Borodin Quartet II

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. 4 in D Major, Op. 83 [1949] In 1948, when the Soviet authorities released a notorious decree criticizing “formalism” in music, Dmitri Shostakovich topped the list of censured composers. He had bounced back from the similar public humiliation in 1936, but this renewed crackdown persisted.

Shostakovich lost his faculty position at the Moscow Conservatory, and his main public duties in the following years consisted of keeping up appearances at international conferences and writing film scores and patriotic music. He continued his serious composing in private, stashing major new works—including the First Violin Concerto and the Fourth and Fifth String Quartets—for later performances. After Stalin died in March of 1953, the Beethoven Quartet wasted little time, premiering the Fifth Quartet in November and the Fourth Quartet in December.

The String Quartet No. 4 begins with a short Allegretto, its pastoral melodies and hearty drones slipping in and out of harmonic clarity. After an intimate and lyrical Andantino, the brief Allegretto third movement serves as a typical Shostakovich scherzo, with muted strings and ambiguous modes leaving a lingering uncertainty about this music’s otherwise upbeat attitude. Reached without a pause, the quartet’s final and longest movement, again marked Allegretto, revisits the sort of Klezmer folk dancing that Shostakovich could get away with in his Second Piano Trio, but no longer amid a time of surging anti-Semitism during Stalin’s final years. The treatment of the themes is sometimes defiant and sometimes ghoulish, and often both at once, reflecting the aspect of Jewish music that so appealed to Shostakovich, according to his biographer, Laurel Fay; “Shostakovich was attracted by the ambiguities in Jewish music,” she wrote, “its ability to project radically different emotions simultaneously.”

String Quartet No. 6 in G Major, Op. 101 [1956] Eighteen months after the death of his first wife, Shostakovich surprised his friends by marrying a young worker at the Communist Youth League in 1956. He spent part of his honeymoon writing the Sixth String Quartet, and on the surface the work seems to capture a moment of relative happiness for the composer, but nothing is ever so straightforward in Shostakovich’s music or life. (Incidentally, the couple divorced three years later.)

The Allegretto first movement develops themes of child-like simplicity. Each new change of direction follows with unflappable logic, and yet over time the music drifts worlds away from its innocent point of arrival, until it reaches a cataclysmic climax midway through. A whimsical touch comes at the very end of this movement, when the sweet cadence stumbles into a thorny dissonance before settling for a final G-major chord. The four notes of that misplaced chord are D, E-flat, C, and B—or in German, DSCH—the composer’s musical signature.

The second movement offers another prime example of Shostakovich’s multilayered approach, musically and emotionally. In line with his Bach-influenced embrace of counterpoint, there are two lines of equal prominence: a jaunty dance tune in the first violin, and a plodding counter-line voiced in octaves by the viola and cello. The conflict between these layers develops and expands but never really resolves, until the movement ends with another wink in the form of that same DSCH cadence.

The third movement adopts another Baroque convention, with the initial cello statement serving as the foundation of a Passacaglia (a set of continuous variations built around a cycling theme). The movement ends yet again with the DSCH cadence, this time spilling directly into the finale. The ambivalence continues with pastoral themes that can’t quite relax, lively dance rhythms tinged with some of the same Klezmer-like angst found in earlier works, and a faltering conclusion that seeks comfort in that same self-obsessed DSCH cadence. Some honeymoon!

String Quartet No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op. 92 [1952] The Fifth Quartet, composed in 1952, did not have any of the political overtones that came with its predecessor’s use of Jewish themes, but in other ways it represented an even more radical and dangerous departure from the “Soviet Realism” that composers were expected to practice under Stalin. Communist music was meant to be approachable and uplifting art for the people, but here was a quartet that turned unapologetically inward, dwelling on Shostakovich’s own identity and the musical operations that motivated him.

The first movement goes awry straight off when the viola gets stuck on a five-note pattern and related permutations. Four of the five notes in that musical germ happen to be D, E-flat (known in German as “Es”), C and B (or H in German), making it a relative of the musical signature of DSCH that riddles the composer’s later works. The other ingredient of personal significance is a quotation that Shostakovich pulled from the Clarinet Trio by his superbly talented student Galina Ustvolskaya, heard in the soaring first violin part at the end of the first movement. He clearly admired her as a musician, and there were enough other feelings there that at two later points he proposed marriage, only to be rejected both times.

The year before Shostakovich wrote this quartet, he invested considerable time in a series of 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano, inspired by Bach’s two equivalent sets collected in The Well-Tempered Clavier. This quartet’s central Andante demonstrates perfectly the heightened sense of linear counterpoint that colored Shostakovich’s music from that point forward.

A Moderato introduction forges the link into the finale, with a melody in the second violin that once again suggests a spectral hint of Jewish flavor. Then the viola cranks up the tempo to reach the Allegretto body of the movement, where waltz-like strides try and fail to remain upbeat. Ultimately the Andante pace and the pseudo-Jewish intervals return for a somber, muted conclusion. © 2019 Aaron Grad.