String Quartet no.2 in A major

According to Camille Saint-Saëns, who relates the anecdote in the Revue de Paris dated 15 June 1897, Gounod’s Quartet no.2 in A major should never have been performed or published: ‘I had called on [Gounod] and asked him what he had produced while I was away. “I’ve written quartets”, he told me . . . “They are bad, and I won’t show them to you.” . . . No one has seen these quartets: they have vanished.’ And indeed, although it was premiered in March 1887 by the Marsick Quartet at the Société Nationale de Musique, the Quartet no.2 was regarded as lost until it resurfaced at an auction in 1993. The severity of Gounod’s judgment as reported here reveals how apprehensive this operatic composer was about tackling an instrumental genre that Beethoven had raised to unequalled heights. Like many others at this period, in fact, Gounod tried his hand at this arduous task only towards the end of his life. His quartet, like those of Franck, Debussy and Ravel, also reflects the role of the Société Nationale in the renewal of interest in chamber music in France at the time. Gounod stands apart from the other composers of his day, however, by his refusal to have any truck with cyclic form, Wagnerian ultra-chromaticism or extra-European modality. On the contrary, his quartet is striking for its elegant classicism and the harmonic and formal clarity of its four movements. Hence, although the second movement, Allegretto, with its use of mutes and pizzicato effects, might seem to conform to the search for novel timbres characteristic of the French quartet of the late nineteenth century, the third movement, which bears the old-fashioned title ‘Minuetto’, displays a Haydnesque humour, while the finale recalls the operatic verve of Mozart.