Notes for: July 26, 2016
Shostakovich composed his Second Piano Trio during the summer of 1944, but the moving story behind the work was learned only after his death 30 years later. At the time of the trio’s composition, Shostakovich formally dedicated it to the memory of Ivan Sollertinsky, a friend and colleague who had died earlier in the year. He had been director general of the Leningrad Philharmonic where he introduced the music of Mahler, Schoenberg, and Alban Berg. In 1928, however, when Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan condemned “decadent” Western influences in the arts; Sollertinsky fell out of favor, and he was compelled to make a public recantation. Sollertinsky had had a great influence on Shostakovich’s career, which was likewise affected by the political regime under Stalin. Although Shostakovich subsequently was “rehabilitated,” he remained loyal to Sollertinsky, writing this trio in his memory.
While there is no published program for the work, the trio was immediately regarded in the Soviet Union as the composer’s protest against Soviet totalitarianism. Its performance was banned from 1948 until shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953. In the 1970s, a rumor circulated in the Soviet Union that Shostakovich had had a second agenda in writing the trio, which the West learned from visiting Soviet musicians.
The themes of the fourth movement have a strong Jewish character, which are believed to have been inspired by stories from the Nazi death camps, particularly Majdanek, in southern Poland. Likewise, his Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar, was based on Yevtushenkko’s poem about another Nazi atrocity against the Jews. The Jewish inspiration for the trio was supported further by the 1979 U.S. publication of Testimony, Shostakovich’s memoirs. In the book, Shostakovich strongly condemned anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and expressed his own affinity for Jewish music. He said:
I think, if we speak of musical impressions, that Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it; it’s multifaceted; it can appear to be happy, while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish music is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They expressed despair in dance music. All folk music is lovely, but I can say that Jewish folk music is unique.
In musical terms, the trio is unusual for the unconventional tone colors that Shostakovich draws from the traditional combination of piano, violin and cello. In comparison with the massive keyboard sonorities characteristic of 19th century trios, Shostakovich’s piano writing is sparse and transparent. Each hand is generally confined to a single line, with one hand doubling the other at one, two, three or four octaves.
The first movement opens with a slow strain, suggesting a mournful Russian folk song, stated by the muted cello in high harmonics on the highest string. The violin repeats the tune in canon (a round), playing in its lowest register at the interval of a 13th below the cello. The piano then enters again down a 13th, in octaves deep in the bass. Eventually, there is an increase in speed, dynamic range and tension, and the balance of the movement is in sonata form with two themes that are variants of the opening canon.
The second movement is a sardonic scherzo with a simplistic main theme built almost entirely on the tones of a major triad. The two string instruments color the trio with a bagpipe-like drone.
The third movement is a passacaglia, an old Baroque dance form. The piano intones eight measures of somber chords, one chord to a measure. This chorale-like sequence is repeated again and again, while the violin and cello play variations above it, sometimes separately, then together, or in canon.
The closing movement is a macabre march with an insistent, hypnotic rhythm. Three themes, introduced in turn by the violin, piano, and cello, seem to be inspired by the dances of eastern European Jews. However, as Shostakovich says in his memoirs, they are dances of death and despair. Toward the end, there are echoes of the opening in the first movement and of the chorale-like passacaglia. The marching returns, and the trio ends on a note of resignation.
Notes for: July 26, 2022
Shostakovich’s closest friend was Ivan Sollertinsky, an erudite musicologist and scholar known for his great intellect, passion for music, and mischievous sense of humor. In February 1944 the 41-year-old Sollertinsky died of a heart attack. Shostakovich was devastated.
The summer before, he had begun work on the first movement of a new piano trio on Russian folk themes. Within days of Sollertinsky’s death he finished the movement. Several months later he completed the Trio and dedicated it to the memory of his friend. By then, other tragedies were weighing on Shostakovich: the horrific toll the war was taking on Russia, and the appalling news of the Holocaust that was beginning to reach him. So the Trio can be heard as an elegy both for Sollertinsky and for the war’s millions of victims. It’s a powerful work, filled with pain, anger, melancholy, and mordant wit. It begins eerily, with a ghostly melody that is introduced by the cello at the top of its range, picked up by the violin in the middle range, and finally repeated quietly by the piano in the low bass. Other themes evolve from this opening fugato as the Andante builds through a series of escalating climaxes. Contributing to the movement’s emotional force are the strident rhythms and the startling contrasts in tone and mood that are characteristic of Shostakovich’s music.
With the second movement, despair gives way to manic energy. Sollertinskly’s sister described this brash movement as “an amazingly exact portrait of Ivan Ivanovich, whom Shostakovich understood like no one else. That is his temper, his polemics, his manner of speech, his habit of returning to one and the same thought, developing it.” Funereal bleakness returns in full force in the Largo, a passacaglia in which the strings weave an anguished lament over a repeated set of eight tormented chords. The ironic last movement begins with a macabre Yiddish-sounding dance – the first appearance of the so-called Jewish theme that would play an ongoing role in Shostakovich’s music, both as a comment on anti-Semitism and because the modes, rhythms, and ambiguous attitudes of Jewish music and folklore suited him musically and temperamentally. Here the dance builds to a frenzy before ending abruptly. Shostakovich brings back the fugal theme from the first movement and the chords from the Largo, after which the strings whisper the dance theme one last time to bring the Trio to an exhausted and sorrowful close.