Program Notes

Notes for: August 9, 2011

This was the only work that Shostakovich completed in 1945, and it took him six months - an unusually long period for this customarily prolific composer. Like the Soviet Union as a whole, he was still recovering from the nation’s hardships of World War II, and his friends found him nervous, bitter and depressed. As a suitable outlet, he turned to the privacy and expressive capability of chamber music, and he was in no hurry to rush the recovery process.

There is some debate among Shostakovich specialists over whether he had in mind a non-musical program reflecting the nation’s wartime experience. The Borodin String Quartet, a prominent Soviet ensemble, insisted on adding war-related subtitles to each of the quartet’s five movements whenever they performed the work. The Borodins had a close relationship with Shostakovich and claimed they had his approval. On the other hand, the work was published without the subtitles, and the Beethoven String Quartet, the Soviet group to whom it was dedicated, ignored them.

At any rate, the subtitles characterize the quartet as a personal reflection on the war and vividly point up the programmatic nature of the individual movements:

Shostakovich himself was highly pleased with the new quartet, writing to the Beethoven String Quartet: “It seems to me that I have never been so pleased with one of my works. Probably I am mistaken, but for the time being this is exactly how I feel.”

Soviet authorities apparently felt otherwise. Before the quartet’s first performance in December, Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s cultural czar, made the first of a series of speeches attacking the nation’s cultural leaders for “formalism”, Soviet-speak for art with limited mass appeal. At a Composers Plenum in October, Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, completed during the war, was criticized for its inappropriately playful and grotesque humor. The quartet was not criticized, but its reception was effectively eclipsed, and it remained in obscurity for many years.

The quartet is unconventionally cast in five movements, with an unusual emotional sequence. The first movement, in conventional sonata form, is lighthearted and almost frivolous. In the second movement, the abrupt shift in mood to a sardonic waltz, laced with dissonance, comes as a complete surprise. The succeeding movements become increasingly demanding. In the third movement, a mixture of scherzo and march, alternating between triple and duple meter, the growing bitterness breaks into violence and aggression.

The fourth movement is mired in sorrow and despair. It is dominated by a heavy five-measure phrase, stated in unison at the outset by the three lower instruments fortissimo, which is repeated in one form or another throughout the movement. This leads without pause into the final movement, the longest of the quartet, and the most emotionally challenging. The quartet reaches a climax with an emphatic restatement of the tragic strain of the fourth movement, and the work ends in gentle pathos and a sense of resignation.