An analysis by Pierre Michel (musicologist)

Arising from a painful personal memory, this quartet expresses both anger and peace—in the sense of reconciliation with the person who died. The general state of mind is thus that of refusal or interrogation (why?), and is initially manifested by a musical motif recurrent throughout the entire work, presented simultaneously by the four instruments at the beginning and then, most often, successively. Through this perfectly perceptible element (a descending semitone or tone) we can see one of the means by which the composer has sought to create an intelligible network of relationships between different moments and different facets of the quartet. For, despite the three-movement form, Denis Levaillant's idea here is indeed to make heard a unique passionate object, an élan of the heart, always in transformation . The title of the work suggests the range of "harmonic and rhythmic colours" in which are present "gentleness as well as violence, light as well as darkness, the intimate as well as the revealed, from the most muted (the A flat major!) to the clearest (the A major!) .

As he says himself, Denis Levaillant seeks to return to the tradition of expression, and this quartet is particularly striking due to the emotion it conveys on three registers (first movement: Meditative; second movement: Dramatic; third movement: Tragic), running through twenty-four keys successively. This reference to old types of writing is not new in Denis Levaillant's music, and the listener will be able to draw a relation between the tenuto D minor chord shortly after the beginning of the third movement and this same sonority at the beginning of Tombeau de Gesualdo of 1994. Moreover, Le clair, l'obscur..., almost romantic at times, joins the poetry and immateriality of the most beautiful musical tombeaux of our era. Its homogeneous style nonetheless relies on varied means, with a particular tendency towards a lively rhythmic language whose models would be the speech and certain kinds of music of oral tradition.

This Second String Quartet, written eight years after the First, was premiered by the Arpeggione Quartet on 23rd March 1997 at the Epau Abbey, near Le Mans.