Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75)
String Quartet no. 8, in C minor (1960)
There is nothing bright or hopeful about Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 8. Composed in just three days in the summer of 1960, the Quartet, like much of Shostakovich’s music, is shrouded in at least some amount of ambiguity: the score is dedicated “to the memory of the victims of fascism and war” and, in public, Shostakovich said that the music was inspired by the sight of the bombed-out ruins of Dresden. Yet, in private, he referred to the work as a memorial for its composer and it is clearly filled with highly personal references and musical quotations. Its composition coincided with a period of deep despair when, for a time, Shostakovich was apparently suicidal. While, as a general rule, it’s unwise to look too closely for autobiographical significance in any composer’s work, this Quartet makes for a glaring exception.
The Quartet’s defining musical feature is heard in its first four notes: these are Shostakovich’s initials, DSCH, spelled out in musical notation – the notes D, E-flat, C, and B natural. Each of the Quartet’s five connected movements refer back to this motive in some form.
Its opening movement is essentially an elegy that recalls musical textures most closely associated with the Baroque era, particularly quasi-fugal, imitative counterpoint. The first of the work’s several quotations – a snatch from Shostakovich’s First Symphony – interrupts this aural portrait of despair, but doesn’t really lift the gloom.
The second movement bursts in on the first without warning. This is music of a completely contrasting emotion, violent and surging, recalling the fast movements of Shostakovich’s Eighth and Tenth Symphonies. At the end comes another self-quotation: the famous theme from the Piano Trio no. 2.
In the midst of this music of grief and tumult comes the third movement, a bitter, ironic waltz that is built around the DSCH motive. Shostakovich loved waltzes – they turn up in a surprising amount of his chamber music for a 20th-century composer – and, like Tchaikovsky, he could spin out a good tune like nobody’s business. But this waltz is downright chilling: it sounds like a dance of skeletons.
After this macabre ballroom scene comes the most fascinating movement of the piece. The fourth movement starts with repeated, dissonant chords that recall gunshots or – as has been suggested – the dreaded knock of the KGB on Shostakovich’s front door (which, thankfully for the composer, never actually came). What follows is a fascinating collage of melodies, both from Shostakovich’s own music as well as from other sources: there’s a snatch of an aria from his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; a motive that suggests the Dies irae chant; and a Russian folk song called “Tormented by Grievous Bondage.” To hammer home the message, at the very end comes the DSCH motive. It’s the musical equivalent of watching a slideshow of horrors playing out in slow motion.
Like the first movement, the finale is based primarily on the DSCH motive and features many of the same compositional devices and textures heard earlier. But its overall affect is numbness: Ilya Ehrenburg’s comment that, “without saying anything [music] can express everything,” is borne out as powerfully in this closing movement as anywhere else in the repertoire.
© Jonathan Blumhofer
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