More than 30 years separate d'Indy's Second String Quartet (1897) from his Third, composed over 1928-1929 as he passed his 78th birthday. Between the Violin Sonata (1903-1904) and the Piano Quintet (1924), apart from a few small pieces and arrangements, d'Indy composed no chamber music, being preoccupied with administrative duties at his music school, the Schola Cantorum—funded with his fortune and for which he wrote the course—and composition of his musical testament, La Légende de Saint Christophe (1908-1915), into which he crammed his medievalism, his Catholicism, his enormous erudition, his bigotry and anti-Semitism, and his loathing for the rising tide of Modernism. The preceding quartets, challenged by the prestige the form commanded owing to Beethoven's spate of masterpieces, evinced a preoccupation with form, compensating for a habitual absence of melodic afflatus, constricting the unusual lyricism of the First and generating a curious aridity in the monothematic Second. With the death of his wife in 1905, d'Indy's already highly organized approach to composition took on a systematic rigidity and chef d'école self-consciousness as his general outlook soured. The attendant heaviness began to dissipate only toward the end of the Great War when a chance encounter with a sympathetic young woman, Caroline Janson, took a romantic turn leading to marriage in 1920 and that amazing series of late masterpieces attesting a puissant rejuvenation—the scintillant Poème des ravages, its companion Diptyque méditerranéen for orchestra, and a half-dozen chamber works rife with joy, the Third Quartet among them. It is not that d'Indy has become a fetching melodist in his old age—his themes are serviceable rather than memorable—but supreme technique is animated by potent feeling, the return of his considerable charm, and a generally relaxed geniality. It was no longer necessary for every new work to be an audacious coup de maître, though the Third Quartet qualifies. From the opening bars there is lift, cordiality—ecstasy, even—managed by a master hand. The welcoming mien is confirmed by a two-page notice explicative prefacing the score in which the work's formal design is spelled out—after a brief introduction a compact sonata first movement, passionate yet smiling; a candid Intermède set off by a trio of ravishing tendresse; a slender theme becoming ever more persuasive through seven brief but elaborate variations; and a rondo finale with five refrains leading through nostalgia-laced joy to a triumphant peroration. The Quatuor Calvet gave the premiere at a Société Nationale concert on April 12, 1930.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide