"Every day I'm writing a little music, a very little it's true. And as so often has been the case, I don't yet know what these first fumblings will turn into," Fauré writes to his wife from Annecy-le-Vieux, Savoy, where he spent the summer of 1923. As sketches made in July began to take shape in the fall, the composer admitted to his wife, in a letter from September 9, that "I've started a quartet for strings, without piano. It's a medium in which Beethoven was particularly active, which is enough to give all those people who are not Beethoven the jitters!" Superstitiously wary, Fauré kept his work on the quartet a secret. By September 12, the great central Andante had been completed. Composition of the first movement was taken up in Paris in the fall, alternating with episodes of physical decline—he passed his 79th birthday on May 12, 1924. And it was only in late June, on holiday in Divonne, above Lake Geneva, that his creative energy returned. His son, Philippe Fauré-Fremiet, recalled that "On the fourth day he placed his manuscript paper on the table and quietly started on the finale of his String Quartet. He was no longer strong enough to walk." Moving on to Annecy at the end of July, he continued to compose, completing the Finale on September 11. Exhausted, by September 19 he had come down with double pneumonia. Instructions were given that the quartet was not to be published or performed before it had been heard by a select group of friends—including Dukas, Pierre Lalo, and Camille Bellaigue—who would decide whether the work was worthy. By mid-October he had shaken the pneumonia off, but at the beginning of November he was in pain and disoriented, and on the early morning of November 4, 1924, he died.

When an extensive Allegro for violin and orchestra from 1878-1879—all that remains of an abandoned violin concerto—was exhumed and recorded in 1989, one could not fail to be astounded and moved to hear the two principal themes familiar from the Allegro of the old master's String Quartet, very little altered, in the context of youthful romanticism. The essential Fauré persists through all vicissitudes. In the microcosmic intimacy of the quartet, the first theme suggests a muted de profundis clamavi, the second an aspiring prayer. Their development is concise and contrapuntally constructed, with a special eloquence entrusted to the viola. Likewise, the three themes of the Andante—the most extensive movement—are polyphonically wrought to a quietly intense, incandescent contemplation radiating an aura of light parsed, with infinite sweetness and tenderness, in ever more ethereal gradations. And with its percolating pizzicati, the rondo Finale looms as a serenade and dance, which not without compassion, casts a wry eye on life and love.

The first performance was given at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique on June 12, 1925, with Jacques Thibaud and Robert Krettly (violins), Maurice Vieux (viola), and André Hekking (cello).

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