Notes for: August 14, 2012
Beethoven composed his five “middle” quartets and four “last” quartets for the same body of musicians – the Schuppanzigh String Quartet, named after its first violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh. The Schuppanzighs, moreover, advised Beethoven on technical matters relating to the use of string instruments, and the ensemble was the first professional string quartet, replacing an informal body of musicians who joined together on an ad hoc basis.
In like manner, Shostakovich collaborated closely with one professional string quartet, the Beethoven Quartet, which, with some changes in personnel, premiered thirteen of his fifteen string quartets. The group had been founded in 1923 by graduates of the Moscow Conservatory, adopting the name, the Beethoven Quartet, in the course of its 50-year history. Further, Shostakovich dedicated each of the quartets Nos. 11 through 14 to one of the group’s original members. Composed in January 1966, Quartet No. 11 was dedicated to the memory of Vasili Pyotrovich Shirinsky, the second violinist in the preceding ten string quartets, who had died the previous year.
The Beethoven Quartet gave the new work its premiere performance the following March at the Moscow Composers Club. The program also included a set of Shostakovich’s vocal works with the composer at the piano. The quartet was well received and was encored, but the event turned out to be the composer’s final concert appearance.
After the concert, he was escorted to his hotel by a throng of well-wishers, but there he began to feel unwell. An ambulance took him to a hospital where he was found to be having a heart attack – one of a series of illnesses that was to plague his final nine years. Confined to the hospital for two months followed by a month of recuperation in a sanitarium, he was unable to attend a series of concerts and other events in his honor, including the Moscow premiere of his thirteenth symphony.
Shostakovich’s eleventh quartet is backward looking, patterned in several ways after an eighteenth century divertimento. First, it is organized in seven short movements totaling about 16 minutes rather than the four movements of greater length characteristic of string quartets. Second, it gives the movements traditional titles common in the divertimento form as well as conventional tempo markings. Third, it gives prominence to the first violin.
However, the quartet’s dark moods and dissonant harmonization are completely modern, and this is music to tax the mind rather than to relax the body. Further, the movements are played without pause, making in effect an intensive single-movement structure.