The quartet was premiered by the Heymann Quartet at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique on 5 March 1904. Its dedicatee, Fauré, attended the performance but was not greatly taken with the piece. Critics were divided on its merits. Pierre Lalo, already a staunch opponent of Ravel, dismissed it as derivative ("it offers an incredible resemblance to the music of M. Debussy") but Jean Marnold of the "Mercure de France" praised the work and described Ravel as "one of the masters of tomorrow". The work had its London premiere in 1908 (the reviewer in "The Musical Times" found the music "chiefly remarkable for vagueness of significance, incoherence, and weird harmonic eccentricities") and its German premiere in Berlin in 1910. By 1914, the work was so well established that a London critic was able to compare performances by the Parisian String Quartet with those of British players in consecutive months. The quartet has remained, in Orenstein's phrase, "a standard work in the chamber music repertory".