Notes on the Program By Aaron Grad String Quartets DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Born September 25, 1906 in Saint Petersburg, Russia Died August 9, 1975 in Moscow, Soviet Union The 13-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich was a talented pianist and budding composer when he enrolled at the conservatory in his hometown of Petrograd (known at the time of his birth, and again now, as Saint Petersburg). Despite a debilitating tuberculosis infection, the death of his father, and precarious family finances that led Shostakovich to chip in by accompanying silent movies in his spare time, he still completed his studies in piano and composition at 19, offering his First Symphony as a graduation piece. The symphony’s 1926 debut in Leningrad (the same city, renamed again) catapulted Shostakovich onto the world stage, and he spent his twenties riding high as a leading artist in the young Soviet Union, famed for his early symphonies and especially for his ballets, film scores and operas. After such an auspicious start, Shostakovich’s career took an alarming turn in 1936, when an editorial in the official Communist party newspaper blasted the 29-year-old composer for producing “muddle instead of music” in his latest opera. It was a dangerous time to be on the wrong side of Stalin and his henchmen who dictated Soviet cultural tastes, and Shostakovich wisely learned to redirect his biting wit and subversive candor into scores that, on the surface, lived up to the party’s expectations. Chamber music became a prime vehicle for Shostakovich in this new phase, given that such abstract or “absolute” music, produced on an intimate scale, was inherently less burdened by political meaning. In his first decade out of school, he wrote only one significant piece of chamber music—a Cello Sonata to perform with his recital partner— but starting in 1938 be turned his attention to string quartets. The Leningrad-based Glazunov Quartet debuted the First String Quartet, followed soon by a Moscow premiere from the rival Beethoven Quartet, and it was with that second group that Shostakovich forged a relationship unlike any other in music history: He went on to compose 14 more quartets over the next 36 years, and the Beethoven Quartet introduced all but the last. For a composer who might have spent his life in the opera house under different circumstances, Shostakovich ended up producing a wealth of string quartets that arguably added more to the repertoire than anyone since Beethoven. String Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 68 [1944] Shostakovich composed the Second String Quartet during a 19-day stretch in 1944, when he was cloistered with other top Soviet composers at a wartime retreat. The Beethoven Quartet gave the first performance that November, on the same program where
Shostakovich joined two members to introduce the work that he completed just before the quartet, his Piano Trio No. 2. Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio is justifiably famous for its references to Jewish music, and some of the same tropes spill over into the quartet that followed, albeit in more subtle ways. The Second String Quartet begins with a movement that Shostakovich labeled an Overture, and the initial fiddle-like themes, set over droning harmonies, clearly borrow from the folk traditions of Eastern Europe—perhaps the music of that region’s Ashkenazi Jews, or any of their neighbors with equally rich musical traditions. (The first few phrases could easily be mistaken for Bartók, the other great quartet composer of the 20th century who often channeled Hungarian and Romanian folk music.) The slow movement begins and ends with another construct borrowed from opera, recitative, which usually describes a speech-like style of singing delivered with rhythmic freedom. The mournful phrases here use scale patterns that resemble traditional modes of Jewish liturgical singing and Klezmer music, in spirit at least if not in their specific intervals. Shostakovich also emphasized the singing nature of the movement by labeling the central section a Romance, a term used since the Classical era to indicate a simple and tuneful slow movement. The third movement, an uncomfortably rapid waltz, functions as a disquieting scherzo. After landing at a great harmonic distance from the quartet’s starting point, a slow transition provides a link directly into the finale, which builds a series of variations from an austere, folk-inflected theme first heard in the viola. Bucking tradition, this quartet never finds redemption in the starting key of A major, returning instead to slow music that anchors the heaviness of A minor. String Quartet No. 1 in C Major, Op. 49 In the first movement of Shostakovich’s First Quartet, the harmonic language revolves around a sunny, almost naïve approach to the key of C major, except that the picture seems to distort and go crooked at times with intrusions of foreign tones. It is a perfect example of the veiled quality that Shostakovich adopted after 1936, giving the impression that some deeper wisdom lurks beneath a seemingly innocent attitude. In the Moderato second movement, the unaccompanied viola introduces a simple theme that becomes the basis for a set of variations. Passages with plucked accompaniment reinforce the rustic quality, while other variations explore Shostakovich’s fascination with clean counterpoint. Next a muted scherzo establishes a spooky tone in C-sharp minor, but once it reaches a contrasting major key it never fully gives it up, carrying some of that optimism into its uncertain conclusion. While working on the quartet, Shostakovich swapped the position of the outer movements, bringing the Allegro molto statement to the end. The spirited movement
updates the extroverted, barreling energy of a quartet finale in the Classical tradition of Haydn and Beethoven. String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73 [1946] Stalin’s tight control over Soviet artists relaxed slightly during World War II, and Shostakovich bounced back from his earlier rebuke with his internationally celebrated Seventh Symphony—a tribute to the besieged city of Leningrad—but the risks intensified again after the war. Given the criticism Shostakovich faced in 1945 for his Ninth Symphony, a charming little work that was a far cry from the expected ode to victory, he knew to tread carefully, and he completed only one composition in 1946, the String Quartet No. 3. His caution, it turned out, was well founded: he was singled out for condemnation again in 1948, during another wave of Stalin’s deadly purges. For the 1946 premiere, Shostakovich provided the Third Quartet with subtitles for each movement corresponding to the arc of war, starting with “Blithe ignorance of the future cataclysm” to characterize the first movement. Shostakovich soon disavowed the subtitles, and it seems likely that they only existed to insulate the quartet from criticism of its ideological stance (or lack thereof). That description of “Blithe ignorance” for the first movement may have provided cover for music that is unabashedly playful, but it hardly captures the thrust of this finely wrought movement in the tradition of Haydn and Beethoven (with traces of Bach, as heard in the formal counterpoint). The next movement, at a tempo marked Moderato con moto, originally sported the label “Rumblings of unrest and anticipation.” This unsettled music in a forward-leaning, threebeat meter substitutes for a customary slow movement. The following section is even more assertive, taking the form of a hard-charging march that came with the subtitle “Forces of war unleashed.” The work’s only slow movement is the brief Adagio (“In memory of the dead”) that functions as a somber introduction to the finale. This fifth movement is the longest and most enigmatic portion of the quartet, and it resonates far beyond Shostakovich’s supposed war narrative as it asks: “The eternal question: Why? And for what?” © 2019 Aaron Grad.