Chausson's music, at all stages, could be called psychological in its vaulting gamut of expression—from blackest melancholy to mercurially manic high spirits—traversed with startling suddenness by an unexpected modulation, a subtle nuance, a brilliant coup de théâtre. Indeed, the latter occur more often in his orchestral and chamber works than in his grand opera, Le roi Arthus, lending them a constant effect of shimmer between articulate darkness and blithe radiance. In the first decade of his maturity, in such things as the Poème de l'amour et de la mer (1882-1890) and the Symphony (1889-1890), this bipolar oscillation is tinged with a certain morbidity checked only by the application of formal procedures inspired by Franck. But from the mid-1890s, as Chausson entered his forties, a new prehension—a hectically fraught serenity (or hyper-aesthetic twist on the "serene anxiety" of his mentor, César Franck)—comes into play. Form and content, too, dovetail more deftly. The handful of works from this period are no less intense, impassioned, or volatile, but suffused with a new assurance that calls to mind Yeats' lines in his 1939 poem "Lapis Lazuli," reminding all that great actors "Do not break up their lines to weep./They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; /Gaiety transfiguring all that dread." In this sense, the works of Chausson's last broken-off period have about them a tragic gaiety. One thinks of the Serres chaudes cycle of mélodies, the great Poème for violin and orchestra, the Quelques danses for piano, and—pre-eminently—of the sublime Piano Quartet. In marked contrast to the slow, agonizing gestation of many of his other works, the Piano Quartet was composed in a mere five weeks between July and September 1897. The cascading pentatonic theme that opens the work provides most of the first movement's Animé melodic material, with its peremptory head phrase and nether phrases lyrically shaped for contrast. Although the movement is written in orthodox sonata-allegro form, listeners are reminded, in a fine turn on Franck's "cyclic" practice, that it all originates from one long-breathed melody. Rapidly and with constant modulations, this unity in multiplicity unfurls its transformative fabric in coruscating brilliance. Marked Très calme, the second movement offers an orison-like lied, passionately worked, yielding to an imploring, insistently contrasting middle section before the lied returns with an air of wan melancholy. The brief third movement, woven around a folk-like tune, passes—Simple et sans hâte—with sad, balletic grace. A tempestuous Animé burst announces the final, long, balancing movement largely given to languishing, dreamlike evocations—albeit dramatically rippled—of themes from the preceding movements to conclude with a recall of the lied and an oracular reminiscence of the work's opening cascading melody. While the Concert for piano, violin, and string quartet (1892), among Chausson's chamber works, has achieved something like popularity, critics and connoisseurs rate the seldom-heard Piano Quartet a far finer work, and not merely because of its unintentionally valedictory geste.

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