Although Bohuslav Martinů’s “French Quartet” is numbered as his first, he had already written several works for the same combination of instruments, some of which are now lost, while others like the programmatic quartet Tři jezdci (Three Riders, 1902) add to our picture of Martinů’s musical childhood, and yet others like the String Quartet in E flat major (1917) reveal his gradual development as a composer. Martinů’s studies at the Prague Conservatoire did not go smoothly, whether as a violin pupil, in the organ department (where he also learned composition), or from the 1909/1910 school year in the regular composition course. He did not graduate from the conservatoire, but he stayed with the violin and used it to earn a living, giving violin lessons and performing as a violinist. In 1915 began playing in the violin section of the Czech Philharmonic, at first as a substitute, then a few years later as a full-time member. He spent the war years in Polička and in Prague without being sent to the front. And he composed. It had been Martinů’s plan to enter his String Quartet in E flat major, sometimes called the quartet “number zero”, in a competition for a new chamber work held regularly by the Czech Chamber Music Society since 1895. And with a bit of a delay, he succeeded: in 1920 Martinů won the second prize for his quartet, and no first prize was awarded.
Written not too long afterwards, the “French Quartet” (H 117) is designated in the autograph as the composer’s second quartet, but already by the late 1920s it had been numbered definitely as the first. Its date of composition is not entirely clear; the year is usually given as 1918, but its dating in the early 1920s is more likely. The work differs fundamentally from the “Quartet Number Zero” in terms of its inspiration from French music and in particular from the Impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. The first movement (Moderato) develops a meditative main theme and a lively, contrasting second subject. The second movement (Andante moderato) is in large-scale ternary form and has three varied themes. The following dance movement (Allegro non troppo) is structured as a rondo.
Later the composer added a fourth movement. The Bennewitz Quartet, however, performs the original three-movement version of the composition, enriched by all the modifications and revisions that Martinů introduced directly into the parts during rehearsals with the Ševčík-Lhotský Quartet, which also premiered in 1927 (!). The parts with the notes disappeared for many years in the bowels of the Prague Conservatory's music archive, where they were rediscovered by musicologist Aleš Březina, an expert on the works of Bohuslav Martinů.
The work was premiered in 1927 (!) by the Ševčík-Lhotský Quartet, which first played the composition in Brno on 5 October at a concert presented by the Beseda brněnská (Brno Artists’ Society), and soon afterwards, on 10 October, it was heard at a regular concert of Prague’s Czech Chamber Music Society. In both cases, as was often then the custom, a contemporary work (Martinů) was at the centre of a programme framed by established works from the classical chamber repertoire: in this particular case, Dvořák’s String Quartet in E major, Op. 80, Beethoven’s Op. 135, and quartets by Karel Bendl and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Already by then however, the quartet’s contemporary or modern character was a relative matter because Martinů had changed his style during the 1920s and had already produced such works as the String Quartet No. 2 (Prague premiere in 1925), Vřava (La Bagarre, world premiere in 1927), and the String Quintet (composed in 1927). In this context, the delayed premiere of the First Quartet gave the music critics the impression of a retrospective of the music of the composer’s youth.
