Piano Quartet in B minor

Lekeu began this Piano Quarteton 3 December 1892 at the request of Eugène Ysaÿe, the dedicatee of his recently completed Violin Sonata. When Lekeu died, the day after his 24th birthday, he had only finished the first movement. D’Indy took on the composition of the last few bars of the slow movement. Although Lekeu had announced, in December 1893, that he had “found the end of the second part of [his] Quartet, and all the themes of the third”, he left nothing of the last movement. The quartet was therefore premiered as a two-movement work on 23 October 1894 in Brussels, with his friend Mathieu Crickboom on violin, Paul Miry on viola, Henri Gillet on cello and Louise Merck on piano. The quartet had been started in a mood of exaltation that reflected the emotional programme described by the composer: “For me, the first part of my Quartet provides a setting for a thoroughly heartfelt poem in which thousands of feelings collide, in which cries of suffering give way to lengthy calls for happiness, and into which tenderness slips, insinuates itself, seeking to soothe the darkest thoughts”, while the second movement admits that “love is the source of this pain”. However, Lekeu struggled with his ambitious score which diverged “from what people are accustomed to hearing in chamber music”: numerous open-ended thematic elements, a heightened lyricism, a contrapuntal density, a chromaticism contrasted with touches of modality, a unity based on brief motifs rather than on cyclical themes. On 7 February 1893, the composer had shared this prophetic confidence with his mother: “Putting my heart and soul into my music is killing me.”