizzicato pops. Its trio section, a little rising melody, provides little contrast. Beethoven runs madly around the scherzo-trio circuit two-and-a-half times, but when he attempts a third go at the trio, everything comically breaks down. The restart is a bizarre repeat of the scherzo played in scratchy sul ponticello (“on the bridge”)—the composer’s first use of this unorthodox technique.

Another abrupt about-face and the brief sixth movement appears—a beautiful slow movement in embryo in the key of G-sharp Minor. To emphasize its tender sadness, Beethoven gives the theme to the viola. Again, the half-step motive colors the melodic line.

But before this wonderful music can develop, it is suddenly cut-off by the launch of the finale, which at last returns us to the home key of C-sharp Minor. This Quartet’s only sonata form, it draws together and resolves the diverse elements of the entire work. In Joseph Kerman’s words, Beethoven uses “his best weapons—themes in strong contrast and in arresting juxtaposition, exciting modulations, expansive and argumentative developments, triumphant returns, and great summary codas.” The aggressively galloping principal theme, full of fierce determination and a will to explore and conquer a vast harmonic region, is balanced by an ethereal second theme of long-held notes and rippling scales, which is content to soar serenely in E Major. Beethoven ultimately seals the triumph of his greatest chamber work with three brisk chords, now brightened to C-sharp Major.