Guillaume Lekeu

Hunting in vain for the identity of an annoying 2-3 bar phrase that will not leave my head, I decided it was either from something by Rachmaninov, or by Guillaume Lekeu. This has led me so far into listening to three hours of chamber music by Lekeu. In vain; I still have not found the identity of the musical phrase. It must be Rachmaninov, but there are so many pieces of music by Sergei Rachmaninov! Anyway, there are worse ways of spending three hours than listening to the chamber music of Lekeu, especially the complete music for string quartet (Quatuor Debussy) or the quartet for piano and string quartet. There is an appealing chromatic melancholy in much of the music (well, anyone would be melancholy if they died just one day after their 24^th birthday.) It is astonishing that so much high quality music was left by someone who died so young. Nowadays it is mainly his sonata for violin and piano that is aired occasionally; it was commissioned by Eugène Ysaÿe; I got to know it first from a 1938 recording by Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin. Latterly the work received an excellent performance by Alina Ibragimova, with Cédric Tiberghien.

Guillaume Lekeu was born in Verviers, Belgium in 1870 and died in 1894 in Angers, France after catching typhoid fever from a contaminated sorbet. He joins a long list of eminent composers who died too young: Purcell (36), Pergolesi (26), Mozart (35), Schubert (31), Chausson (44), Bizet (37), George Butterworth (31).