[New] “Intriguing and Original Effects”

Quintets by Dvořák and Shostakovich

Katy Hamilton

Bohemian Transformations

Although we tend to think of the piece on tonight’s program as “the” Dvořák Piano Quintet, Antonín Dvořák actually composed two over the course of his career—both in A major. The first was written in the autumn of 1872, when the composer was in his early 30s and still struggling to establish himself as a composer. Occupying various jobs as a violist and organist, and teaching to raise funds, he only managed to get his first piece into print in 1873; this early Quintet had to wait until the 1950s to see publication. Dvořák’s finances only stabilized several years later thanks to the intervention of an imperial Viennese committee. He applied to the Austrian State Stipend for young, impecunious artists and was awarded money annually for several years, much to his relief. Yet this was to prove far more important to Dvořák’s career than simply settling his debts. The Stipend adjudication panel changed personnel in 1875, and Johannes Brahms signed up for the empty slot. Brahms was so impressed with Dvořák’s offerings that he recommended them to his own publisher, the Berlin-based Fritz Simrock, who not only agreed to publish the songs Brahms had given him, but also commissioned Dvořák to write a book of Slavonic Dances. These sold out practically overnight in German music shops, and the unknown Bohemian composer of a few short years before was suddenly a sensation in western Europe.

It was, therefore, a very differently placed Dvořák who, in 1887, embarked upon his Second Piano Quintet Op. 81. He was a celebrity in Germany and Austria, a much-feted visitor to England, and had three symphonies in print as well as being hard at work on his opera Jakobín. It may well have been due to his decision to revisit (and indeed revise) some of his earlier pieces that year that prompted him to try his hand once again at this particular ensemble grouping—he was, by this time, a very experienced composer of string chamber music, as well as having several piano trios to his name. He spent the summer of 1887 working on the Quintet at his beloved country house Vysoka, to the south-west of Prague, and completed it in October. The premiere was given on January 6, 1888 in a concert organized by the Umělecká beseda, the Czech artists’ forum in Prague (Smetana had been among its founders) and the Quintet was warmly received by the local press. “This is a work of rare value,” wrote composer and critic Josef Bohuslav Foerster. “The piece encapsulates what we have come to expect from Dvořák: a wonderful sound and numerous intriguing and original instrumental effects.” About a month later, Tchaikovsky arrived in the Bohemian capital and was also much taken with Dvořák’s new work: the two men became friendly and in 1890, Dvořák travelled to Russia at Tchaikovsky’s invitation to conduct some of his works in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

In the German and British press, however, there was a little more equivocation. We are familiar enough today with Dvořák’s tremendously skillful melding of concert forms with folk-style material that it is easy to lose sight of how unusual it was at the time. George Bernard Shaw dismissed the Quintet as “a trifle” at its London premiere, pointedly observing that the music contained “the usual Dvorakian dressing of Bohemian rhythms and intervals, which give the analytical programmist an opportunity of writing about ‘national traits,’ and save the composer the trouble of developing his individual traits.” Although Eduard Hanslick’s opinion in the Viennese Neue Freie Presse was rather higher—Dvořák is placed alongside Hanslick’s friend Brahms, no less, in terms of his nascent ability—there is a subtler sense of the critic downplaying the Bohemian composer’s music as a result of his nationalist tendencies. If only he could give up his insistence on Slavonic ideas, Hanslick hints, Dvořák could be a truly great (and properly Austro-German) composer.

And yet it is precisely the level of sophistication with which Dvořák crafts his Quintet, and weaves Bohemian and Slavonic forms and ideas into the piece, that make it such a joy to hear and play. The first movement is a particularly brilliant piece of musical architecture, stitching together the chief characteristics of a Slavonic dance (sudden jumps from major to minor, unprepared tempo changes, surprising and unusual harmonies) into a sonata form structure. Shaw’s “trifle” is revealed to be a complex interweaving of several highly differentiated themes, lyrical and dynamic, singing and dancing, bound tightly together across the Allegro. The second movement is a dumka (originally a type of folk song), the mournful opening of alto and tenor-voiced strings with shining, high keyboard writing thrown into sharp contrast with a series of increasingly lively new sections that seem to take in everywhere from an elegant drawing room to a mad celebration in the town square. This is followed by a furiant, a dance full of swagger and rhythmic play. In the finale, Dvořák leads us through a merry—not to mention virtuosic—kaleidoscope of moods and colorful textures; and the gorgeously wistful final pages are ultimately flung aside in a rousing close to the work.

Bach in Leningrad

In November 1937, Dmitri Shostakovich pulled his tattered reputation back from the brink with the critically—and publicly— acclaimed premiere of his Fifth Symphony. After the terrifying “Muddle instead of Music” affair (this the title of the Pravda article penned against the composer’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for its “decadent” Western Modernist tendencies), the Symphony rescued Shostakovich from despair, disgrace, and even physical danger, and placed him firmly back on the list of acceptable Socialist Realist composers. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of these events, he found it almost impossible to compose further, and even contemplated enrolling as a student again with his old teacher in Moscow. He was 31 years old.

By the summer of 1938, the dust had begun to settle and Shostakovich was gradually regaining his confidence. He completed a string quartet—his first—in July of that year, premiered by the

Glazunov Quartet and the Beethoven Quartet in Leningrad and Moscow, respectively. The piece was a success, and both professional groups were keen to work with the composer again, nagging him for a follow-up work. The leader of the Beethoven Quartet, Dmitri Tsyganov, recalled later that Shostakovich promised to write a piano quintet that he could play with the ensemble, and joked that he would be sure to make the string parts far harder than his own. In the event, this was exactly what he did—and the timing was fortuitous. Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony, premiered in December 1939, was met with a certain amount of disappointment and bafflement; but the Quintet followed on its heels in November 1940 and was a resounding triumph. Just as he had quipped to Tsyganov, he wrote an elegantly streamlined piano part to complement the quartet’s more fearsome textures, and then used this as a reason to rehearse extensively and travel with both the Beethoven and Glazunov Quartets in due course. The piece was nominated for an award even before its premiere and was subsequently awarded a Category One Stalin Prize in March 1941—despite the best efforts of one senior Communist Party member to publicly denounce the piece as “stilted … abstract … music that does not connect with the life of the people.”

There had been a strong sense, in the “Muddle instead of Music” scandal, that Shostakovich needed to pay more attention to the lessons of past musical masters: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Mozart, but also Handel and Bach, whose 250th birthdays in 1935 had been enthusiastically celebrated in Shostakovich’s home city of Leningrad. Ironic as this criticism may have seemed (Lady Macbeth features a lengthy passacaglia), the Piano Quintet occupies a newly uncluttered, elegant sound world that resounds with the influence of Bach, whose music was to remain incredibly important to Shostakovich for the rest of his life.

The piece begins with a G-minor Prelude, the strident piano opening already full of stacked imitative lines before the strings join in with this grand introduction. The keyboard writing of the poco più mosso that follows is reminiscent, in its spacing on the page, of Bach’s lighter dance suites, though as Shostakovich ratchets up the tension to return us to the opening material, there is no doubt that we are dealing with a thoroughly 20th-century hat tip to the older composer—this is far from a pastiche.

The Fugue that follows, marked Adagio, is muted and deeply poignant; and perhaps the small, simple intervals of the opening bars are as much a reference to Beethoven’s late string quartets as the polyphonic models of Bach. As the fugue itself disintegrates, these opening lines shape the remainder of the movement, the music dropping occasionally from the regular 4/4 pulse of the opening into moments of a less stable 5/4, as if there is too much to say in the allotted time. The Scherzo is a sudden sea of sharp, bright B major, the pianist’s hands pushed apart to extremes of the keyboard. A delightfully twangy combination of string pizzicato and ornamental turns in the piano appear a little later on in this slightly hysterical, chugging cheerfulness. A slow Intermezzo returns us to a more spacious, pensive mood, led by a plucked walking bass in the cello and a singing first violin that eventually ascends into long, ringing harmonics as the rest of the ensemble joins. This is the most impassioned movement of the Quintet, reaching a grand climax with that same sense of ineluctability that the repeated chords of the previous movement provided. The music moves directly into the Finale as we reach G major at last, the piano texture once again reminiscent of Baroque clarity and élan. The jaunty melodies here recall something of the First Piano Concerto of 1933, though this triumphant joyfulness is short-lived as creeping dissonances and col legno (played with the wooden part of the bow) strumming interrupt the flow. There seems a real danger that this happy melody may have passed away forever, or at least find itself tempered by the darker interruption. But it does, finally, return: quietly, but unbowed. The last few pages are deftly light-hearted for all five players, and brimming with charm.

Less than a decade after the Quintet was premiered to such acclaim, Shostakovich was invited to serve on the jury for the First International Bach Competition in Leipzig. The gold medal went to the young Russian pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva, who had prepared all 48 Preludes and Fugues of the Well-tempered Clavier for performance. Inspired by this brilliant musician, Shostakovich undertook his next major Bach project: a set of 24 Preludes and Fugues, in the manner of Bach, dedicated to Nikolayeva.

Katy Hamilton is a writer and presenter on music, specializing in 19th-century German repertoire. She has published on the music of Brahms and on 20th-century British concert life and appears as a speaker at concerts and festivals across the UK and on BBC Radio 3.