String Quartet no.2 in A major

Benjamin Godard – virtuoso violinist and quartet player, professor of the instrumental ensemble class at the Paris Conservatoire – produced a work of consummate mastery in his Second Quartet in A major. According to Alfred Bruneau, Godard ‘made a point of knowing nothing of Wagner and constantly boasted that he had never opened a single score of the supreme master of contemporary music’. It is therefore not surprising that his Second Quartet was premiered in February 1878 by an ensemble led by Eugène Ysaÿe at the Société Nationale de Musique, whose motto ‘Ars gallica’ asserts its ambition of giving new momentum to French instrumental music after the defeat of 1870. The quartet is cast in a wholly Romantic vein. It opens with a pastoral theme, with which Godard then contrasts a very smooth second theme sung by the viola and the first violin. Similarly, while the slow movement begins with a strange, archaic-seeming chorale in unison, it subsequently evokes the Brahms string sextets in the sonic plenitude of the harmonised and varied recurrences of the theme. After a brief and mischievous scherzo, Godard rounds his work off with a magisterial Allegro molto whose swirling figuration and use of pizzicatos recall Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and certain passages from the same composer’s quartets.