Grieg, the Société nationale, and the Origins of Debussy’s String Quartet

In 1948, in the preface to a collection of essays devoted to Edvard Grieg and his music, Gerald Abraham suggested that Debussy’s String Quartet might have been modelled on Grieg’s First Quartet. ‘True’, Abraham writes, ‘there is no obvious Griegishness in the Debussy Quartet, but the most casual study of the parallels between Grieg’s G Minor Quartet of 1878 and Debussy’s G Minor Quartet of 1893 shows that the one was modelled to some extent on the other, or at least that it was written with the other in the composer’s conscious or sub-conscious mind’. ¹