Adagio for orchestral quartet

• Date: 1891
• Composer: Guillaume Lekeu
• Period: Post-Romantic (1870-1909)

Review

Lekeu is often called a one-work composer, though one wonders which of several works perpetually resurfacing at the fringe of the standard repertoire, keeping his name alive, is "the one." Despite the fondness of violinists for the Violin Sonata, that has disappeared for long stretches, to be rediscovered in every generation. European orchestras occasionally revive the Fantaisie sur deux airs angevins, while chamber ensembles now and then essay Lekeu's musical joke, the Fantaisie contrapuntique sur un cramignon liégois. The orchestral studies on Hamlet and Ophelia come and go. In the late '50s, Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky) and his Society for Forgotten Music resurrected and recorded the Piano Trio and the unfinished Quartet for Piano and Strings -- the latter seeming to have caught on as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty first. All attest to the morbid fascination exerted by a composer possessed of a unique power to captivate and move who died at 24. At the mid century, the work by which Lekeu was more or less "known" was the Adagio for Strings, also inaccurately called "Adagio pour quatuor d'orchestre" and "Adagio for string quartet and string orchestra," sometimes misleadingly labeled "Op. 3." The layout features a solo violin, solo cello, violins divided into four parts, violas and cellos each in two parts, and a single line for double-basses. There is a great deal of unison and tremolando writing for the violins, though Lekeu justifies his subdivisions with contrapuntal touches and the achievement of sonority with arpeggios in contrary motion. Though the work has been effectively transcribed for string quartet by other hands, it is evident that Lekeu is calling for a large body of strings yielding sumptuous sound. The epigraph, from Lekeu's favorite (but now wholly forgotten) poet Georges Vanor -- "Les fleurs pâles du souvenir..." -- hardly prepares one for the Adagio's grief-stricken effulgence. The opening is a prolonged sigh seemingly broken by muted sobs relieved by the sudden flight of one of those preternaturally expressive melodies of which Lekeu alone possessed the secret in which sweetness, anguish, and ecstatic lift are compounded. The lamentation rises thrice to a climax to ebb away in a faint murmur yielding, at last, to a tremolo shudder on cellos and double-basses, and a coda of utter devastation. Completed April 21, 1891, the Adagio -- though nowhere acknowledged -- is almost certainly Lekeu's elegy for his teacher, César Franck, who died the previous November 8. Few composers can have had a more compelling epitaph. ~ Adrian Corleonis, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Guillaume Lekeu: Edition du Centenaire (Box Set)
Guillaume Lekeu: Oeuvres Orchestrales

Previous:	Adagio for orchestra, JW 6/5
Next:	Adagio for organ