Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8 0754606996, 9780754606994

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When it was first performe j 1960, Shostakovich's Eigh�.·.

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was greeted with a standing ovation and given a full encore. Its popularity has conti nued to the present day with over a hundred commercial record i ngs a ppea ring during the last 40 years. The appeal of the work is not hard to identify; im med iately com m u n icative, the quartet also contains rich seams of deeper meaning. This book is the first to exa m i ne its musical design in detail and seeks to overthrow the charges of superficiality that have arisen as a result of the work's popu lar success. The core of this study is the close ana lysis of the work, but this is placed in context with a discussion of Shostakovich's reputation and historica l position, the circu msta nces of the qua rtet's com position and the subsequent controversies that have surrounded it. The work was com posed during the so-called 'Thaw' years of the Soviet U nion, and the cu ltura l and politica l backg rounds of this period are considered, together with Shostakovich's life and work during this time. David Fanning argues persuasively that the Eighth String Quartet is a landmark in twentieth-century m usic in its transcendence of the extra-musical meani ngs it i nvokes; that it is 'music that liberates itself from the shackles of its context'. The book features an accompanying CD of the work.

SHOSTAKOVICH: STRING QUARTET NO.

8

For The Lindsays

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

DAVID FANNING

Universiy of Manchester, UK

ASH GATE

©

David Fanning 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced , stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any om or by any means, electronic , mechanical , photocopying , recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. David Fanning has asserted his right under the Copyright , Designs and Patents Act, 1988 , to be identiied as Author of this Work .

Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GUll 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 1 0 1 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

I Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com I British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Fanning , David, 1955Shostakovich : string quartet no . 8. - (Landmarks in music since 1950) 1 . Shostakovich, D. (Dmitrii) , 1 906- 1 975 . String quartets , no . 8 I . Title 785 .7' 1 94 Fanning , David (David J.) Shostakovich: String quatet no . 8 I David Fanning . p. cm. - (Landmarks in music since 1 950) Includes bibliographical reerences and index . ISBN 0-7546-0699-6 (ak . paper) 1 . Shostakovich, Dmitri Ditrievich, 1 906- 1 975 . Quartets , strings , no . 8 , op . 1 10 , C minor. 2 . String quatets-Analysis , appreciation . I . Title . II . Series . Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MTl 45 .S45F36 2004 785' 7 1 94-dc2 1 2003048925 ISBN 0 7546 0699 6

Typeset by Express Typesetters Ltd , Fanham Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Boin, Conwall

Contents

vii viii xi xiii xiv

List of Plates and Figures List of Tables and Music Examples General Editor's Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations

1

Introduction Placing Shostakovich and the Eighth Quartet 2 The USSR and Shostakovich in the 'Thaw'

5 25

3 The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis Layout of Movements Quotations , Allusions and Afinities First Movement: Largo Second Movement: Allegro motto Third Movement: Allegretto Fourth Movement: Largo Fifth Movement: Largo Summary

49 49 51 56 70 87 101 120 132

Appendix A: amuchen yazholoy nevoley (Tormented by Harsh Captivity) Appendix B: Documents 1. Shostakovich (letter) 2. Lev Lebedinsky 3. Shostakovich (interview) 4. Solomon Volkov 5 . Matias Sokolsky 6. Nikolay Martinov 7 . Yury Keldish 8. Alexander Dolzhansky 9 . Rudolf Barshai

141 145 145 148 150 151 152 154 156 157 158

v

vi

Contents

10. Alred Schnitke Appendix C: Recordings

159 161

Bibliography CD Information Index

167 177 179

List of Plates and Figures

Plates

1 Autograph score, p . 1 . Original in Russian State Archive of Literature and the rts (RGLI) . Reproduced rom Dvomichenko 2000 by kind permission of Irina Shostkovich 2 From draft score. Original in Shostakovich Family Archive. Reproduced rom Dvomichenko 2000 by kind permission of Irina Shostakovich ·

13 39

Figures

3 .1 3 .2 3 .3 3 .4 3 .5 3 .6 3 .7

First movement: overview Second movement: overview Second movement: phrase structure in Scherzo B 1 Third movement: overview Third movement: prase structure in outer sections Fourth movement: overview Fifth movement: overview

vii

57 74 79 90 99 104 123

List of Tables and Music Examples

Tables

2.1 Shostakovich's Opp. 92-1 1 1 3 . 1 Quartet No. 8: quotations 3 .2 Quartet No. 8: allusions and afinities

33 52 54

Music Examples

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1

3.2 3 .3 3 .4 3 .5 3 .6 3 .7 3 .8 3 .9 3 .10

Symphony No. 10, third movement, second theme Quartet No. 5, opening Quartet No. 5, thrd movement, retransition Quartet No. 6, irst movement, conclusion Quartet No. 7, opening (a) Quartet No. 8 , first movement; opening, compared with (b) Bach: Fugue in C sharp minor, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One, opening; (c) Beethoven: Sting Qurtet in C sharp minor, Op. 1 3 1 , opening; (d) Beethoven: String Qurtet in A minor, Op. 1 32, opening (a) Quartet No. 8 , first movement, quotation rom Symphony No. 1 ; (b) Symphony No. 1 , irst movement, opening (a) First movement, Arioso 1 ; (b) Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 , irst movement, second subject (a) First movement, Arioso 2; (b) Symphony No. 5 , irst movement, irst subject (a) First movement, Arioso 3 ; (b) Arioso 3 , analytical reduction Evolution of dactylic motif rom irst to second movement First movement: analytical reduction (a) Second movement, opening; (b) Symphony No. 8 , thrd movement (a) Second movement, modal inlections in opening section; (b) Piano Quintet, third movement (a) Second movement, lead-in to Trio; (b) Quartet No . 7, third viii

34 37

37

41 42

59 62 64 66 68 69 71 72 76

List of Tables and Music xamples

ix

movement, lead-in to recall of first movement 78 3 . 1 1 (a) Second movement, Trio section, opening; (b) Piano Trio No. 2, 80 inale, second theme 3 . 1 2 Second movement, intervallic expansion 82 88 3 . 1 3 Second movement, analytical reduction 3 . 14 Third movement, Introduction motifs as paradigms 91 3.15 (a) Third movement, main theme; (b) Saint-Saens , Danse macabre, 93 main theme 3 . 1 6 Third movement, Sections A and B , analytical reduction 94 3 . 1 7 Third movement, Trio section C , harmonic reduction 95 3 . 1 8 (a) Third movement, Tio section D, opening; (b) Cello Concerto No. 1 , irst movement, opening 96 3 . 1 9 (a) Third movement, Trio section E; (b) Cello Concerto No. 1 , 98 slow movement; (c) Quartet No. 5 , inale, opening 3 .20 Third movement, analytical reduction 102 106 3 .21 Fourth movement, opening 3 .22 (a) Fourth movement, Outburst 2; (b) The oung Guard, 'Death of the Heroes' , opening; (c) Ravel ' Scrbo' , opening 109 3 .23 (a) Fourth movement, rioso 1 ; (b) The ,dy Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Interlude between Scenes 4 and 5 111 3 .24 (a) Fourth movement, rioso 2 ; (b) amuchen yazholoy nevoley 1 14 3 .25 (a) Symphony No. 1 1 , third movement; (b) Quartet No. 8 , oh movement, link between rioso 2 and 3 116 3 .26 (a) Fourth movement, rioso 3; (b) The ,dy Macbeth o f Mtsensk 1 17 District, Act 4 3 .27 Fourth movement, analytical reduction 121 3 .28 (a) Fifth movement, Exposition 1; (b) Purcell, Fantazia 4, opening; (c) The ,dy Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Act 4, opening 124 127 3 .29 Fith movement, Exposition 2 (enharmonically renotated) 3 .30 Fifth movement, analytical reduction 133 3 .3 1 Overall key schemes: (a) Quartet No. 8 ; (b) Symphony No. 8; (c) Schubert: Wanderer Fantasy 137 Permissions All Shostakovich examples are reproduced by permission of Boosey Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

&

Examples rom the String Quartet No. 8 are© Copyright 1961 by Boosey & Hawkes Music_ Publishers Ltd. For the United Kingdom, the British Commonwealth (ex. Canada) and Eire.

x

List of Tables and Music Examples

Examples rom the Cello Concerto No. 1 in E lat major Op. 107 re © Copyright 1960 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. For the United Kingdom, the British Commonwealth (ex. Canada) and Eire. Examples rom the Symphony No. 10 in E minor Op.93 are© Copyright 1954 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. For the United Kingdom, the British Commonwealth (ex. Canada) and Eire. Examples rom the ollowing works are all © Copyright by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. For the United Kingdom, the British Commonwealth (ex. Canada) and Eire: String Quartets Nos. 5 in B lat major Op. 92, 6 in G major Op. 101, and 7 in F sharp minor Op.108; Symphonies Nos. 1 in F minor Op. 10, 5 in D inor Op.47, 8 in C minor Op.65, and 11 in G minor Op.103; Piano Quintet in G minor Op. 57; Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor Op. 67; The Young Guard Op. 75; The Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk District Op. 29.

General Editor's Preface

Apart rom a few notable exceptions, specialist books on individual works composed since the end of the Second World War are thin on the ground. Detailed commentaries have been limited to necessarily less ambitious opera, concert and record booklets or published in jounals, ranging rom the overtly popular to the academically erudite. This new series of volumes devoted to contextual and analytical studies of single signiicant compositions (or coherent groups of works) aims to redress this balance by bringing together something of the excitement and immediacy of a concert-guide-in each case, a CD of the work itself is included with the book - with the insights of distinguished authors whose research areas provide the resources or windows of exploration into the circumstances surrounding the composition of the chosen work, its musical language and structure, its place in the composer's oeuvre, and its reception history. Additionally, the socio-political context of each composer and composition is illuminated by a selection of documents such as interviews, concert reviews, letters or diary extracts. In deciding which works to choose, the publishers have been guided by a number of principles. It goes without saying that the composers themselves should command general respect (although popularity is not in itself a criterion of selection); the works should have been widely disseminated (although in certain cases - operas particularly - this is less important than positive critical evaluation and the availability of adequate recordings); a wide range of styles and aesthetics should be explored, and the selection of works should be intenational. The series is not an attempt to construct a canon of modem 'masterworks' - indeed its title is a self-deinition of an intention to identify key works in the development of varied musical idioms and techniques since the death of Schoenberg. Inevitably, some compositions may be better known to the reader than others but all will provide opportunities to revisit (or discover) important landmarks on the constantly evolving map of modem music - to engage with a blend of scholarly analysis and colourful critical appraisal and to be better prepared or further excursions into music of the present day. David Fanning is an acknowledged authority on the music of Shostkovich. He brings to this study of the composer's Eighth String Quartet a wealth of ·

xi

xii

General Editor 's Preface

practical experience (as writer, performer, broadcaster and teacher) together with proound knowledge of Russian cultural and political history.Within an imaginatively conceived examination of the work's autobiographical signiicance, the author provides fascinating and original insights into the composer's relationship with the Com,unist regime, his use of crypto­ grams and quotations, and his masterly control of the medium. He argues persuasively that the Eighth String Quartet is a landmark in twentieth-century music in its transcendence of the extra-musical meanings that it invokes. Wyndham Thomas University of Bristol

Acknowledgements

I am grateul to Laurel Fay or various valuable points of clariication and or copies of the texts translated in Appendix B, 4 and 5; to Derek Hulme or an advance view of material rom the third edition of his Shostakovich Catalogue and or copies of a number of rare recordings; to Marina Frolova-Walker or sheet-music copies of two arrangements of the revolutionary song amuchen yazholoy nevoley (Tormented by Harsh Captivity); to Pauline Fairclough and Judy Kuhn or many stimulating exchanges, especially concening early drafts of the present book; to Harriet Smith or love and support, and or careul reading of my text; to Wyndham Thomas or the invitation to contribute to the series Landmarks in Music since 1950; and to him, Rachel Lynch and Kristen Thomer of Ashgate Publishing and Bonnie Blackbum or their guidance through the publication process. This book is dedicated with admiration and gratitude to The Lindsays, my colleagues at the University of Manchester, on the 25th anniversary of our performing and academic partnership.

Altrincham, Januay 2004

xiii

Abbreviations

Reerence to musical pitches ollows the revised Helmholtz system adopted in The New Grove Dictionay of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 2001).Accordingly, Middle C is c' ; octaves above re c", c'", etc.; octaves below are c, C, C' , etc. Pitch-classes are given in capital letters, non­ italicized. Octaves are reckoned rom C up to B.

2-�3 indicates: rom the second bar beore rehearsal number 4 to the third bar after rehearsal number 5.

vn. 1: irst violin vn. 2: second violin RGALI: Russkiy gosudarstvenniy arkhiv literatun i iskusstv (Russian State rchive of Literature and the Arts)

xiv

Introduction

By most conceivable methods of measurement Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet may be said to enjoy extraordinry esteem: extraordinary, certainly, or a concert work rom the second half of the twentieth century. Its success was instantaneous. The irst perormance - given by the Beethoven Quartet on 2 October 1960 in Leningrad's Glinka Hall as the opening event of the new chamber music season - was part of an all-Shostakovich programme including the Second and Seventh Quartets, and Vasily Shirinsky, the Beethoven's second violinist, noted in his diary that the concert was sold out and that some of the audience had to stand along the walls. The new work was greeted by a standing ovation and encored in its entirety.1 Reviews of this and the Moscow premiere on 9 October were glowing.2 The Eighth Quartet's reputation spread rapidly, uelled by rumours about the personal and political subtexts relating to the circumstances of composition and to its numerous self-quotations and allusions.3 Orchestrated versions soon appeared, usually or string orchestra, but sometimes with added timpani; to date there have been at least ten independent arrangements, none of them by the composer.4 The first recording was made by the Beethoven Quartet, just 19 days after the premiere.5 Since that time well over 100 commercial recordings have appeared (including the various arrangements), of which more than 40 are listed in the current British CD catalogue (or a comparative evaluation and discussion see Appendix C 1 Shirinsky 1 997 , p . 147; Stupel' 1 960 . The performance was preceded by introductory comments rom Alexander Dolzhansky, later elaborated in his book on Shostakovich's chamber music - Dolzhansky 1965 , ootnote on p. 43 . 2 Volkov 1960 , Sokol'sky 1 960 , Martinov 1 960; translated in Appendix B , 6 below. See also the more cursory review in Stupel' 1960 . The Moscow premiere took place in the Small Hall of the Conservatoire, ollowing closed performances at the Composers' Union on 5 and 7 October. It was preceded by Shostakovich 's First Quartet and ollowed by Georgy Sviridov's Song Cycle on Texts of Robert Bums . 3 See Keldlsh 1960/ 1 96 1 (excerpts given in Appendix B , 6 below) and Smith 1 962 . Inormation in the latter source was conveyed by members of the Borodin Quartet (personal communication rom the author, December 2002) . 4 See Hulme 2002 , pp . 38 1-82. . 5 According ti Shirinsky 1 997 , p . 147 . Not all sources agree on this date.

2

Shostakovich: String Quartet No . 8

and, or more detail, Fanning 200 1c). It has been calculated that the Eighth Quartet is the most performed string quartet by a twentieth-century composer, vying or popularity with the best-known chamber works of Mozart and Beethoven.6 Extracts have been used to accompany ballets, ilms and television programmes, and at the time of writing the Eighth Quartet is a set work or 'A Level' Music examinations in England. Reasons or this exceptional regard are not hard to ind. Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet is quite obviously a stirring musical document - immediately communicative, yet also rich in headline-grabbing background circumstances. Despite its relatively modest dimensions - ive movements, playing without a brek or around 20-25 minutes - its impact in the concert hall can be overwhelming, as anyone who has witnessed an intense, ocused performance beore a receptive audience can testify. Most proessional string quartets have the piece in ther repertoire, and it is also accessible to amateur and student players. As a second-study violinist in the 1970s, I myself took part in two public performances, and I still cherish the reaction of the audience member who praised my quartet (or so we chose to believe) or the 'sense ef agony' we conveyed. Here, then, is already ample justiication or a short book. Its subject matter is a work whose expressive power is more or less unquestioned and whose message-bearing qualities have been much vaunted, but whose musical design - crucial to that power and to those qualities - has never been examined in detail.7 Lack of close scrutiny has left the Eighth Quartet unprotected against its ew (yet inluential) detractors, according to whom its quotations and striking dramatic gestures betoken mere superficiality, and its popularity mere artistic debasement.8 Even prominent performers of the Eighth Quartet perhaps over-exposed to the work or to its more lurid commentaries - have been known to voice reservations along these lines (albeit rarely in print). The main analytical section of the present study aims at the heart of su�h

6 Statistics rom the American Chamber Music Society, cited in Moris Boneld, 'Uroki velikogo maestro' [Lessons with a great maestro] , Muzikal'naya akademiya , (4) (1997), p. 64 . 7 Overviews may be ound in Roseberry 1 989, pp . 268-76; Longman 1989 , pp . 18 1-87; Jackson 1998, pp . 628-32; and Wehrmeyer 2002, pp . 2 1 3-28 . However, none of these claims to ofer sustained analy tical discussion , and only the last-named touches on the question of how musical design may relate to broader aspects of meaning . The provocative non-analytical commentaries in Taruskin 1997 , pp. 494-97 and Kramer 2002, pp. 23241 will be addressed at various points in Chapters 1 and 3 below (see pp. 15-16, 21-22, 129 , 135) . s See Taruskin 1997 , p. 495 .

Introduction

3

doubts. It highlights those aspects of the Eighth Quartet that transmit its emotional power, and it ocuses on artistic mastery at every tum. This is intended in part as a demonstration that Shostakovich's music has its own self­ validating ex ressivity and cohesion, irrespective of programme, subtext or intention. But prolonged engagement with the work has pushed me towards a more provocative conclusion, namely that, whether by instinct or design, the Eighth Quartet makes a point of transcending the extra-musical meanings it invokes, and that the strong presence of those meanings serves precisely to dramatize the process of their transcending. Viewed in this light the squabbles detailed in Chapter 1 below - as to whether the quartet is 'about' Shostakovich's reactions to the Second World War or, altenatively, his more personal traumas - are beside the point. Either or both of those backgrounds, in any mixture, may indeed be relevant, and their traces are not hard to uncover in the music. But the overriding point is that they are eventually set aside in avour of more all-embracing philosophical concepts. In this way the Eighth Quartet is, if anything, 'about' the condition of music itself - about music's relation to lie and the urge or reedom which it symbolizes. The lengthy analysis in Chapter 3 of this book thereore seeks to articulate an experience of the work with which existing commentaries do not engage: that this is music that liberates itself rom the shackles of its contexts. Those contexts naturally demand close examination. Thereore Chapter 1 considers some of the problems associated with Shostkovich's reputation and historical position, and in particular the circumstances surrounding the composition of the Eighth Quartet and the controversies that have since sprung up around it. Chapter 2 goes on to discuss cultural and political lie in the Soviet Union during the so-called 'Thaw' yers ( 1953-64) and Shostkovich's lie and work in that period. Three appendices ollow the main analytical study. The first gives the complete text and translation of the revolutionary song quoted by Shostakovich in the ourth movement of the Quartet, ollowed by Mihail Druskin's study of its provenance; the second consists of documents relating to the Quartet's composition and reception; the third is a comparative survey of selected recordings. The close analysis in Chapter 3 should ideally be read with a score to hand. Nevertheless I have tried to include suicient musical and analytical examples to make its basic arguments intelligible without such reerence, at least or readers well acquainted with the work. Those impatient to know my conclusions may like to go straight to the summaries appended to the analysis of each movement, ollowed by the overall summary beginning at p. 132. The score used is the 200 1 corrected reprint (Moscow: DSCH) of the 1979 Muzgiz

p

4

Shostakovich: String Quartet No . 8

score (Collected Works, vol. 35). A Critical Edition, as part of a New Collected Works, remains some yers of; this may include the complete sketches and drafts or the work (some eight pages, apparently), to which the curators of Shostakovich's estate re currently unwilling to grant access (see below, pp. 3840 and p. 92, or discussion of the single page published to date). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this book are my own. Transliteration ollows the style adopted in The New Grove Dictionay' of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 200 1).

Chapter 1

Placing Shostakovich and the Eighth Quartet

Shostakovich the Elusive

For all the esteem indicators buttressing Shostakovich's reputation, commentators and historians still have diiculty placing him, at least in the West.For some it seems to be mainly the political dimension that validates his music.' Others more explicitly regret his supposed defects of craftsmanship,2 to the point of regarding him as little more than a purveyor of rtistic simple­ mindedness.3 Few would be prepared to grant him parity with the leading lights of twentieth-century music. To a degree this merely relects decades-old controversies over the place of the humanistic tradition in twentieth-century music. Those who hold that tradition to be central have tended to canonize Nielsen, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Prokoiev, Britten and Tippett; those who

1 For example , Morgan 1 99 1 , where Shostakovich is ranged alongside Hindemith, Weill and Prokoiev in a chapter headed 'The inluence of politics ' . 2 For strictures on his quartet style , see Griiths 200 1 : 'Material may seem too banal or the purpose of a quartet, orms too short . . . , textures too bare . . . , and contrasts too extreme between the trite and the soul-searching' (p . 593) . 3 Pierre Boulez, or instance, places Shostakovich ' much lower' than the ' second division , where you ind Prokoiev and Hindemith' (interview with Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times , 9 January 2000, Section 9 [Culture] , p . 2 1 ) . At least two well-known British composer-critics are also sceptics: 'Personally I'd travel a long way in 'the opposite direction to avoid exposure to Shostakovich - the English taste or this treadbare music , as if in communal expiation or guilt and sufering we should have undergone but were sadly spared, strikes me as mere revival of the old national vice , pleasure masquerading as pain. ' (Robin Holloway, explaining his avoidance of the Borodin Quartet's Shostakovich concerts at the Aldeburgh Festival , The Spectator, 284, 24 June 2000 , p. 46) ; 'As or Shostakovich , it's diicult to imagine how his music could be more intensely programmed than it already has been . Though that apparently bottomless drawer could yet divulge still further tricks of keening lines and tiddle-om­ pom rhythms . ' (Bayan Northcott, 'And today 's centenary is ' , The Independent, 4 February 2000 , Review section, p. 17 .)

5

6

Shostakovich: String Quartet No . 8

consider it to have been overtaken by events have tended to marginalize those same composers and to emphasize the 'modenist' path rom Wagner and Debussy through Schoenberg, Berg, Weben, Stravinsky and Bart6k, to Messiaen and the post-war avant-garde. Of course all such categories are artiicial constructs, and the battle-lines .over them are now less entrenched than they once were. But their traces linger on in private and public debate, and it is by no means easy to predict what kind of re-evaluation Shostakovich and his ellow musical humanists will be granted in uture histories of twentieth-century music. Even those who love Shostakovich's music and wholeheartedly acknowledge its stature have dificulty placing him in the broader picture. And with good reason. The music of his frst maturity - roughly rom the First Symphony ( 1924-25) to the Fouth ( 1934-36) - is stylistically so inclusive and emotionally so volatile that it is by no means always apparent which of its tones of voice should be taken seriously (though that very uncertainty may actually be crucial to its appeal). The Fifth Symphony ( 1937) marks a second maturity, one to some extent enorced and hastened by the cultural crackdown of 1936. From this time the 'real' Shostakovich becomes if anything harder to pin down, despite apparently greater stylistic cohesion, conservatism and lyrical directness. Now the surface of the music becomes, as it were, overlaid with mrrors. And if we ail to notice these irrors - if we regrd the musical surface as essentially a transparent window on Shostakovich's intentions - we may in act be seeing only our own prejudices, ideological and/or aesthetic, relected back at us. On the other hand, even if we do sense the presence of mirrors, we can never be sure precisely where and at what angle they are placed. Documentary evidence of 'intentions', especially rom a country where ree speech was as severely constrained as in the Soviet Union, is of limited help in resolving the disputes that inevitably arise. Yet this uncertainty mingles with Shostakovich's undoubted rhetorical eloquence, creating a potent and disturbing mixture. So while the post-1936 Shostakovich may never have been at the cutting edge of central European stylistic sophistication (which is the tust of Boulez's complaint), he continued to be a master of elusiveness and psychological complexity. In this respect he was as worthy a successor to Mahler as were the members of the Second Viennese School, albeit or very diferent reasons. In a way this too was a orm of modenism: one very much on Shostakovich's own terms, symbiotic and in precarious balance with a personal and political lie that was anything but on his terms. Paradoxically, Shostkovich's pluralistic style and elusiveness of tone have enabled vitually all commentators - more or less irrespective of their ideological viewpoint - to agree on one thing: his position as a chronicler,

Placing Shostakovich and the Eighth Quartet

7

even a conscience, of his times. Those who have not perceived his music as overlaid by mirrors have generally assumed that his heroic, patriotic, tragic or unereal tones speak directly, either on behalf of a supposedly united Soviet populace or on behalf of the victims of the State (thts drastic dichotomy equates broadly with published views rom the pre� and post-glasnost eras, respectively). By contrast those who have detected the mirrors have tended to understand the elusiveness on a more philosophically nuanced plane, as a declaration of independence rom state-sponsored thought-control, and thereby as part of the necessarily hidden lie of the spirit in the Soviet Union (this view has come increasingly to prominence in Russia in recent years, and the present study is more or less consonant with it).4 At the same time commentators have repeatedly stressed Shostakovich's place in the inter­ national line of humanist philosopher-symphonists rom Beethoven through to - again - Mahler, whether as their natural successor or in a critical relationship to their work.5 Yet his equally obvious engagement with Bach, with Russian traditions rom Glinka to Stravinsky, with Bergian modenism and neo-Classicism in general, and with popular and olk traditions, fustrates all attempts to pin him down. And that is precisely the point. Here was a composer determined to steer an independent course, against whatever odds. When the odds were stacked against him he compromised, but he made a point of redressing the balance as soon as he could. In the process his music gained layers of meaning that are endlessly ascinating to ponder. His legendary versatility may make the music historian's job diicult, but it was crucial to his survival and integrity, and indeed to the breadth of his appeal. Stylistically Shostakovich was partly a modenist, partly a traditionalist, prtly a neo-classicist, partly an eclectic polystylist. Yet aesthetically he was none of these. If anything he was, or at least became, a humanist under threat. From his second maturity on, his music undoubtedly drew on the circumstances of his lie and that of the Russian intelligentsia as a whole, but in broadly existential terms rather than narrowly anecdotal ones.6 The political adversity is certainly relevant. But rather than squaring up to it directly, he placed himself at an angle to it and delected it into the current of his teeming musical invention. His music gradually took on the role of cultural preservation - maintaining high principles against the threat of debasement. All matters of style and tone low rom that; even - I would say, 4 See ranovsky 1 997b , p . 249 ; Hakobian 1 998 , pp . 172-77 ; Levaya 1 999, p . 1 54. 5 See Longman 1 989, Roseberry 1 989, Koball 1 997 and Walsh 200 1 . 6 For a similar view, concluding a wide-ranging investigation of Shostakovich and

Irony, see Sheinberg 2000 , pp . 3 1 8- 1 9 .

8

Shostakovich: String Quartet No . 8

especially - in a work as seemingly politically charged as the Eighth String Quartet. This helps to explain why composers who have taken their cue rom Shostakovich's personal musical idiom have rarely, if ever, matched him or expressive depth or breadth. The stricture. applies to most of the 30 or so pupils he taught at various times rom 1937 through to the mid-1960s. Among composers of string quartets Boris Chaykovsky (1925-96), Shostkovich's unoficial disciple Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-96), and his star oficial pupil of the next generation, Boris Tishchenko (b. 1939), are close to being exceptions, in that their individuality is by no means entirely efaced by echoes of their master's voice. But after Shostakovich's death the major igures in Russian music - such as Edison Denisov (1929-96), Sofya Gubaydulina (b. 1931), Alred Schnittke (1934-98) and Galina Ustvolskaya (b. 1919 - another Shostakovich pupil), also the Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937), the Estonian Arvo Part (b. 1935), the Georgian Giya Kancheli (b. 1935) and the Armenian Avet Teteryan (1929-94) - all had to get out rom under his potentially overpowering inluence. To varying degrees all of these ine composers nevertheless show afinities with deeper-lying aspects of Shostakovich's musical language: which is to say, with its extremes of motion and non-motion, and with its various kinds of musical symbolisi,7 rather than with its stylistic speciics or its engagement with 'civic' (i.e. social­ conscience) values or 'Aesopian' (i.e. allegorical) commentary. In the West there have been talented individuals - such as the American George Antheil (1900-59), the Englishman Malcolm nold (b. 1921), the Finns Einar Englund (1916-99), Per Henrik Nordgren (b. 1944) and Kalevi Aho (b. 1945) and the Greek Mikis Theodorakis (b. 1925) - who have demonstrated strong stylistic afinities with Shostakovich, as have numerous less interesting igures in ormer Easten-bloc countries. But none of these, with the possible exception of Theodorakis, has experienced a comparable need to articulate outrage on behalf of their audiences. What they have tended to ofer is a dilute version of Shostakovichian angst (Antheil, Englund, Nordgren, Theodorakis), or else, more productively, an eclecticism in which the Shostakovich idiom is but one constituent part (nold, Aho). This, too, can readily be accounted or. The kinds of social and personal pressures under which, in Tishchenko's words, 'such diamonds were ormed as [the poetess Anna] Ahmatova and Shostakovich'8 cannot be atiicially manuactured;

7 See lvaskin 1 995 and Appendix B , 10 below. 8 From an interview reproduced in John 1996, p. 1 62.

Placing Shostakovich and the Eighth Quartet

9

and only a twisted mind would ever want them to be. But if Tishchenko is right, then Shostakovich's achievement may well remain unique, and unclassiiable by available norms.

Shostakovich the Otherwise-Thinker

So far as Shostakovich's major instrumental works are concerned, commentary in the West has tended to polarize between generalized technical exegesis (e.g. Longman 1989, Roseberry 1989) and enthusiastic but reckless paraphrase (e.g. Kopp 1990, MacDonald 1990). The ormer trend does scant justice to the context in which the music arose and acquired its broader cultural resonance; the latter seeks to make good the deiciency, but does so mainly by substituting paraphrase or musical understanding, thereby often doing violence not only to the meaning of Shostakovich's music but also to the nature of musical meaning in general. Paraphrasing music with storylines was a favoured approach of nineteenth-century music criticism, and it has continued to eature strongly in educational and marketing contexts. At its best it can be a useul stimulus to the imagination: a means of helping readers, listeners, even perormers, to relate to music, whether by agreement or disagreement with the paraphraser. This can be a valuable element in a more wide-ranging commentry. However, even if sensitively and subtly done, paraphrase remains a blunt intellectual tool and one that can easily be abused, especially when it is backed up by 'circumstantial evidence' rom the composer's lie and times.9 For all its superficial persuasiveness it osters a liestyle-magazine approach to musical understanding and allies itself all too easily with hype. For instance, when CDs of the Eighth Quartet appear with titles such as 'Written with the Heart's Blood' (Delos DE 3259) or 'Dedicated to Victims of War and Terror' (New Albion NA068), suspicions should be aroused. Because such slogans, emanating rom conductors of Rudolf Brshai's chamber orchestra arrangement, smack of emotional blackmail. To ind the musical experience deicient would be, by implication, to doubt either the conductor's competence or the composer's sincerity, or even to lack compassion or the victims of history. And this clearly does nothing to convert those who doubt Shostakovich's genius or who question the value of individual works. Rather the opposite, in fact. Do the slogans disguise the Eighth Quartet's limitations as a work of art? Does the music cynically press

9 See the trenchant critique of MacDonald in Taruskin 1 997 , pp. 468-97 .

Shostakovich: String Quartet No . 8

10

the compassion button? Is it no better than the numerous well-intentioned but thinly composed and meretricious musical commemorations of the Holocaust and other outrages? After all, plenty of music may have been 'written with the heart's blood', even 'dedicated to victims of War and Terror', if not in so many words; but that says nothing about its. value as a work of rt. The most pertinent example at the time of writing is the British-bon, American-resident Nicholas Maw's Holocaust-related opera Sophie's Choice, a work of high musical quality and high aspirations, premiered at London's Royal Opera, Covent Garden in December 2002. Neither this opera's subject matter nor the powerful advocacy of its conductor Sir Simon Rattle (who reportedly described it as the most important British opera in 50 years) could compensate or its dramaturgical miscalculations. The obvious moral is that works of art have to live up to their billing if they are to survive. Fortunately much of Shostakovich's music does; but there is an extraordinary lack of studies showing how and why it does. This is not the only reason to be worried about aspects of the upsurge of interest in Shostakovich since his death. The appearance of Solomon Volkov's Testimony in 1979 - purporting to contain the composer's dictated memoirs, but in act mixing these with extracts rom his earlier rticles and, almost certainly, with rumours circulating about him in his later years'0 - inaugurated a trend to argue or Shostakovich's place in history on the basis of his supposed dissidence and his music's supposed embodiment of that dissidence (see Kopp 1990, MacDonald 1990, Ho and Feoanov 1998). But that line of thought rests on an act of faith, one no more susceptible of proof than any other. Even if it were possible to pin down the composer's political attitudes more precisely than we actually can, and even if it could be shown that he consciously sought to embody these attitudes artistically, it would not ollow that his music is merely - or even principally - a translation of ideology into sound. It is in the nature of artistic expression, and especially musical expression, to generalize lie experiences into psychological and philosophical dimensions, which are then particularized through the means of the art orm in question. Just so with Shostakovich. If there is 'dissidence' in his music however broadly or narrowly the word be deined - this lies in his determination to stick to his guns, to speak of the reality and complexity of the human condition, if necessary in the teeth of oicial opposition, and to do so by extending rather than debasing the artistic traditions to which he was heir. In that respect his music certainly invites reading as non-conormist, and it reserves the right to denounce evil, both directly and indirectly (by asserting 10

See Brown 2004 .

Placing Shostakovich and the Eighth Quartet

11

altenative values). But only in rare, and even then usually debatable, instances does it seek to specify the source of that evil. In the high-Stalinist years of 1928-53, and for some time thereafter, Shostakovich's determination to retain his individuality, depth of emotional utterance. and complexity of voice requently ran up against the dogmas of Socialist Realism (or rather against the ways in which they were applied by oficialdom). But it is not his condenation of those dogmas that constitutes his true achievement, so much as his deiant independence in the ace of them. For the greater pat of his lie, the system under which he laboured regarded individualism not as a virtue but as a suspect deviation. Pradoxically that gave a sharper edge to Shostakovich's quest; it gave him explosive material to work with, of a kind that most socially conscious Westen composers could only contemplate with envy. But to call this independence 'dissidence' is to risk conusion with writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918) and many others of the next generation, who rom the mid-1950s openly declared their non-compliance and took the consequences. It is also to risk conusion with those major artistic igures in the Stalin Terror years, above all theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold [Meierhold] (1874-1940), who reused to disavow their pinciples and were eliminated. We would do better, perhaps, to adopt the more malleable term coined or Shostakovich by a senior Soviet musicologist - inakomislyashchiy, literally 'the otherwise-thinker', which implies something rather stronger than the Westen 'non-conorist' but not so strong as 'dissident' in the narrow sense.11 This also has the vrtue of lexible application to all periods of Shostakovich's output and to most of his works. In no way does it reduce his stature or underestimate his courage. For quite apat rom the strain of embodying independence of spirit in his music and of periodically having to deend it against attack, he took upon himself the conscience of a survivor - speaing to ellow-survivors of the Stalin years, and speaking on behalf of those who did not survive. As a congenitally nervy, highly-stung personality, and having become acutely sensitive to his faily responsibilities and to his cultural standing, his task was all the more 11 See Aranovsky 1 997a and Levaya 1 999, p. 1 54. Levaya stresses the importance of this topic in Shostakovich's music rom the Tenth Symphony on . Volkov himself argues in similar terms, even though his view of the Eighth Quartet (see Appendix B , 4 below) i s more narrowly programmatic than mine: 'What [Westen audiences] hear is the composer 's deep sympathy or the right of the individual to express itself . . . . To put Shostakovich in the dissidents ' camp now would be a alsiication comparable to putting him in the camp of Stalin and later the Soviet oicial bureaucracy' (Volkov 1 997 pp . 1 5 , 1 6) ' .

.·

Shostakovich: String Quartet No . 8

12

ormidable. Independence of spirit, combined with agonies of conscience, is a vital ingredient in the signiicance of Shostakovich or ellow-surviving Russians of his and the next generation. And it is at the core of the Eighth String Quartet's message.

Explicitness?

Taken as a whole , the [Eighth] quartet is probably the most explicit thing in the composer 's output.12 But its explicitness exacts a price.13

Chock ull of imagery of lament and violence, the Qurtet seemed to early commentators quite straightorward in its basic import, as expressed in its dedicatory line: 'To the Victims of Fascism and War'. This phrase does not appear on the manuscript (see Plate 1),14 and it is not clear who authorized its appearance on the printed page (it is not in the irst publication of the score Moscow: Muzgiz [State Music Publishers], 196 1). But it was preigured in an interview with the composer published in lzvestiya shortly beore the irst perormance,15 and it appeared in the cursory programme note to the Moscow public premiere on 9 October 1960 (copy in RGLI). In itself such a dedication would have been no cause or surprise, given Cold War tensions, especially connected with nuclear prolieration, at the time. Among numerous works by Soviet composers in the late 1950s commemorating the Second World Wr was Vadim Salmanov's Second Quartet ( 1959) 'In memory of Comrades Killed in the War'.16 Dmitry Kabalevsky singled out Salmanov's work or criticism as 'alsely tragic'17 but was himself soon to compose his own Requiem ( 196 1-63) or the victims of the Great Patriotic Wr (as the Second World War was known in the Soviet Union).18 In the same year as the Eighth Quartet (probably shortly after it) Shostakovich composed his

12

MacDonald 1 990 , p. 222 .

13 Taruskin 1 997 , p . 495 .

14 Reproduced in Dvonichenko 2000 (DVDROM and CDROM , pages on Eighth String Quartet) . 15 Dolgopolov 1 960 . See Appendix B , 3 below. 1 6 Schwarz 1 983 , p. 328 (though again , this title does not appear on the score itsel) . See also Raaben 1963 , p . 1 8 1 . 1 1 Schwarz 1 983 , p . 328 . 1s See commentary in John 1 996 , pp . 3 8-57 .

Placing Shostakovich and the Eighth Quartet

Plate 1

13

Autograph score, p. 1. From Dvornichenko 2000. Reproduced by kind permission of Irina Shostakovich

in memory of wartime deenders of that city; and in similar spirit in 1967 the Funeral and Triumphal Prelude in Memoy of the Heoes of the Battle of Stalingrad. In the West Benjamin Britten was about to embark on his War Requiem ( 196 1-62), which was destined to eclipse other works, such as Tippett's King Priam, Bliss's The Beatitudes, Wilred Josephs's

Novorossisk Chimes

14

Shostakovich: String Quartet No . 8

1962), that aimed to catch the same public mood. It is perfectly natural, then, that the soon-recognized presence in the Eighth Quartet of self-quotations and allusions should have been read simply as confirmation of Shostakovich's personal identiication with a undamenttl anti-war message.19 Yet circumstances first hinted at by Vladimir Askenazy,20 and elaborated in more recently published reminiscences of those close to the composer, opened the way to a diferent ind of interpretation: namely that the composer's unwilling candidature or membership of the Communist Party had illed him with despair, which he then sought to exorcize in a bitter musical retrospective over his damaged career, to be dedicated to himself. (In the most lurid version of this story, the composer's next planned move was to commit suicide: see Appendix B, 2).Again, it should be no real surprise to ind this view of the work taking root. For many in the post-Communist world, the notion of the Eighth Quartet as a (self-)condemnatory suicide note is more congenial than hearing it as a righteous blast against Fascism, since it reinorces the idea of Shostakovich as a victim of his own country's system

Requiem and Graham Whettam's Sifonia contra timore (all rom

rather than its beneiciary. This is the line most militantly represented by Ian MacDonald.21 According to this way of thinking, the Quartet's numerous self-quotations and allusions (see below, Tables 3.1 and 3.2) are a diary of despair, and the work as a whole is thereore in .essence Shostakovich's anti-Heldenleben or, as it has often been described, a Requiem or himself.22 This last image was reinorced when the work was played at his uneral on 14 August 1975.23 To try to determine which of these interpretations is the more correct, or even to blend elements of both, is raught with danger, so slippery is the nature of the evidence. Even Shostkovich's son and daughter, in their erly twenties at the time of the Quartet's composition, while in agreement that the published dedication to the Victims of Fascism and War is a sham, have difered as to whether it should be understood as including Shostkovich or whether it should simply be replaced by a dedication to the composer alone.24 It should be stressed again that none of the possible shades 'Of interpretation is any guarantee of artistic value.None ofers any deence against the accusation, or

19 Keld:sh 1 960 , pp . 1 9-23 ; 1 96 1 , pp . 226-28. See Appendix B , 7 below. 20 Parott 1 984, pp . 55-56 . 2 1 MacDonald 1 990 , pp . 22 1-24; MacDonald 1 998 , pp . 587-89. 22 See Yakubov 1 99 1 . 23 Wilson 1 994 , p . 474 . 24 See rdov 2004, pp . 158-59 .

Placing Shostakovich and the Eighth Quartet

15

instance, that the Quartet's violent second movement and its dance-of-death third movement are essentially cheap thrills, or that the three surrounding argos are mere self-indulgent efusions, or even that the quotations are a crutch, taking the place of solid musical invention:. in .sum, that the entire Quartet is a kind of twentieth-century music or dummies. No one has voiced precisely those sentiments, at least not in print. But even among Shostakovich's admirers we can ind signs of unease along these lines. For instance, the musicologist Daniil Zhitoirsky ( 1906-92), who began his career in the 1920s on the Proletarian wing of Soviet music bitterly opposed to Shostakovich, but who later became a supporter and ghost writer or some of his oicial speeches and articles, has suggested of the revolutionary song quoted in the ourth movement that: 'this melody, laden with associations . . ., in the context of the other themes makes the whole appear "cheap" ' .25 In broad agreement with this and with urther reservations expressed by Yury Keldlsh (see Appendix B, 7), Richard Taruskin - in any case a much more guarded admirer of the composer - has commented that: The compulsion to write in this virtually telegraphic or stenographic way was unquestionably an inner compulsion . Its sincerity compels a strong empathic response; and yet the work, I eel , is weakened by it nevertheless. I do not ind myself retuning to it with renewed anticipation of discovery, and when I do ind myself listening to it, I seem to be listening to it the way deterined paraphrasts lke Ian MacDonald evidently listen to every Shostakovich piece .26

Coing rom the world's oremost living historian of Russian music, these reservations are not lightly to be brushed aside. I shall retun to them in due course. But I may as well say here and now that in so far as their trget is Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet, rather than the paraphrastic fallacy attributed by Taruskin to MacDonald, I believe them to be misplaced. For me, notwithstanding all the Eighth Quartet's quotations, allusions and thinly veiled subtexts, what it communicates, far rom being conined to socio-political ' speciics, aspires to philosophy, to meaning-of-lie statement. This is, admittedly, saying no more than early Soviet commentaries did (see Stupel' 1960, Volkov 1960, Ginzburg 196 1, Dolzhansky 1965), and they might be suspected of evasiveness and self-censorship. But I want to take their bland assertions a stage urther and suggest that the jouney rom the explicit to the philosophical is in act one of the most explicit things about the work. This is

25 Zhitomirsky 1 996, p . 289 . 26 Taruskin 1 997·, p. 495 .

Shostakovich: String Quartet No . 8

16

the conclusion towards which my analytical chapter will point, in direct opposition not only to Zhitomirsky, MacDonald and Taruskin but also to Lawrence Kramer, the inluential advocate of culturally inormed musical hermeneutics, whose recent discussion of the Eighth Quartet sees its over­ reliance on quotation as betokening 'anxi.ety' and its overall construction as a symptom of 'damage', adding up to an 'empty ritual' .27 Unlike Taruskin, ramer intends his comments or the most part sympathetically, and there re undoubtedly sensitive points in his discussion. But the oundation or his argument seems to me rocky. For instance, like so many commentators, he persistently describes the irst movement as a ugue, which it is patently not, and is led thereby to overstate the large-scale symmetry of the work (Kramer 2002, pp. 233-35). When he writes that 'Instead of transiguring the anguish of the opening ugue, the closing ugue heightens it' (p. 235), he is no longer thinking of Shostkovich's Eighth Quartet so much as of a distorted schematic version of it. Most amazingly, Kramer reads Shostakovich's reerence to his music's 'pseudo-tragedy' in his letter to Isaak Glikman (see Appendix B, 1 below) as sincere, and therefore as corroboration of overall ironic compositional intent (pp. 23940). This is surely wrong-headed. The irony of the 'pseudo-tragedy' reerence, if not already obvious as an example of epistolary self-deprecation, consists in its echoing of Kabalevsky's polemic on the supposed 'alse tragedy' in late 1950s Soviet music, voiced during a keynote address to the Fifth Ple�um of the Composers' Union in January 1960.28 For all their diferences of opinion as regards artistic quality and tone of voice, MacDonald, Taruskin and Kramer re in agreement that the Eighth Quartet does not transcend its programme. But that is a view I or one cannot reconcile with my experience of the work, and I believe that it leads to a disastrous underestimation of the Quartet's aesthetic qualities and principles.29 Admittedly their views have some oundation; in order to see how they do, and beore the next chapter goes on to examine the wider cultural context in which Shostakovich's work appeared, it is worth taking a closer look at the immediate circumstances of composition. 21

ramer 2002, pp . 2324 1 . Schwarz 1 983 , p. 328 . 29 Again, I call on Volkov or support (though his comment applies to Shostakovich in general): 'Then he was downgraded - also in the political context - during the Cold War, and the intense aesthetic value of his music was orgotten . But it was there , waiting or resurrection . Without the real aesthetic value nobody would remember Shostakovich now, regardless of all the political events [since 1 989] ' (Volkov 1 997 , p . 14) . 2s

Placing Shostakovich and the Eighth Quartet

17

Circumstances o f Composition

By 1960, in his undisputed, if uncomortable, position as the Soviet Union's leading composer, Shostakovich had ew of his Westen counterparts' career . concens; but he had plenty that they could scarcely imagine. On the whole he enjoyed congenial conditions in which to compose; but he was obliged, or at least he elt obliged, to keep up a morale-sapping regime of oicial duties. Front-rank conductors and soloists lived in hope of receiving irst­ performance rights to his new works; but their interest was shared by his political masters, who were still monitoring him or appropriate role-model behaviour. He maintained a steady stream of composition or ilms, often to quite lucrative commissions; but by the 1950s most of this work was drudgery to him, and his prospects or successully steering to completion more ambitious projects - such as a serious opera or ballet - had long since been shattered as a consequence of Prava's denunciations in January and Febuary 1936 of his second opera, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, and his third ballet, The Limpid Stream. It was a ilm commission that took Shostakovich to Dresden in July 1960, to work on the score to his friend Leo Anshtam's Five Days, Five Nights. This was a Russian-East German collaboration, relating the story of how Red Army soldiers managed to save some of Dresden's at treasures beore the inal destruction of the city at the end of the Second World War. Having seen some of the rushes, and having toured the still ruined city and spoken to some of the survivors (see Appendix B, 3), Shostakovich repaired to the spa town of Gohrisch, in the nearby resort area of S.chsische Schweiz ( 'Saxon Switzerland') near the border with Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). Instead of working on the ilm score, however, he composed the Eighth String Quartet, in three days rom 12 to 14 July. On his retun to Russia the work was almost immediately put into rehearsal by the Beethoven Quartet, with whom Shostakovich had collaborated since 1938 and who had premiered his Quartets Nos. 2-7, as well as the Piano Quintet and Second Piano Trio with the composer himself as pianist. On 11 August and 19 September, Shostakovich played the Eighth Quartet on the piano or members of the Beethoven Quartet, and on 25 September an interview was published in lzvestiya, in which he mentioned his dedication of the work 'to the Victims of War and Fascism' (sic; see Appendix B, 3). Building on interpretations set orth in reviews of early perormances (see Appendix B, 4-6) an explanatory article appeared in the December issue of Sovetskaya muzika, oicial organ of the Soviet Composers' Union, its author being Yury Keldlsh, one of the most prominent Soviet musicologists, a

18

Shostakovich: String Quartet No . 8

proessor at Moscow Conservatoire and at that time editor of the jounal. This article set orth the parameters or a politically correct interpretation of the work: 'In tuning to the remembrances of the heavy losses of the war years, it is as if the composer wishes to remind us that this part of our past has not become distant and indiferent, that it must not be consigned to orgetfulness' (or further extracts, see Appendix B, 7). However, in a letter of 19 July to his riend and one-time secretry Isaak Glman, Shostkovich had already outlined a very diferent background to the work, stressing (in semi-ironic, self-deprecating tones) the self-quotations and describing the piece as an 'ideologically depraved quartet which is no use to anybody'. There is no hint of the published dedication here. Rather, Shostakovich explains, 'I started thiking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself. The title page could carry the dedication: "To the memory of the composer of this quartet'" (or ull text see Appendix B, 1). Publishing this letter in 1993, Glikman himself added a long explanatory gloss, giving details, as he saw them, of Shostakovich's enorced application to join the Communist Party, the composer's consequent shame, and the appropriateness to his situation of the Quartet's quotation of the revolutionary song amuchen tyazholoy nevoley [Tormented by Harsh Captivity] in the ourth movement (the same quotation regrded by Zhitomirsky as cheapening). The reminiscences of musicologist Lev Lebedinsky, another friend at the time, go urther still, claiming that Shostakovich had fallen into such intense self-loathing over his inability to reject Party candidature that he was intent on committing suicide, having composed the Eighth Quartet as his valedictory testament. Lebedinsky even claims to have removed the sleeping pills with which Shostakovich proposed to accomplish the act, and to have passed them to the composer's son, Maxim (see Appendix B, 2). Maxim, however, vehemently denies this story,30 and others have voiced doubts over Lebedinsky as a memoirist. A one-time oicial in the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, and, like Zhitomirsky, a bitter critic of Shostakovich in the late 1920s, he underwent a change of heart (possibly after inding himself also on the receiving end of oicial displeasure in the aftermath of the Lady Macbeth afair) and became close to the composer, claiming a share in writing the text of his anti-bureaucratic satire, Rayok.3' However, or reasons not entirely known, there was a rift between the two men at some point in the

30 Telephone conversation with the author, 15 July 2003 . 31 Wilson 1 994 , pp . 298-99 .

Placing Shostakovich and the E�ghth Quartet

19

1960s,32 and sceptics as to the authenticity of Testimony attribute some of its more dubious contents to Lebedinsky.33 A cautionary note regarding the implications of Prty membership may also be appropriate here. Notwithstanding Glikman's linking of Shostakovich's recruitment to the Party with the composer's appointment, on 9 April 1960, as First Secretary of the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics] Union of Composers, joining the Communist Party was by no means an automatic or compulsory step or prominent igures in the proessions (as Glikman himself reports Shostakovich rguing to his Party tormentor). It is true that in the post-war era Party membership had been widely regarded as a necessary step or personal advancement through the middle ranks.34 But there had always been diferent levels of 'Party saturation' in the proessions, according to the nature of the job. In the People's Commissariat [later Ministry] or Foreign Afairs, or instance, it was expected that most medium- and high-ranking oicials would be Party members,35 and likewise in the police and throughout the justice system. But proportions in the Commissariat or Agriculture, say, were much lower. In the proessions, including the arts, it has been calculated that Party membership increased rom 3.8 per cent in 1929 to 15. 1 per cent in 1 939, 30.0 per cent in 1947 and 30.8 per cent in 1959.36 Membership in the population as a whole was also on a steady ascent since the death of Stalin in 1953. (That ascent would have been steadier throughout the entire history of the Soviet Union had it not been or the ravages of Purges and War.37) By the mid-1960s one-twelfth of the entire adult population were Party members.38 As to whether proposals or membership were ever reusable, this has to be judged on an individual basis; there was no general rule to indicate that they were not so.39 Shostakovich's recruitment to the Party may certainly be seen as part of the larger-scale drive of the Kushchev yers; but the socially engineered aspect of that drive, at least until 196 1, had mainly to do with increasing the membership among workers and peasants. There was no grand design at this time to co-opt the great and the good. In this respect, Lebedinsky's assertion

Fay 2000, pp . 227 , 263 . Yakubov 1 993 , pp . 83, 85 . Dubinsky 1989, p. 8 . Rigby 1 968, p . 42 1 . De Witt 196 1 , p . 534. Rigby 1 968 , pp . 5 1 , 296-323 . Ibid ., p . 449. 39 Ibid., p. 46.

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

_

20

Shostakovich: String Quartet No . 8

that the initiative or Shostakovich's Party candidature came rom a petty oficial seeking personal advancement (perhaps he meant the P. N. Pospelov named in Glikman's reminiscences) could easily be true.40 To those outside Shostakovich's inner circle, his application or Prty membership seemed to be a natural culmination of the long process of his acceptance of oicial responsibilities. As. early as 1934 he had been an elected deputy of Leningrad's October District, and since February 1947 he had been chairman of the Leningrad branch of the Composers' Union and district representative to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. His civic responsibilities multiplied in the last years of Stalin's rule, when he was sent as a Soviet representative to various intenational conerences, most notoriously at Stalin's personal behest to the Cultural and Scientiic Congress or World Peace in New York in March 1949.41 Through the late. 1950s, and especially in the year 1960, Shostakovich's public pronouncements were becoming ever more conormist in tone.42 On 9 April that year he was elected First Secretry, in efect leader, of the Composers' Union of the RSFSR, a post he held until early 1968, when he pleaded ill-health and the post passed to his ormer pupil, Georgy Sviridov ( 19 15-98). This job was not as all-embracing a responsibility as the corresponding position at the Union of Soviet Composers, held rom 1948 until 199 1 by Tihon Khrennikov, but it represented a signiicant commitment nonetheless. Pty membership was the next logical move, and since musicians close to Shostakovich, such as violinist David Oistrkh, conductor Kiril Kondrashin, and composers ram Khachaturyan and Kara Karayev, were already members, it was not necessarily such a ateul step as might be thought. Nevertheless, the reminiscences of those close to him suggest that or Shostakovich at least, it seems to have been a move he had been determined never to make.43 Whatever the disagreements over details and the uncertainty surrounding Shostakovich's actions and reactions at this time, there seems to be little doubt that the business of joining the Prty brought home to him his impotence vis­ a-vis authority, and that the Eighth Quartet in some way relects his consequent agonizing. But the ways in which this agonizing is embodied in the music remain a matter or debate, as does the tistic value of the results. Ian 40 Cited in Wilson 1994, pp . 336-37 . But if this individual was the Party-line historian Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov, he was a good deal more prominent than the phrase 'petty oficial ' suggests . 41 See Fay 2000, pp . 17 1-73 . 42 See Grigoryev and Platek 1980, pp . 166-2 16. 43 Fay 2000, p . 219.

21

Placing Shostakovich and the Eighth Quartet

MacDonald took the hints rom Testimony and rom Ashkenazy 's memoirs and was the irst in the West to air the possibility that the · Quatet conveyed a message connected with Shostakovich 's orced induction to the Party.4 Richard Truskin, momentarily in agreement with the commentator he otherwise delights in stigmatizing, is in no doubt that the Eighth Quartet essentially articulates Shostakovich's despair and self-recrimination: The central strategy . . . was to contrive the pointed conjunction, which takes place near the end of the ourth movement, between the D-S-C-H motif [see Chapter 2, pp . 32-4 1 below] and the one extensive quotation that does not come rom one of Shostakovich's own works , namely the famous song of revolutionary martyrdom that begins with the words amuchen yazholoy nevoley, which mean , literally, 'Tortured by grievous unfreedom.' The citation was insulated rom oicial suspicion by the fact, known to every Soviet child at school, that this was one of Lenin's avorite songs [see Appendix A below] . Yet by appropriating it, Shostakovich was , as it were, giving his quartet not only a subtext but literally a text, proclaiming his unreedom and disclaiming responsibility or what he judged in himself to be an act of cowardice, or, rather, a craven failure to act [i.e., presumably, his ailure to reuse Party candidature] .45

But Taruskin takes the opposite view rom MacDonald of the Quartet's quality as a musical composition. This is the one composition of his that does ask expressly to be read as autobiography, the one time Shostakovich did put an explicit note in a bottle . And, although my saying so may win me ew riends , I believe that this melancholy, much admred work of 1960 reveals something beyond its intended message - something I, or one, would rather not believe. What it shows is that the need to communicate urgently and with speciicity in an atmosphere of threat did at times shrik Shostakovich's creative options . . . . The Eighth Quartet is thus a wrenching human document . . . . The quotations e· lengthy and literal, amounting in the crucial ourth movement to a airly inert medley ; the thematic transormations are very demonstratively, perhaps overdemonstratively, elaborated; startling juxtapositions are reiterated until they become familiar. The work provides its own running paraphrase, and the paraphrase moves inevitably into the oreground of consciousness as the note pattens become predictable.46

·

Taruskin is certainly right to suggest that Shostakovich composed nothing 4 MacDonald 1 990 , pp . 22 1-24. See also Lebedinsky 1990, p. 264. 45 Taruskin 1997 , p. 495 . 46 Ibid. , pp. 493.94.

Shostakovich: String Quartet No . 8

22

with such a suggestive tissue of (self-)quotation and allusion as the Eighth Qurtet; nor, arguably, has any other major composer ever done so with serious intent - not even Berg in his Lyric Suite, only a raction of whose autobiographical elements were known at the time (possible candidates are Luciano Berio in the third movement of .is Sinfonia ( 1968-69) and Schnittke in his First Symphony ( 1968-72)). But Taruskin's consequent reservations about the piece - its 'ixity of meaning', its 'predictable' note-pattens and what he has elsewhere dubbed Shostakovich's 'debased level of musical discourse'47 - relect his limitations rather than those of the composition itself. There are other ways of reading the ourth movement, indeed other ways of reading the entire work, that do not thus privilege the composer's presumed intentions, as I shall endeavour to show in Chapter 3. And these are ways that release the Eighth Quartet rom the accretions of its commentries, both well­ and ill-meaning.This entails taking a resh, close look at the notes on the page - the ones that musicians play rom, whether or not they know the stories behind the music. And it involves turning existing perceptions of 'explicitness' inside out, by proposing that explicitness is courted precisely in order to dramatize its setting aside. As with any piece of serious music, the notes are there not merely in order to serve a story that could be told in words; or if that were their sole unction, then once we knew the story there would be no point in listening to the music at all. Rather the story serves a higher philosophical purpose, which I would be content to call: the music. Not that the story of Shostakovich;s Party candidature is irrelevant. It is simply part of a larger relevant context that indicates to us where the music comes rom, which is not at all the same thing as what it became after the process of composition. What the composer's membership of the Party challenged, and what several other strands of his lie in the 1950s challenged, was his self-image as an independent 'non-conormist'. The Eighth Quartet was his emotionally despairing, but also artistically magniicent, transcendent response to those challenges. In common with his euvre as a whole, it is not merely a means to articulate his moral premise; rather the moral premise is a goad to his music. If anything, the music is symbolic not of personal tribulations but of the potential of the human spirit or self-awareness, or achieving psychological balance and wholeness in the ace of adversity. Thereore, to understand the musical imagery of the Eighth Quartet (most of it painul) and its structural embodiment (its ocusing and transorming power) is nothing less than to understand something of the power of the soul to absorb

47 Tuskin

1995 , p. 55 .

Placing Shostakovich and the Eighth Quartet

23

and integrate experience. Of course numerous musical works rom Beethoven on can be interpreted as having similar aspirations . But ew in the second half of the twentieth century realized that goal in a way that speaks so eloquently and to so broad an audience. This at least is the belief that animates my book� And it is my reason or inviting the reader to ollow my close examination of the Eighth Quartet either by jumping ahead now to Chapter 3, or after an excursion into the broader context of Soviet Russian culture and Shostakovich's lie and works in the 'Thaw' years.

Chapter 2

T he USSR and Shostakovich in the ' Thaw'

Accepting leadership of the RSFSR Composers' Union in April 1960, and candidature or the Communist Party 11 weeks ·1ater, meant the prospect of major administrative headaches or Shostakovich. It also guaranteed a degree of estrangement rom the rising generation of composers and intellectuals eager to push orward and enjoy new reedoms. The period rom the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953 to the deposing of Niita Khrushchev on 14 October 1964 witnessed a growing gap between the younger would-be liberalizers and those who had lived through the Stalin era often by dint of compromise, as in Shostakovich's case, but in many cases with unwavering commitment to the Prty line. Among Soviet writers this issue of 'Fathers and Sons' (rom the title of Turgenev's famous novel of a century earlier) was particularly acute.1 And it is according to the luctuating climate in the Soviet literary world that the historiographical subdivisions often applied to this period re taken. The Thaw

Ilya Erenburg's short novel of 1954, Ottepel [The Thaw] , dealt with the concens and hopes of the liberal intelligentsia at the time, and its title was almost instantly adopted as the symbol of the era. With hindsight the Thaw. has commonly been held to fall into three phases, vacillating between brief; but signiicant phases of liberalization and renewed impositions of authority. The 'First Thaw' lasted rom Stalin's death more or less up to the Second Writers' Congress in December 1954, where Party discipline was reairmed. It saw the publication of a number of theoretical articles rguing or higher literary values, as well as of Erenburg's novella.2 It was apparent that the havoc wreaked on Soviet culture during the Stalin era would take years 1 See Johnson 1 965 , p. 26 .

25

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

26

to undo. Even as late as 1956, or instance, a number of prominent Soviet writers declared not only that had they not read Kaka, but that they had not even heard of him.3 For a nation that had once prided itself on its awareness of intenational culture, such ignorance was symptomatic of a catastrophic isolation; pressure rom the. rising generation to rectify it was intense. The second phase of the Thaw was initiated dramatically with Khrushchev's 'Secret Speech' to the 20th Party Congress on 25 February 1956, in which he denounced Stalin's 'Personality Cult' .4 Soon leaked, this had immediate political repercussions, especially in other countries within the Warsaw Pact (ormed the previous year). Poland now made a successul bid or limited autonomy, adopting a compromise policy of 'national Communism' , one of whose striking achievements in the cultural sphere was the ounding in 1956 of the Warsaw Autumn Festival, which was soon to become the main conduit into the Easten bloc or Westen avant-garde musical trends. Hungarian politicians and intellectuals pushed even harder, in a bid to win the kind of political independence that the Soviet Union had already granted Finland and Austria after the War but had been unwilling to extend to others ollowing the successul break or reedom by Tito's Yugoslavia in 1948. Hungarian aspirations were crushed by the invasion of Soviet tanks in November 1956. Partly as a result of these rebellions, the oicial line within the USSR hardened again. The underlying problem or the authorities was that ' Khrushchev's admission of Stalin's 'Personality Cult' (an obvious euphemism or far worse things) destroyed the myth of Party infallibility that or many had sustained morale through the darkest days of the Great Purges and War. If the Leader's god-like reputation had been shown to be a iction, what other articles of faith might now have to be overtuned? In addition, by 1956 the trickle of releases rom the GULAG (Glavnoye Upravleniye ispravitelno-trudovikh AGerey Main Administration or Corrective-Labour Camps) since Stalin's death was increasing to a lood, bringing tales of the hell of the camps and uelling the determination of young writers and intellectuals to push or aster reorm. This led to agonies of conscience or one-time Party-liners, a famous example being Alexander Fadeyev, the ormer secretary of the Writers' Union and 2

Terras 1985, p. 469. 3 Johnson 1 965 , p. 83. 4 Full text i n Thomas P. Whitney (ed.), Khrushchev Speaks: Selected Speeches, Articles and Press Conferences, 1949-1961 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press ,

1 963), pp . 207-65 .

The USSR and Shostakovich in the 'Thaw '

27

signatory in that capacity to numerous expulsions and rrests of his ellow­ authors. Fadeyev committed suicide in May 1956 in a haze of alcoholism and guilt. The most famous victim of the renewed hard line at the end of the Second Thaw was Boris Pastenak. He had been emboldened by Krushchev's Secret Speech to tke his novel Doctor Zhivago rom his desk drawer and to seek its publication. This having been reused in Russia, he arranged or the book to reach the left-wing publishing h�use of Feltrinelli in Italy, thereby inaugurating the trend of tamizdat (literally 'over-there publication'). Colossal intenational success ollowed, and in 1958 the 68-year-old author was awarded the Nobel Prize or Literature. But he came under massive pressure within the Soviet Union, was unable to travel to collect the award and ound himself expelled rom the Writers' Union.5 He died of cancer and heart problems two years later. With the Third Thaw, launched by Krushchev's renewed de-Stalinization policies in October 1961 , the heyday of 'dissident' literature began. Such writings often circulated in private copies (i.e. samizdat 'self-publishing'). The most serious cases of such supposed 'anti-Soviet propaganda' were punishable by trial, intenal exile and/or incrceration in psychiatric hospitals, though the act that writers were no longer executed or sent to the GULAG was a measure of the change of climate since the Stalin era. Matters came to a head again in April 1962, when, encouraged by the signals of the Third Thaw, a group of progressive writers mounted a putsch against their conservative elders. For two years thereafter the outcome was uncertain. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, also emboldened by the Third Thaw, submitted his tale of lie in the prison camps, One Day in the Lfe of Ivan Denisovich, or publication. By a devious process it ound its way to Khrushchev, who personally ensured its approval. Solzhenitsyn's novel appeared in the jounal Noviy mir [New World] in November 1962. But that was the high-water mrk of liberalism in literature. Khrushchev himself was deposed in October 1964, to be succeeded by a triumvirate rom which Leonid Brezhnev eventually emerged as the igurehead. What Mikhail Gorbachev was later to dub the era of Stagnation (Zastoy) began, although strictly speking economic stagnation was mainly a eature of the later years of Brezhnev's rule, which lasted until November 1982. -

5 The novel was irst published in Russian in 1 988 . Oicial documents relating to the afair appeared in 200 1 ( 'A za mnoyu shum pogoni': Boris Pastenak i vlast' 1 956-1972gg. : Dokument' ['And behind me the Noise of the Hunt' : Boris Pastenak and Authority 195-1972: Documents] , Moscow: Rosspen) .

28

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

Soviet Music in the Thaw

Classic musical documents rom the First Thaw were Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, composed in 1953, and various journal articles by Aram Khachaturyan, Shostakovich and others , pleading or greater creative independence within the accepted constraints of Socialist Realism.6 It was at this time that vrious of Shostakovich's works composed in the last years 'of Stalin's rule, but consigned to the drawer since Andrey Zhdanov's 'anti­ ormalist' crackdown of early 1948 , were belatedly premiered: the Fifth Quartet in November 1953, the Fourth Quartet in the ollowing month, the song-cycle From Jewish Folk Poety in January 1955 and the First Violin Concerto in October 1955 . Works that had languished on the oicial blacklist were rehabilitated: the Ninth Symphony in 1955 , the Eighth in 1956.7 Yet the isolationism of the Stalin years had left the general community of composers with as much catching up to do as writers. In July 1955 , or instance, the precociously talented 22-year-old Rodion Shchedrin asserted that young Soviet musicians knew little about Mahler, Debussy and Ravel.8 As in the Stalin years, the ideological line or music was more blurred than or literature, and the consequences of non-conormism were less dramatic. The Second Composers' Congress in April 1957 was caught between the hopeul atmosphere of the Second Thaw and the spectre of a renewed clampdown. Shostkovich used some of its more inane proclamations as extra material or his satirical cantata Rayok [Peepshow] , which he probably began subsequent to the Zhdanov campaign of 1948; this was the one piece he deliberately composed 'or the drawer' , where it stayed until long after his death. But at least the Congress brought some cautious revision of some long­ standing dogmas, and the process of liberalism and catching-up with Westen trends moved airly steadily thereafter. Only days afterwards, the young Canadian pianist Glenn Gould created a sensation with a recital at the Moscow Conservatoire, including music by Berg, Weben and Krenek. Such visits had been ew and far between since the War, and such repertoire had gone 6 For some translated excerpts see Schwarz 1 983 , pp . 273-76. 7 The blaclist, drawn up under Prikaz (Order) No . 17 on 14 February 1948 by the Main Administration or the Control of Dramatic Spectacles and Repertoire within the Committee or Artistic Afairs of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, was irst published in Bobkina 2000, pp . 543-44; or a German translation see E . Kuhn 200 1 , pp . 34447 . It was declared illegal by Stalin himself on 1 6 March 1949, but in practice it remained largely in orce or several years after that. s Schwarz 1 983 , p. 286.

The USSR and Shostakovich in the 'Thaw '

29

practically unheard in Russian concert halls or 20 years. In March and April 1958 violinists and pianists rom many nations gathered or the irst Intenational Tchaikovsky Competition, with Shostakovich as chairman of the Jury; the glamorous Texan . Van Clibun was declared winner of the piano prize. On 27 January, a cultural exchange agreement had been signed between the United States and the Soviet Union, in accordance with which a group of American composers visited the Soviet Union later that year: a Soviet delegation, with Shostakovich at the ore, retuned the compliment in October-November 1959. Over the next ew years, orchestras, performers and musicologists also participated in the scheme, and the interchange culminated in the sensational return visit of Stravinsky to his homeland in September-October 1962.9 Similar exchanges took place involving British composers and performers. On 28 May 1958, close to the tenth anniversary of Zhdanov's campaign, a Party Resolution was adopted, partially admitting and retracting the 'errors' of 1948 .'0 By now, Westen music that had been virtually unavailable to Soviet composers since the mid-1930s was orcing its way through the narrow channels opened up by the Thaw. Many of the reshly rediscovered works of Hindemith, Bart6k and Stravinsky were aready well known to Shostakovich rom beore the Stalinist reeze and had long since been absorbed into his bloodstream. Other trends, particularly those emanating rom the new Westen avant-garde, seemingly appealed to him rather less, or not at all. He was able to experience some of them at irst hand when he visited the Third Warsaw Autumn Festival in September 1959, later privately proessing to ind things to admire in the work of Boulez, Xenakis and Stochausen," although his public pronouncements were more adverse. That apparent dichotomy would strike us as surprising only if we were to orget that Shostakovich and composers of his generation, aged 50 or above, had seen comparable easings of restrictions in the early 1920s and 1930s ollowed by renewed crackdowns; and their hopes or greater tolerance in the immediate post-war years had been dashed by Zhdanov's campaigns that had trgeted literature (1946), ilm (1947) and music (1948) . Public statements of interest in contemporary Westen art could easily have rebounded on those who risked making them in the uture if not at the time they were made. Furthermore, Shostakovich's own musical idiom was by now well ocused and deined. Small wonder, then, 9 Ibid . , pp . 352-56. For English translations of this resolution and of other important documents rom the Thaw years relating to music see Slonimsky 1 994, pp . 1067-72. 11 See Fay 2000, pp . 2 1 3 , 2 1 5 . 10

30

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

that he tried to ace both ways, even in his public statements, welcoming and encouraging the new reedoms in general terms, but wning against any rush to adopt new styles. It was in 1960, the year of the Eighth Qutet, that Grigory Shneyerson's book 0 muzice zhivoy i myortvoy [On Music Alive and Dead] appeared, ostensibly attempting to wn against interest in the Westen avant-garde, but inadvertently giving precious inormation in the orm of excerpts rom scores that were still enjoying only clandestine circulation. In a climate where oicial disapproval was now less lie-threatening than it once had been, younger Soviet composers were keen to take on board 'new' styles. Some, including certain of Shostakovich's own pupils and intimates (notably Karayev, Tishchenko and Weinberg) , were soon enthusiastically trying out 1 2-note techniques. The Shaporin pupil Andrey Volkonsky - an exotic igure because of his emigre past (he had studied piano with Dinu Lipatti and composition with Nadia Boulanger in the 1930s) - had already led the way with his 1957 piano piece Musica stricta, attracting stem oicial disapproval. Others, such as Nikolay Karetnikov and the Estonian Arva Pt, ollowed in the early 1960s.12 Although most Soviet works of this kind seem tentative and naive beside their Westen counterparts, they created a considerable stir in the USSR at the time. One upshot was that Shostkovich himself could no longer be considered to be at the cutting edge of musical progressivism, even in his stylistically retarded homeland. Rather he was in the middle of a road, one side of which had unexpectedly shifted (a position analogous to those of Britten and Tippett in the United Kingdom and Copland in the United States). In this respect, too, he had to reassess himself, to assert his independence as neither conservative nor avant-gardist, neither 'Father' nor 'Son' , but an individual.13 In practice that position became increasingly diicult to maintain, given Shostakovich's prominence in the institutional hierarchies of his country. In the eyes of most of the musical 'Sons' , he had already become an Establishment igure by 1960. From the new progressive wing, represented by 12 Karetnikov 's memors , in the orm of short stories , are among the most revealing of Russian musical lie in the Thaw years . See especially the cameo of conductor Alexander Gauk systematically enquring after Karetnikov's age , amily circum­ stances, health and well-being , then, having ound them all to be advantageous , asking why his music was so gloomy; and Shostakovich bringing his power to bear to secure the premiere of Karetnikov's ballet Vanina-Vanini in 1961 (Karetnikov 1 990, pp .

26-27 ' 41-46).

1 3 For Westen eye-witness views of the Soviet musical scene at the time , see Schwarz 1983 , pp . 353-7 1 and Werth 1 96 1 , pp . 218-24.

The USSR and Shostakovich in the 'Thaw '

31

the likes of Denisov and Ustvolskaya, there was private criticism of his musical and political positions. Works such as the Thirteenth Symphony of 1962 and the succession of bleak masterpieces _rom then until Shostakovich's death in 1975 , together with.his activity behind the scenes on behalf of many younger composers, would help him to re-establish his moral status with most representatives of the so-called ' Second Soviet avant-garde' (the irst lourished in the 1 920s), even though its members were increasingly distancing themselves rom his musical style. From the standpoint of 1960, however, when the Eighth Quartet was composed, Shostakovich's image as an independent - both politically and musically - was under serious threat. Shostakovich in the Thaw

During the Thaw years Shostakovich experienced a succession of bereavements and health problems. In December 1954 his irst wie, Nina Vasilevna Varzar, died suddenly of previously unsuspected cancer. They had been married or 22 years. She had been at his side through the worst trials of his proessional lie - in 1936 and 1948 - and she was the mother of his two children (Galina, bon 1936; Maxim, bon 1938). Although the mariage had initially been stormy - to the point of a brief divorce and remarriage - and both partners had continued to pursue other attachments, Nina's sudden death was a grievous blow. The ollowing November, Shostakovich's mother, who had been another bastion of suppot, died. Rising 50, the composer was left to end or himself and his two teenage children (though he did employ a secretry and domestic sta). In the sumer of 1956 he met and impulsively married Mrgrita Andreyevna Kaynova, a Komsomol activist in her early thirties. Though little is known of the emotional side of this marriage, it is clear that there was resistance to it rom his children. Shostakovich himself initiated a separation and divorce after three years. In 1962 he got maried or the third time, to the literary editor Irina Antonovna Supinskaya, who was to remain devoted to him through his illness­ dogged inal years. Her devotion continues to the present day in her conservation of the family archive and her sponsorship of a much-needed new edition of Shostakovich's Collected Works under the DSCH imprint. In the midst of these disorientating events in his personal lie, in 1958, shotly beore a trip to Paris, Shostakovich elt the irst signs of a debilitating muscular condition, maniested in weakness of his right hand. He was in diiculties at the time of recording his two piano concertos with Andre Cluytens and the Orchestre de Paris or EMI and was hospitalized or

32

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

treatment, which was unsuccessul.14 The diagnosis of a rare orm of polio would not be orthcoming until 1965 , 15 and it is contested to this day. Although Shostakovich's health had never been particularly robust, this was an alarming sign of decline or a man in his early ifties. Its impact both on his ability to write and on his pino playing is not hard to imagine. With no emotional support system at home, and with his health seemingly threatened, Shostakovich could hardly help but view the call to join the Party as a mortal blow to his hopes or creative reedom. The collapse of his second mrriage and the early signs of debilitation already cast in a special light the two major works of 1959-60 immediately preceding that call - the grittily determined Cello Concerto and the altenately playul, sorrowful and hysterical Seventh Quatet (dedicated to the memory of Nina Varzar and dominated by a poignant sense of absence). But beore those reassertive masterpieces, Shostakovich's work in the Thaw years presents a curious aspect: dominated on the one hand by the increasing signiicance of personal subtexts, usually sorrowul in tone and expressed via cryptographic signatures, and on the other hand by a kind of uneasy cheeriness. For ease of reerence Table 2.1 sets out the chronology of his works rom just beore the death of Stalin to just after the Eighth String Quartet. The DSCH Signature and Other References

Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony of 1953 is not merely an archetypal First Thaw period work but also a monument to his assertion of independence. It represents a retun to the genre, after a break of eight years during the period of renewed artistic repression after the War. His previous symphonies had appeared on average every two years, and it is a sobering thought that the hostility of the post-war ideological climate in Russia might have put paid to his career as a symphonist, just as the tribulations of 1936 had blighted his prospects as an opera composer. It was during the 1945-53 hiatus that the symphonic impulse began to transer to the string quartet, Nos. 3 , 4 and 5 appearing in 1946, 1949 and 1952 respectively. Shostakovich marked his retun to the symphony in two complementary ways. First and oremost, the Tenth is his most 'symphonic' symphony, in the Beethovenian sense of economy of material allied to complexity of process, 14 See Glman 200 1 , pp . 1 s Wilson 1 994, p. 392.

76-77 .

The USSR and Shostakovich in the 'Thaw ' Table 2.1

Shostakoich's Opp. 92-111

Opus no. Title

Date

Op. 92

1952 1952-53 Summer-October 1953 1953 1954 Autumn 1954 Spring 1955

Op. 93 Op. 94 Op. 95 Op. 96 Op. 97 Op. 98

33

String Quartet No. 5 Greek Songs

Symphony No. 10 Concertina or two pianos Song of the Great Rivers (ilm score)

Festive Overture The Gadly (ilm score) Five Romances on Verses of Yevgeny Dolmatovsy Op. 99 The First Echelon (ilm score) Op. 100 Spanish Songs

Op. 101 String Quartet No. 6 Op. 102 Piano Concerto No. 2 Variations on a Theme by Glinka (piano) Op. 103 Symphony No. 1 1 Op. 104 Cultivation (two choruses) Rayok [Peepshow]

Op. 105 Moscow, Cheyomushki (operetta) Op. 106 Khovanshchina (new orchestration of Musorgsky's opera) Op. 107 Cello Concerto No. 1 Op. 108 String Quartet No. 7 Op. 109 Satires (song-cycle) Op. 1 10 String Quartet No. 8 Novorossisk Chimes

Op. 1 1 1 Five Days, Five Nights (ilm score)

July-September 1954 1955-56 July-August 1956 August 1956 Completed February 1957 1957 Summer 1957 1957 Continued August 1957 (begun 1948 , inished 1960s) 1957-58 1958-59 July-September 1959 March 1960 Completed July 1960 12-14 July 1960 1960 July-August 1960

resulting in a musical drama of enormous power. This is especially true of the irst movement.16 At the same time the work is extraordinarily rich in subtext and cryptographic reerence, most notably in that it sees the irst overt appearance of the DSCH motif - the Eighth Quartet is the second such work. This motif comprises musical pitch representations of the composer's initials !6

-

See Fanning 1988 , pp . 6-38.

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

34

- the Cyrillic letters ;-m (pronounced roughly Day-Shah) in their German transliteration D-SCH and using the German musical letter-names, where S is the pronunciation or Es (German or E�) . and H is the German or the English B � . When Shostakovich uses this DSCH motif he almost always conines it to its narrowest possible pitch range, i.e. the diminished ourth rom B up to E�. This was already a highly characteristic element of his thematic lines, deriving rom olk music modes, in particular Jewish ones.17 The first appearance of' the motif in the Tenth Symphony is in the second theme of the third movement (Ex. 2 . 1 ) . Ex. 2.1

Symphony No. 10, third movement, second theme (Allegreto

J = 138)

It is not known when or how Shostkovich became aware of this 'monogram-theme' (as it is known to Russian commentators), though it may be no coincidence that its irst overt appearance in his music ollowed less than three years after his visit to the Bach bicentennial celebrations in Leipzig. Bach had amously introduced his musical monogram - mACB � - into the incomplete inal Contrapunctus of The At of Fugue, and the legend that this composition was cut of at precisely this point by his death lent extra pathos to its associations; numerous composers had already paid musical tribute to it. There are many other intriguing, obviously coincidental precedents or the DSCH motif, and not only in Shostakovich's music. The ollowing examples are even at the untransposed DSCH level and prominently embedded in the thematic material of their respective works. This is not to suggest that any of them provided Shostakovich with a model; rather that the motif is so comparatively common that the search or a single historical model is pointless, and also that its potency is not just symbolic but a matter of widely acknowledged musical adaptability. 11

See Braun 1 985 , passim.

The USSR and Shostakovich in the 'Thaw ' •

35

Clementi: Piano Sonata Op. 13 No. 6 in F minor, first movement (1785). Beethoven: 'Waldstein' Sonata, Op. 53 , last movement, bb. 14-16 (1803-4) . (This was a work the young Shost�ovich played in his graduation recital.1 8) Berg: Chamber Concerto, trumpet in preatory prases, highlighting part of the monogram or 'nolD SCH6nberg' (1923-25). Walton: Viola Concerto, first lovement climax, �1-] (1928-29).

•

• •

Several of Shostkovich's own works beore the Tenth Symphony contain 'near-miss' versions of the signature - most obviously the Violin Concerto No. 1 (second movement and cadenza) - but only in the Symphony does it appear unequivocally. Thereafter it eatures only in the Eighth Qurtet (1960) and in the Preface to the Complete Edition of my Works and a Brief Relection on this Preface (1966) .19 In the Symphony and the Quartet the signature has maniold musical implications. In the ormer it appears in the contexts of G major, F major, C major (all in the third movement) and E major (in the inale). In all these cases there is friction between the notes of the DSCH motif and the surrounding harmony. And variety is enhanced by the shifting rhythmic accentuations: in the irst two instances the accent alls strongly on the irst note, in the next more weakly on the second note, and inally decisively on the last note. By contrast, in the Preface to the Complete Edition the tonal context is D minor, and the emphasis is on the irst note of the motif. Here Shostakovich allows himself some whimsical play with the initials RSFSR (Russian State Federation of Socialist Republics) and SSSR (Soyuz [i.e. Union] of Soviet Socialist Republics) , using the note-name D or R, since Re is the French solege designation or D. In the Eighth Quartet the DSCH motif appears in its 'home' key of C minor, or the only time in Shostakovich's output, reinorced in the outer movements by the resolution of the concluding H ( B�) to the tonic C. This is thereore both the most 'solid' of Shostkovich's musical signings-in and the most 'closed' presentation, in that there is no built-in riction between the motif and its harmonic context. That in tun means that it tkes an act of compositional will to create tension and movement, whereas in the other cases mentioned the clashes between the motif and its context do the job automatically. =

18

Fay 2000, p. 2 1 .

1 9 According to one ingenious theory, the DSCH signature also accounts o r the irregular succession of home keys running through all Shostakovich's 15 quartets - see

Strachan 1998 . -

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

36

The signature quality of the DSCH motto in the Tenth Symphony may go urther than its pitches. In the third movement several of its appearances are initiated by the gesture of the repeated-note, beginning-accented anapest (short-short-long) rhythm. The Russian musicologist Arkady Klimovitsky, taking up an inormal suggestion rom his colleague Aleksey Vulfson, has proposed that this highly characteristic patten may in itself also be a kind of signature, since it enshrines the speech-rhythm and accentuation of the composer's pet-name, Mityenka (Dmitry becomes the familiar Mitya, as his riends and colleagues called him, and the more childlike Mityenka, which is how his mother would have addressed him).20 It should be noted that this interpretation applies to the anapest motif only in its repeated-note guise, and more prticularly when it is beginning-accented - as in Example 2.1 and, even more dramatically, as in the ourth movement of the Eighth Quartet (see Ex. 3 .21 below) . Nor is the DSCH motif the only cryptic signature in the Tenth Symphony: the mysterious, statuesque hon theme in the third movement encodes the first name of Shostkovich's Azerbaijani composition pupil Elmira Nazirova, who was his muse and conidante at the time.21 Such musical cryptography may be traced a little urther back, to the Fith Quartet of 1952. This work stands as a irst high point in Shostakovich's increasingly dramatic conception of the string quartet genre, its quasi­ symphonic density and breadth of construction representing his most ambitious exploration of the medium . to that date. Thereafter his Quartets would retreat into more cryptic, conessional, concentrated statement, until the Ninth (1964) achieved a new synthesis. At the same time the Fifth Quartet's smuggling in of 'secret' quoted material initiates a line of thought that would culminate in No. 8 . Its initial musical impulses include a near-miss (interverted) DSCH motif (Ex. 2.2). Among Shostakovich's relatively ew ast opening movements, the Fifth Quartet's Allegro non troppo bids fair or the accolade of being the inest. He retuns here to the sonata-orm premise - complete with exposition repeat - of his Second and Third Quartets, but both expands and intensiies it, giving the lie to his own (mock?) self-accusations, voiced 1 8 months later apropos the Tenth Symphony, to the efect that he could not compose such movements.22 He assembles his themes rom the nexus of motifs presented at the outset, each one densely packed with potential; and he broadens the horizons of the exposition section by an ingenious process of metric modulation, giving the 20

21

22

Klimovitsky 1 996, p. 265 . See Kravets 2000 . See Fanning 1 9 8 8 , p. 77 .

37

The USSR and Shostakovich in the 'Thaw ' Ex. 2.2 l

Allegro non troppo

I

"Pl " I T

V

:

Quartet No. 5, opening

p, 1

"

p

j

=

1 00

'c

D S

n�

HI

"

r

I

"

" J 1.l

-

..

r "r

n�

, "J 1.l

-

impression that one layer of the music has slowed while the other remains unchanged. As the development drives towards an intense climax, very much along the lines of the corresponding point in the Second Quartet, a new theme is suddenly introduced, in counterpoint against the irst subject (at �). This builds to a pitch of hysteria as vn. 1 ascends to heights almost unparalleled in the standard quartet literature (to a�"") . This new theme will retun in melancholy, restrained guise in the coda, and again at the point of retransition in the inale, where it descends into the emale and then the male vocal register, at which point it is conronted with multiple-stopped repeated-note anapest pizzicato chords (Ex. 2.3 , cf. Ex. 2.1). Standing outside the con­ ventional spaces of the musical design, these passages involving the 'new' theme are a vital actor in the exceptional length of the movements containing them. That in tun helps to explain why the overall layout of the work is in three rather than our movements (they are almost equivalent in length to the ive movements of Quartet No. 3). At the same time these passages cry out or programmatic explanation, simply because of their structural impropriety (a new theme at the point of retransition) . This is easy to supply, since the theme in question is a direct quotation rom the Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano (1 949) by Shostakovich's pupil Galina Ustvolskaya. She had studied with him between Ex. 2.3

Quartet No. 5, third movement, retransition

j=63] ]

[Allegretto

Ustvolskaya Trio theme

ffpizz. 1

'Mityenka'1 M

M

M

M

M

M

38

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

1938 and 1947 , and at some point he had conceived a strong afection or her. Two years after the Fifth Quartet, ollowing the death of his irst wie, he actually proposed marriage, but Ustvolskaya tuned him down. W,en her irst husband died in 1960 and Shostakovich's second marriage had broken up, he again proposed a liaison and was again rebufed.23 Further details of the Shostakovich-Ustvolskaya relationship hard to come by, largely because she, still alive at the time of writing, is an intensely private person. She claims never to have been close to him, either personally or as a composer, and to have destroyed all his letters to her.24 But it is extremely tempting to read into Shostakovich's presentation of her theme in the Fifth Quartet something of his true eelings or her. In the first movement this would explain the hysterical tone and the stratospheric, 'out-of-reach' registration of the retransition section. In the inale the descent of the theme rom the heights brings it, as it were, within the composer's grasp, and the characteristic anapest motif conronts her, as it were, with his presence: passionately assertive, yet unable to orm a union. Such allusions, whether serious or comic, overt or secret, and irrespective of their possible programmatic signiication, had been a feature of Shostakovich's work at least since the Aphorisms, Op. 13 of 1927 (No. 7, the 'Dance of Death' , eatures the Dies irae chant). They continued in an open and jokey way with the First Piano Concerto of 193 1-32, and in more cryptic fashion with the Fourth, Fifth and Tenth Symphonies,25 reaching a peak with the Eighth Quartet. In addition quotation and self-quotation abound in his work or stage and screen, doubtless as a means of facilitating rapid production, and his song cycle, Satires, Op. 109, composed just weeks beore the Eighth Quartet, is shot through with reerences (as re Sasha Chony's texts which they set). Something of this kind may well have been an erly musical impulse or the Eighth Quartet. Shostkovich's draft score includes a single-line sketch or the end of the second movement (the retun of the Piano Trio quotation) leading into the beginning of the third (the DSCH motif up to the appearance of the main theme) - see Plate 2.26 Not only is the juxtaposition of quotation and monogram characteristic of the Quartet as a whole, but this page shows e.

23 See Khentova 1 993 , pp. 1 5 3 , 1 5 5 , 1 6 1 . 24 Ustvolskaya 1 996, p . 175 . 25 See Fanning 200 1 b , pp . 1 20-3 1 , Taruskin 1 995 , pp . 3945 and Kravets 2000 , pp . 1 60-64. 26 Reproduced in Dvomichenko 2000 (DVDROM and CDROM, pages on Eighth

String Quartet) .

he USSR and Shostakovich in the 'haw '

Plate 2

39

From draft score. From Dvornichenko 2000. Reproduced by kind permission of Irina Shostakovich

the heading 5 Dney, 5 Nochy [5 Days, 5 Nights] crossed out. It is plausible, thereore, that Shostakovich may have originally envisaged this sketch as part of his ilm score - perhaps as a means of kick-starting his sluggish invention by choosing music_he had composed at roughly the time the ilm was set (the

40

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

ilm score itself would contain several prominent quotations) - but then realized that it contained the germ of a string quartet instead. However, until the rest of the draft score is either published or released or inspection this guess cannot be veriied. The sketch may equally be part of a continuous draft or the entire Quatet, all of whose pages may have been marked up in advance with the same heading. Be that as it may, it is surely hardly coincidental that the Eighth Quartet is rich in cinematographic continuity techniques, such as slow motion, ast orward, lashback, dissolves and jump-cuts.21 For urther comment on this draft page see p. 92 below. The Sixth Qurtet (1956) begins in a vein of straightorward tuneulness that had also been a stock eature of Shostkovich's ilm scores, such as The Fall of Berlin (1949).28 It retuns not only to the 'classical' our-movement mould of Quartets 1 , 2 and 4, but also to the prelapsarian innocence of No. 1 . There are all sorts of ready-made explanations or this apparent regession. It could simply be that Shostkovich had given ull vent to the tragic-symphonic manner in his preceding our quatets (and in Symphonies 4-10) and was ready or a change. It could be that the paciic tone was meant to be somehow consistent with the Soviet Union's oicial intenational stance as a peace­ loving nation in the early Cold War years and that the hypocrisy of that stance is relected in the sense of uneasy watchulness that increasingly makes itself elt beneath the Sixth Quartet's apparently benign surface. It could even be that since Shostakovich composed the piece during his honeymoon with his second wie (whose attitude to this un-honeymoonly activity is not recorded), its wanly smiling quality relects his nervous wish to believe in the possibility of domestic bliss. None of these hypotheses can be proved or disproved. But the problem of tone in the Sixth Quartet will not go away. A classic case of Shostakovichian deceptive innocence is the whimsical cadence that rounds of each movement. This has baled even commentators generally sympathetic to Shostakovich's Quartets.29 The calculated naivety of the gesture is incontestable. Less obvious are its structural and cryptographic unctions. The peculiar yawning bass line echoes the irst chromatic deviation in the work, lending weight to the cadence's role in tying up loose ends. Just as noteworthy is the act that the tense high point in the yawn, beore the inal resolution, is a verticalized 27 For discussion of similar techniques in Shostakovich 's Fifteenth Quartet, see Burke 1 999 . 2 8 See Bobrovsky 1 96 1 , pp. 1 79-82. But equally it evokes the second of Mahler ' s Des Knaben Wunderhon songs, 'Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?' . 29 For example Raaben 1 963 , p . 1 5 1 .

The USSR and Shostakovich in the 'Thaw ' Ex. 2.4

41

Quartet No. 6, irst movement, conclusion

]l3

[Allegreto \ .., > :

J = 112)

� Ppoco espress. .� � P poco espress.

...

""

Pu. - p-

appearance of DSCH, the only such instance, so far as I am aware, in Shostakovich's entire output (Ex. 2.4). It would be possible to dismiss this cryptic version of the DSCH signature as non-intentional, were it not or its anomalous prominence - it is reiterated at the end of each movement, as if to reinorce its quasi-leitmotivic quality and or its cronological proximity to other works that include unmistakable DSCH signatures (i.e. the Tenth Symphony and Eighth Quartet) . The most tempting 'explanation' , of course, is that this cadence betokens Shostakovich's shadowy presence, just as the anapest rhythm may do in the inale of the Fifth Quartet; and that the cadence's familiar yet estranged quality conirms his wish, yet at the same time his inability, to partake wholeheartedly of jollity and innocence (in itself a powerful cultural trope, familiar rom the inale of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, or instance, and rom Thomas Mann's 1903 novella Tonio Kroger) .30 The Seventh Qurtet was inished just our months beore No. 8 , in March 1960. Shostakovich had begun work on it the previous summer, and it crries a dedication to the memory of his irst wie, Nina Varzar, whose 50th birthday would have fallen in May 1959. It is cast in three movements, but these are as exceptionally compact as the three of No. 5 are exceptionally extended making this the shortest of all Shostakovich's 15 quartets, at around 12 minutes. As in No. 4, the overall structure is strongly end-weighted, the irst two movements each having a provisional feel and the inale reworking aspects of both of them, along with transormations of its own initial ugue­ scherzo. All the elements are reconciled in the melancholy muted waltz that concludes the work. There is no sign of the DSCH signature here, unless we count the prominent link between the second and third movements (a .•

30 Without noticing the signature or going into any explanations , the frst academic commentator on the work also took the cadence to be 'a kind of "author ' s" last word' (Rabinovich 1 957 , p . · 17) .

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

42

transposed and permutated orm of the moti) . However, in the irst movement the repeated-note anapest igure, eatured in the inale of No. 5 and, as already noted, a clear Shostakovich ingerprint and possibly even an actual signature, is a prime mover (bracketed notes on .. 2.5 , cf. Exx. 2.1 and 2.3 above). The possible autobiographical element in the Seventh Quartet, hinted at in its dedication and readable in the requent 'absence' of instruments rom the quartet texture, is reinorced by what seem to be allusions to works associated with times of special intensity during the years of Shostakovich's irst marriage:

First movement, second theme (�-): compre rhythm and articula­ tion with First Piano Concerto, first movement at l (symbolizing gay abandon during the irst year of marriage?). Second movement, main theme < l ' 1) : compare with Fifth Symphony, irst movement, irst subject at . see Ex. 3.4b below (Shostakovich's rehabilitation in 1937). Second movement, second theme (��): C shrp 'latter-than­ minor' mode, cf. passacaglia rom The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District (see Ex. 3 .23b below) (Shostakovich's public disgrace in 1936). First and third movements (concluding bars): F sharp major tonality, cf. love music rom Lady Macbeth (e.g. 1 314 1- 13 1 6 1) (the opera was dedicated to Nina Varzar).

•

•

•

•

Admittedly none of these instances is as musically literal as the self-quotations in the Eighth Qurtet. Nevertheless, tken together they apper to continue the thread of self-reerentiality that distinguishes Qutets Nos. 5-8 rom Nos. 14. The Tenth Symphony was the culmination of Shostakovich's mid-peiod symphonies and the last of its kind. The Eleventh ('The Year 1905 ' , composed 1956-57) and Twelfth ('The Year 1917' , composed 1959-61) are epic-historic progr atic rescoes; the Thrteenth ('Babiy Yar' , 1962) is a ive-movement cantata or bass solo, male chorus and orchestra, setting the 'civic' verses of mm

Ex. 2.5

Quartet No. 7, opening Allegretto J =

...

120

1 @ �1 1 �rr u11 �n 11 �,1 n ;i _ �

.-.,

-1

-1

The USSR and Shostakovich in the 'Thaw '

43

Yevgeny Yevtushenko; the Fourteenth (1969) is an 1 1-movement song-cycle or soprano and bass soloists, strings and percussion, setting verses about death and oppression; and the Fifteenth (1971) revives the our-movement instrumental model but places it in an enigmatic perspectiye. The Eleyenth Symphony is another vital link to the Eighth String Quartet, by virtue of its use of quotation, which is r more extensive than in any of Shostkovich's previous works and also far more literal and programmatically explicit. The quoted material consists of revolutionary songs, carefully selected so as to illustrate and comment on the · 1905 'Bloody Sunday' massacre, in which hundreds of citizens taing a peaceful petition to the Tsar's Winter Palace were gunned down by panicked oicers. This was one of the iconic events in the pre-history of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Yet the symphonic processes built on this oundation draw out a more universal theme of resistance to tyranny, rendering the symphony in the view of many just as valid a 'commentary' on contemporary events such as the Hungrian uprising of 1956, irrespective of the composer's unveriiable 'intentions' . In the interests of symphonic continuity, Shostakovich selected songs that conform to one of two motif groups - either transposed permutations and variants of DSCH or the 1-5--5 melodic shape that is a common eature of his work rom the 24 Preludes and Fugues of 1950-5 1 on. In this concen with integrating quoted material, the Eleventh Symphony clerly falls into the line rom the Fifth Quatet to the Eighth. If the reerences in Quatet No. 5 are entirely personal in nature and those in the Eleventh Symphony entirely social, those in the Eighth Quartet combine both categories. In every instance it is a matter or debate to what extent musical processes support the quoted material or vice versa. The only other major orchestral work between the Tenth Symphony and the Eighth String Quartet is the First Cello Concerto of 1959. This is notable or the dense motivic working of its irst movement and or the enormous extension of the cadenza into a movement in itself - another powerful indicator of individual presence. In both these respects the Cello Conceto picks up rom the First Violin Concerto of 1947-48 , and as in that work it weaves a semantically charged, semi-secret thematic allusion into the musical abric. In the Violin Concerto this was provided by the outbursts of klezmer­ type music in the Scherzo, after � and � - pat of a long line of Shostakovich's reerences to the Jewish idiom, rom his Second Piano Trio to his Thirteenth Symphony.31 In the Cello Concerto it is a snatch rom Stalin's avourite Georgian olk-tune, 'Suliko' .32 A

A

A

A

31 See Braun 1 985 , J. Kuhn 200 1 . 32 Wilson 1 994 , pp: 477-79.

44

Shostakovich: String Quatet No. 8

Striving or Cheerfulness

These major works apart, Shostakovich's music rom the yers of the First and Second Thaws presents a curious aspect. It is dominated by a disconceting striving or cheerfulness, so much so that. on casual acquaintance the works concerned may appear to be uncharacteristically shallow and slackly composed. In part this may well be the continuation of Shostakovich's coping strategy in the immediate post-war years - to present a ront of loyalty and conormity by altenating 'real' works such as · the First Violin Concerto and the Fourth and Fifth Qurtets with blatant sops to authority such as the oratorio The Song of the Forests, hailing Stalin's ill-ated reaforestation plans. The phenomenon of 'two Shostkoviches' had been identiied well beore that time, both in Russia and in the West;33 but in the 1950s it was sometimes hard to see the join. In particular it was not unusual or the a�ade of cheerfulness to crack, resulting willy-nilly in a commentary on 'cheerfulness' rather than its straightforward presentation. But as ever this is more a matter of interpretation than of veriiable intention. Of all the works in this category, the Festive Overture (1954) is the most unambiguous in its celebratory blatancy. The contrast it presents with the inale of the Tenth Symphony is instructive. While the character of their main themes may be very similar, the Symphony locates cheerfulness in inimical surroundings whereas the Overture places it on a victor's podium, combining the Russian-holiday spirit of Glinka's · Ruslan and Lyudmila Overture or Kabalevsky's to his Colas Breugnon ( 193-38) with the intenational-upbeat, ilm-derived idiom of Walton's Spiire Prelude and Fugue (1942). In the same spirit is the 'National Holiday' movement rom The Gadly (1955), a ilm score which also eatures one of Shostakovich's most candid lyrical inspirations: the 'Romance' , depicting the ilm's young Italian revolutionary hero. The overture and the ilm score are pieces d'occasion, but they survive in the repertoire thanks to their consummate craftsmanship. Shostakovich's other ilm scores rom this period, as well as the Dolmatovsky Romances, the Spanish Songs and the two choruses known as Cultivation (see Table 2.1 above), are similarly written or immediate assimilation and enjoyment. The deceptive cheeriness of the Sixth Quartet has already been discussed. Apparently more straightorward is the Second Piano Concerto (1957). Like the even less ambitious two-piano Concertina (1953), this was written or the composer's son Maxim, then aged 1 8 and approaching his graduation rom 33 See Dzerzhinsky 1 936, p. 3 3 , Evans 1 943 .

The USSR and Shostakovich in the 'Thaw '

45

Moscow's Central Music School. It is accordingly composed in the well­ established Soviet 'youthul' style (as ound in the concertos of, or example, Kabalevsky and Shostakovich's pupil German Gal'nin; 1922-66); which is not to deny the considerable depth of eeling in its slow mVement. Soon after the Second Piano Concerto, Shostakovich embarked on his one and only operetta, Moscow, Cheyomushki, a gentle send-up of lie on one of the capital city's brand-new overspill housing estates. This score contains two or three of his catchiest tunes, including tle recycled Song of the Counterplan (the hit song rom his 1932 ilm score, The Counterplan) , which are worked to death in an over-long, under-plotted but intermittently engaging show. Whatever else may be said of Moscow, Cheyomushki - and it is possible to read any degree of satire into Shostakovich's depiction of corrupt authority igures - it comes across primarily as another attempt to write upbeat, cheerul music in a broadly accessible style. Notable by their almost total absence rom all these works are the shades of humour that made Shostkovich's music rom either side of 1930 so distinctive: brittleness, zaniness, rudeness, malice and so on. Against this background of apparent striving or cheerfulness, the Cello Concerto stands out as the irst work Shostakovich had composed or six years in a complex and personal idiom. It marks a sudden retun to the tightly organized complexity of the First Violin Concerto and of the Tenth Symphony - in other words, nothing less than Shostakovich's re-engagement with his own direct tone(s) of voice. How then can we account or the intervening phase of wan, well-behaved cheerfulness, in which Shostakovich seems to be not entirely himself, and in which he seems to lack the will to assert his musical independence? His letters and the reminiscences of those who knew him give ew clues. There remain several plausible explanations, none of which can be either veriied or ruled out: that well beore the business of joining .the Communist Party, Shostakovich was more or less willingly paying his dues to Socialist Realism, perhaps as thank-oferings or the rehabilitation of previously banned works, perhaps to put credit into the account rom which he would draw to assure acceptance or his uture 'real' works; or that the death of Stalin having brought the promise of a release rom the grip of ear in which the country had been held or nearly two decades, audiences now had diferent needs; or that Shostakovich wanted a break rom the exhausting pressures of embodying painul experiences in music and of living up to his reputation as chronicler of his times. It may be that he simply relished the challenge of working with lighter materials; or that ollowing the death of Prokoiev, on 5 March 1953, the same day as Stalin, he now elt moved to emulate something ··of the older composer's essentially upbeat nature. Of

46

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

course, these explanations need not be mutually exclusive, and there is room or endless debate over their individual and relative merits. The act remains that, whatever we conclude about his motivation, much of the music Shostakovich composed in the 1950s seems out of character. That is certainly part of its enduring ascination, but it was· a phase that was unlikely to last. And it gives the reassertive tone of the Eighth Qurtet and its predecessor a ' particular edge. It seems, thereore, that the broad contexts within which the Eighth Quartet appeared give rise · to as much conjecture and uncertainty as do the more immediate circumstances of its composition. And relating all this to the notes on the page is still more hazardous. Nevertheless the hypothesis I propose to carry orwrd into the close analytical study that ollows is that when he came to compose the Eighth String Quartet Shostkovich was or a variety of personal and cultural reasons in urgent need of redeining and reasserting himself as an artist with an independent voice. Hence the Quartet ollows the lead of its immediate predecessors, the First Cello Concerto and Seventh Qurtet, in its reinscription of his signature (in more than one sense) on the mainstream tradition of instrumental music. In each of these works, moods of lamentation and deiance are expressed with a concentration not found in his music since the Tenth Symphony. Like the Eleventh Symphony, the Eighth Quartet weaves a tapestry of quotations across all its movements; this time, however, the reerences are predominantly to Shostkovich's own oeuvre. The revolutionary song quoted in the Eighth Quartet's ourth movement provides the obvious parallel with the Eleventh Symphony, and it is ollowed by a near­ quotation rom the slow movement of the same work - see Example 3 .25 below.34 As in the Cello Concerto, which Shostkovich quotes in his third movement, the Eighth Quartet abandons the · deceptively relaxed tone of his works of the mid- 1950s and deploys pithy motifs, single-mindedly elaborated. Even more than the Seventh Quartet, and continuing a line begun in No. 5 , the Eighth allows the autobiographical urge to dictate much of the raw material. But that material is thoroughly digested in the creative process and will ultimately yield to ree musical unolding in the last movement. In other 34 It should be noted, however, that contrary to some published views, the Eleventh Symphony does not contain the song amuchen yazholoy nevoley quoted in the ourth movement of the Eighth Quartet; nor, despite certain motivic similarities , is this song merely a variant of the much better-known ' zhertvoyu pali [You Fell as a Victim] see Khentova 1 986, vol . 2, p . 357 , Yakubov 199 1 , Grike 2002, p. 56, Wehrmeyer 2002, p. 227 .

The USSR and Shostakovich in the 'Thaw '

47

words, all the autobiographical and social aspects examined so far may be vital to an understanding of where the music comes rom; but if we want to know where it goes to .- how it penetrates the inner lives of those who her it - then it is to the processes of artistic shaping that we have to tun.

Chapter 3

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

Shostakovich had composed his irst seven quartets at an average rate of one every three years, with a minimum gap of two years. Thereore, whatever projects might have been expected of him in the second half of 1960, another quartet, ollowing the composition of No. 7 in March, would have been about the least likely. Nor is there any precedent or his producing a work of such sophistication within the space of tree days (according to Shostakovich's claim in his letter to Glikman; see Appendix B, 1), quick worker though he undoubtedly was.' These facts in themselves suggest an extraordinary degree of motivation. And clearly such rapidity of construction was acilitated by Shostakovich's use of prefabricated musical units - principally the quotations and allusions to be described below - and of a number of broad, characteristic procedures established in his previous quartets: above all the 'provisional' irst movement, which avoids ully developed sonata structure and thematic 'argument' , throwing structural weight towards later movements (Quartets 1 , 4 and, especially, 7), the sequence of two Scherzos ollowed by a lamenting slow movement (Quartet 3 , cf. also Symphony 8) and a inale which recasts thematic material and chracter rom earlier movements (Quartets 3 to 7). Layout of Movements

One of the chief diferences between the Eighth Quartet and its predecessors 1 Lebedinsky reports that the Festive Overture was tossed of in two days (see Wilson 1 994 , p . 265), but this is a much thinner work. In general, the notion of Shostakovich composing straight into ull score without preliminary drafts has become somewhat exaggerated in the retelling, as an examination of the materials published in Dvonichenko 2000 reveals . Whether his draft score for the Quartet was made beore or during the period of the main composition is unknown , though as noted above (p . 39) it appears on manuscript paper headed 5 Days, 5 Nights , which at least suggests the likelihood that it may date rom the time of his Dresden visit.

49

50

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

lies in the prolieration of idiosyncratic eatures, at both the structural and the thematic level. This in itself leads one to seek explanation in some kind of programmatic background (though, as I have indicated, the conclusion drawn in the present study will be that this background is invoked only in order to be transcended). The work is laid out in ive movements, but without the density of thematic woring of Shostakovich's other ive-movement quartets - Nos. 3 and 9. All ive movements are in the minor mode; with only intermittent glimpses of major-mode coloration, and the ramework of three Largos reinorces the impression of darkness and expressive weight: C minor 1 . Largo - attacca 2. Allego molto - attacca , G shrp minor G minor 3 . Allegretto - attacca C sharp minor 4. Largo - attacca C minor 5 . Largo The irst movement is preludial in character, and its most striking idiosyncrasy is the ailure of the archaic-seeming ugato with which it opens to become a ully-ledged ugue. Instead of sustained contrapuntal woring­ out it gives place first to a self-quotation, then to a more conessional tone expressed in quasi-vocal solos over long pedal-points. These solo sections are designated Ariosos in the analysis that ollows. As will be seen, the various quotations and allusions that displace the ugato provide a ready-made programmatic rationale or this curious design. But Shostakovich will also derive structural consequences rom the 'non-ugue' that go deeper than any programme - be it personal, political or otherwise. The Allegro molto is a more straightforward, perpetual-motion Scherzo­ substitute movement. It intrudes on the meditations of the irst movement with all the violence of a cinematographic lashback (as if rom peacetime to war), and, like the wartime works which it quotes and to which it alludes, it conveys the inexorability of some terrifying extenal orce, mingled with passionate protest. Another Scherzo-substitute movement ollows. In character the Allegretto is a ghostly dance, more diverse in material than the Allegro molto, and more open to nuances of interpretation, both in commentary and in performance. The two Scherzo movements are similar in overall design. Both are doubly incomplete, in that they brek of beore the end of their second Trio sections and lack a inal balancing retun of the Scherzo. This structural incompletion reinorces the sense of issues to be dealt with in the remainder of the work. The Largo ourth movement mirrors the design of the irst in its three long-

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

51

drawn-out, lamenting Ariosos. But these are ramed in a very diferent manner, with violent, antagonistic outbursts that are gesturally a kind of delayed aftershock rom the Allegro molto and thematically a distorted version of material rom the Trio section of the Allegretto. As in the second movement, the violence may be read as a mixture of outward oppression and inwrd protest. At the heart of this movement (�-j) lies the Quartet's first extended quotation of music not by the composer himself: the revolutionary song whose appearance has drawn adverse critical comment (see p. 15 above). Apart rom its emotional immediacy this quotation serves two overriding purposes: to reinforce a semi-secret programmatic 'message' - the composer's identiication with all those who are, or have been, literally or metaphorically 'Tormented by Harsh Captivity' - and to conirm that the level of this message is shifting rom the personal to the universal. The inal Largo probes more deeply into the experience of the irst, at last providing a complete version of the previously 'ailed' ugue and virtually eliminating the element of self-reerentiality previously expressed by self­ quotation. Notwithstanding the absence of any kind of consoling coda, the musically self-suicient fugal design of the last movement succeeds in elevating sorrow to the realm of the spirit. This is a mark of the Eighth Quartet's philosophical ambitions; and the artistic precision of its details sets the seal on its greatness. Quotations, Allusions and Ainities

The topic of quotation in music is extraordinarily complex (or recent overviews, see Tamawska-Kaczorowska 1998 and Burkholder 2001). In this area neither the nature of the composer's intentions nor that of the listener's understanding is easily deined - nor indeed are the borderlines between quotation, allusion and coincidental similarity. Nevertheless, not in dispute is Shostakovich's conscious deployment of quotations in his Eighth Quartet, rom his own works unless otherwise indicated (see Table 3.1). These uncontested quotations may be supplemented by allusions and ainities that are less explicit and whose status is unconirmed. The list in Table 3 .2 derives in part rom Shostakovich's letter to Isaak Dav:dovich Glikman (DDS-IDG; see Appendix B , 1), but also rom ideas in common circulation (uncredited) , rom my own conjecture (DF) and rom suggestions by other authors (speciically credited). All will be discussed in the ollowing analysis. Again, all reerences are to Shostakovich's own works, unless otherwise stated.

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

52 Table 3.1

Quartet No. 8: quotations

Location

Source

First movement

]3-11

Symphony No . 1 , Op 10 ( 1 924-25) , opening bars

]5-11

Symphony No . 1 , opening bars

Second movement

m-l

..

Piano Trio No . 2 , Op . 67 ( 1 944) , inale , �

Piano Trio No . 2 , inale

Third movement

� 1-7 J

•4

Cello Concerto No . 1 , Op . 107 ( 1 9 5 9 ) , opening bars

Cello Concerto No . 1 , opening

Fourth movement

· �- @

•

@ - ll

Anonymous revolutionary song: amuchen yazholoy nevoley [Tormented by Harsh Captivity] (see Ex . 3 .24b and Appendix A below)

The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Act 4, 14791-14801

Fifth movement

]s-1

Symphony No . l , opening bars

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

53

Comment

Transposed down a semitone, notated in doubled note-values (original quavers become crotchets) . Viola and cello at ] '-6 are not part of the quotation; otherwise notes and rhythms quoted exactly. Tempo slowed rom the Symphony 's J = 1 52 to the Quartet's J = 63; this and the heavier articulation signiicantly darken the ' original skittish character. As previous quotation but with new sequential continuation added.

Notated in quadrupled note-values (original crotchets become semibreves) . Lower parts rendered as arpeggios rather than pizzicato chords; otherwise notes and rhythms quoted exactly. Tempo increased rom > = 14 to J 240 . Articulation removes paired sluring of short notes (though these slurs are reinstated in some performances) , modifying the original dance-lke character so as to emphasize oppression and protest. As previous quotation but rescored, with change of harmony at � and with an extra repeated bar at the end; inal six bars of original omitted. =

Transposed rom E flat major to B lat major; theme placed in higher register; otherwise pitch and rhythm unchanged. Tempo virtually unchanged (Concerto: J 1 1 6; Quartet: J 1 20) . Character virtually unchanged. As beore, but truncated and with new derived continuation. =

=

There is no ixed original musical text or key or this song , but it is always notated in 2/4 or 4/4. Shostakovich has changed the metre, the rhythm and in the last line the melodic content, possibly because he was quoting the song rom memory, more likely. because he wished to adapt it to his already established 3/4 metre. Nevertheless the essential lamenting character is unchanged. Renotated in tripled note-values (original crotchets now dotted minims) but with up-beats slightly shorter. Last phrase repeated (_'�); otherwise pitch and rhythm : quoted exactly. Tempo slowed rom original J 88 to J 46 . Character modiied rom sorowul eageness to heartbroken lament. =

=

As in first movement, but only in vn . 1 and truncated to three bars .

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

54 Table 3.2

Eighth Quartet: allusions and ainities

Location

J •-11

First movement

�-] (vn. l) ) 56 etc.

]-�.��.�-§. Second movement

esp. ]1] �7-i

�-!. etc.

Third movement

]-�

�9-16

�1 -2 etc.

Fourth movement

Fifth movement

Original source Symphony No. 10, closing bars (timpani) (Mamnov 1960) Beethoven: String Qurtets Opp. 1 3 1 and 132, first movements, openings Bach: Fugue in C sharp minor, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One, No. 4, opening Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6, first movement, second subject (DDS-IDG) Glazunov: Violin Concerto, presumably second theme (Yakubov 199 1 ) King Lear, Op. 58a, 'Scene i n the Steppe' , bb. 27-29 (Eric Roseberry: CD booklet essay to ' Shostakovich Theatre Music' , Chandos CHAN9907 [200 1]) Mahler: Symphony No. 4, third movement, -' � · � -5 (DF) Symphony No. 5 , irst movement, irst subject (DDS-IDG) Symphony No. 8, third movement

Quartet No. 7, third movement, l '' - � (DF) Quartet No. 2, irst movement, �- § Symphony No. 8 , inale, � -g (DF) Cello Concerto No. l , second movement, opening (DF) Saint-Saens, Danse macabre , bb . 33-40 (DF)

Quartet No. 3 , ifth movement, irst two bars (DF) Dies iae

head-motif

Beethoven: String Quartet Op. 135, preface to inale, bb. 5-12, rhythmic response to 'Muss es sein?' motif (Kramer 2002, pp. 237-38) Wagner: Gotterdimmerung , Act 3, scene 2, Siegried's Funeral Music (ibid.) The Young Guard, 'Death of the Heroes ' , Symphony No. 1 1 , third movement, 5 j -m •

�·-�· (cello) , etc., esp. The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Act l , �2-', Act 2l-l (viola, then vn. 2) 2, 7-52051, Act 4, l464l_10 (Dolzhansky 1 965 , p. 5 1 )

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

55

Nature of allusion

DSCH motif in bass register, slower and quieter, as if drained of deiance. Fugato or close imitative texture, paired semitone motifs , structural placing . As above, plus 4iminished-ourth boundary of ugue subject. Characteristic rhythm repeated our times - third and ourth occurences also shadow contour of original (DF, Grenard 200 1 , pp. 109-10). Characteristic motif bracketed on Ex . 3 .3 below (an extremely tenuous connection) . Intervallic outline (tenuous) .

Intervals (major mode) and rhythm. String texture; transposed, but rhythm and pitch intact or first our notes .

Perpetuum mobile texture, with violently accented interjections; l]-� especially close to opening of symphony (low-register viola) . Semitone clashes , chromatically rising , as springboard or new section.

Same rhythm and key, similar harmonic progression (allusion conirmed by draft score - see Plate 2 , p . 39 above) . Cello in high register, same notes. Cello section , same tempo and dynamic , similar phrase structure initially. Cello theme, wandering quaver accompaniment in violins. Same notes and rhythms , slightly slower tempo .

Same rhythm, texture .

Aggressive repeated-note chords (tenuous) . Same notes , similar rhythm, transposed up a semitone. Same intervals , similar rhythm. Same intervals and .rhythm .

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

56

In many instances these quotations and allusions acquire an intensiied character in the Quartet - sometimes they are slower, more painul and more poignant than in the original, sometimes aster and more violent. In the irst three movements the main quotations orm a chronological sequence of major works through Shostakovich's career, in the manner of a series of lashbacks gradually bringing the listener up to date. In the ourth movement that sequence is broken, and the quotations and allusions suggest rather a network of associations around the topic of imprisonment, thereby broadening the terms of reerence rom autobiography towards more universal sufering, albeit with the DSCH motif in the last our bars - as has requently been suggested - conveying Shostakovich's self-identification as tormented prisoner.2 The Lady Macbeth reerences are pivotal in this respect, since at the time of composition Shostakovich was looking orward to the opera's rehabilitation in a revised orm. The ugal inale is the only movement lacking a deinite self-quotation, although it does allude strongly to a motif prominent rom the Siberian prison-camp act of Lady Macbeth,3 thereby continuing reerence to the topic of incarceration so prominent in the previous movement. In this way as the work progresses quotation shrinks and musical thought intensiies, reinorcing the impression, as already suggested, of a gradual elevation of tone rom autobiography through communality to the transcendent. In the broadest terms the network of quotations in the Eighth Quartet is a gateway to the world of Shostakovich's late: quartets and indeed to the work of ollowing generations of Russian composers, obsessed with symbolism and musical time-travel.4 First Movement:

Lago

For only the second time in his instrumental output, Shostakovich begins with an entirely slow movement. As with the only signiicant precedent - the Largo of the Sixth Symphony - the elegiac opening movement of the Eighth Quartet conorms to no conventional ormal patten, though broadly speaking the design is an incomplete arch. There are six sections, punctuated by appearances of the DSCH motif. The character of each section is clearly 2 Taruskin 1 997 , p. 495 ; Lebedinsky 1 990 , p . 264; 1 998, p. 476 .

3 For the association of this motif with the topic of ' sleeplessness' see Fanning 1 995 , pp . 146-49. 4 See Alred Schnittke's comments translated in Appendix B, 10 below, and their elaboration in lvashkin 1 995 .

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

57

deined: the DSCH ugato; a quotation rom the First Symphony; three riosos (the last being a more complex variant of the irst); and a retun of the First Symphony quotation (see Fig. 3.1). The non-retun of the ugato is responsible for the incompleteness of the arch f9rm. Of the DSCH punctuations the first and last (rom 2] and 1) are relatively weak; in both cases the end of the motif is at the same time the point of initiation of the First Symphony quotation. The remaining punctuations (rom 5� , l and ]) are strong, with additional bars of static harmony being inserted beore the beginning of each Arioso. The Arioso s themselves eature long pedal-points, trowing into relief the conessional quality of . the song-like solos. Overall, then, there is the vestige of a luid ABA om, with the Ariosos (orming section B) clearly set of both rom one another and rom the more contrapuntal opening phase (the ugato and First Symphony quotation) and leading back via the less pedal-dominated Arioso 3 to the counterpoint of the concluding phase (quotation but no ugato). The irst movement could perhaps have been titled Introduction (as is the similarly subdued irst movement of the Eleventh Quartet), or Elegy (as in the frst movement of the Fifteenth Quartet, which also has a ugal opening), or even Prelude (as is the similrly sectionalized opening movement of the Piano Quintet). But in the end it is better left untitled, since its most impotant structural eature - crucial to the design of the work as a whole - is that it does not tum into the kind of movement it initially promises to be, namely a ugue; and no title could succinctly encapsulate that unction.

]

Al

A2

Fugato

Bl

B2

ll

Bla

Arioso I

Arioso 2

Arioso 3

Tchaikovsky Sixth Symphony allusion

Shostakovich Elaboration Fifth of Arioso 1 Symphony allusion

�

on DSCH

First Symphony quotation

Entries in manner of stretto rather than ugal exposition

Pun with Pedal-point DSCH motif, especially in b. 17 (vn . 1 and 2)

Fig. 3.1

First movement: overview

Pedal-point

J

�

A2

First Symphony quotation

Inverted pedal- Quotation points , texture extended becoming sequentially more luid and contrapuntal

Fugato (l-]) 58

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

The opening notes of any musical masterpiece create afrisson (or at least they should do), as we embrk on a proound artistic jouney and wonder how the performers will negotiate it. Even if it is our irst hearing and we do not know what kind of experience is in store, the frisson may reach us via the players, who do know. In the case of Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, there ate additional aspects to the frisson, especially when we re-experience the work, having pondered its signiicance in the meantime. Ol rehearing, the opening our-note motif touches of memories of the range of emotion it will pass through in the rest of the Quartet. We may know that this is the composer's personal motto, and we may sense that we are about to witness a baring of the soul behind his amously inscrutable visage. Cetainly one listener at least heard the connection with the Tenth Symphony, where the motif is thundered out by the timpani in the closing pages.5 And, distant though that relationship may seem, it is hard to hear echoes of that work, cited by the composer himself in his letter to Glikman, other than in this monogram. If this connection is intentional, it is evident that the deiance heard in the symphony has been replaced by an altogether darker character. At the same time we may pick up on the afinity with Bach's C sharp minor Fugue rom the First Book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, or, particularly in view of the qurtet medium, with the openings of Beethoven's Op. 1 3 1 and, more distantly, his Op. 1 32, which is to say with two of the most proound masterpieces in the repertoire (Ex. 3.1). At any rate, expectations of this order are raised, and the level of Shostakovich's craftsmanship will ultimately not disappoint. The cello completes the DSCH ugue subject with a cadential rise to the tonic, via an anticipatory crotchet that gives the ugato its rhythmic lift. Overlapping with this completion, the viola enters with a 'real' answer at the upper ifth, creating mild dissonances that prevent the cello's melodic cadence rom eeling too conclusive. In principle this is textbook ugal procedure, even if the speciic dissonances are more permissive than Baroque or Classical practice would allow, and it will remain a consistent eature of the remainder of the fugato. Each line orms a melodically self-suicient entity, moving on stepwise after the completion of the subject, while the harmony avoids giving the melodic cadences any consonant harmonic reinorcement. In fact the only ull consonance in the 1 1 bars of Shostkovich's ugato comes in the irst half of bar 5 . The other verticals consist of sevenths, ninths, six-ours, and passing5 See Minov 1 960 , Appendix B , 6 below.

The Eighth Quatet: An Analysis Ex. 3.1

(a) Quartet No. 8, irst movement, opening, compared ih (b) Bach: Fugue in C sharp minor, The Wel-Tempered Cavier, Book One, opening; (c) Beethoven: String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op. 131, opening; (d) Beethoven: String Quartet in A minor, Op. · 132, opening Largo d

a)

59

=

63

dim. im.

. dim.

� b)

� c)

@ 1 r �r 1�-

�

� \

#

Assai sostenuto

p

p __ "F

I

:

J IJ

Adagio ma non troppo e motto espressivo

ll

j�I

J

--

#f J

J

f

J J IJ J J I

...1

"./I

�I

== -

=

-

note and neighbour-note chords (both diatonic and chromatic), subtly arranged so as to preserve vriety and low. Other aspects of the ugato are more idiosyncratic, however. If this was going to be a 'proper' ugal exposition, we would expect each instrument's statement of the··subject to run its course beore the next entry. Instead the

60

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

viola and both violins enter prematurely, as if in stretto. The vn. 1 entry is a ourth above the original level, rather than a ifth above, as textbook procedure lays down. As if to correct matters, the viola then reminds u's of the 'proper' entry-point - on the dominant - by restating its version of the subject, marked sola and poco espress. , presumably so as to ensure audibility and expressive weight, and perhaps also in order to prepare or the more personalized tone of voice soon to come in the movement's central Ariosos. Nowhere is there room or the breathing space of a codetta, and after the second viola entry the ugato runs out of steam. This, then, is no scholastic exercise. If it had been - if this was supposed to be an orthodox ugal exposition - then we would have to say that Shostkovich got it wrong. But he was the veteran of a cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues (Op. 87) and of many more ugues and ugatos, both published and unpublished, dating back to his student years. He knew perfectly well how to do things by the book. It could perhaps be said that the unorthodoxies of his fugato point to more archaic sources - in the textures of late Renaissance motets and fantasias. And there are at least two examples of Baroque ugal expositions with a subdominant entry - the Lass ihn kreuzigen ('Let Him be cruciied') chorus rom Bach's St Matthew Passion, and the same C sharp minor ugue as shown in Example 3 .1 - which even eature the characteristic diminished-outh outline. There are even rare instances of 'stretto exposition' in the Baroque era, where entries overlap in their initial presentation, as in the 'Gratias agimus tibi' and 'Dona nobis pacem' rom Bach's B minor Mass and the C sharp major Fugue rom Book wo of his 48. But these are exceptions. In any case Shostakovich's aim was surely not historical emulation of any kind, but rather expressive immediacy combined with large-scale stuctural strategy. For all the subtlety and expressive beauty of its details, the larger purpose of the first movement is to ail: to ail to be a ully worked-out ugue. And it is this failure that will be the duty of the last movement to repair. First Symphony Quotation ]-�)

As the opening ugato peters out, it seems to be setting up a conventional approach-to-dominant cadence in the tonic (bb. 8-10) . But the cello's rise to A� interrupts this potential cadence, leaving the ugato open and incomplete the equivalent of what grammarians call aposiopesis, or in French, points de suspension ( . . . ). Into this uncertain uture steps the DSCH motif, now on the two violins and cello in octaves. The cello cannot, of course, complete the motif at this pitch level, as it could do if it were an octave higher; but the registral expansion is

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

61

crucial to the efect of tentatively edging orwards, as if with arms outstretched in the dark. This texture - tree instruments in octaves against a held inner pedal, and all slow, even notes leading to a inal accent - plants a seed or the outbursts of the ourth movement (see Ex. 3 .21 below) . . Taking advantage of its inability to hit a low B ' , the cello supports the end of the DSCH motif with E�. To this the viola responds by warming its inner pedal g to g#, creating a momentarily bright E major triad beore all three lower prts descend chromatically. Shostakovich further lags this moment of exceptional triadic euphony yet distance rom the tonic by the sfpp marking in the first violin. The uller signiicance of E� - both as a melodic inlection and as a structural dissonance against the tonic C minor - will unold at various points in the rest of the Quartet (seel ,l, ],1,11,]8,11-]9, l8,

�) .

1-2 ,

As the three lower parts agree to fall away rom the E major chord at ] it is vn. 1 's held b' that becomes dissonant, and its delayed resolution to c" (if we remember the ugue subject) takes us into the quotation rom the First Symphony, the last two notes of the ugue subject punning with the irst two of the quotation. The pun is also apparent in vn. 2, marked solo and poco espress. at ] 3, which seems to be embarking on yet another ugal entry of DSCH but which instead runs smoothly into what was originally the bassoon's counterpoint to the trumpet theme in the Symphony (Ex. 3 .2) . There are two urther links between the DSCH ugato and the First Symphony quotation. First, the quotation itself has an element of mock­ scholastic, two-part counterpoint, as might typically be ound in the texturally reduced episode of a fugue. Secondly, the upper voice in this counterpoint (vn. 1 , J 1-8 ) expresses the interval patten of the DSCH motif (irst three notes) and, on its sequential repeat, the actual notes (]9-10: 'DSC' in vn. 1 , 'H' in the viola). Nevertheless the integration of the First Symphony quotation into the Quatet entails a signiicant expressive distortion. The theme is now more than twice as slow as in the original, and a good deal heavier in articulation. The introductory section of the First Symphony was itself a skit on Stravinsky's Petrusha - one of Shostakovich's avourite scores - and it continued as a lexicon of Shostakovich's avourite Stravinskian cartoon-ish devices. By the time of the Eighth Quartet it seems that Stravinsky's cheeky/sad puppet has gained in humanity, but at the expense of his grin. Ariosos (JJ- 1)

Continuing the pun between DSCH and the quotation, the punctuating DSCH

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

62 Ex. 3.2 a)

(a) Quartet No. 8, irst movement, quotation from Symphony No. 1 ; (b) Symphony No. 1, irst movement, opening

[Largo J

]2

[p]

[p]

=

63)

pp]

motif now appears with unequivocally cadential orce (5-2]) . Thus far DSCH has served as a ugal initiation and as a unison lik; now it unctions as a chorale-like termination. The passage between the end of the DSCH cadence and the central Ariosos of the first movement e-1�) may apper to do nothing more than tread water. Yet its gently articulated dactylic rhythm (long-short­ short) in viola and cello will prove surprisingly generative, ultimately leading to the main idea of the second movement (see Ex. 3.6 below).6 For the duration of Arioso 1 (�-h the tree lower parts are immobile, like an organ pedal-point against which a priestly intonation can unold. Through the entire central phase of the movement, this drone support will be progressively relaxed: in Arioso 2 (]-]) vn. 2 will be released and given a counter-melody based on the faster dactylic rhythm evolved in the breathing space between the two Ariosos @5-8) . In addition the tonic pedal-point is lited temporrily to the dominant 4-1�). In Arioso 3 (J-l) the pedal-point 6 A note of caution is needed here, since some publications, including the original 1 96 1 Muzgiz [State Music Publishers] score and parts , show additional ties in viola and cello . Yet even here an element of dactylic articulation remains , thanks to the descent of vn. 1 at ' � .

will be shifted to the violins and gradually eliminated, until by ] an almost complete equality of parts is restored, liking smoothly to the retun of the contrapuntal texture of the First Symphony quotation rom ] 5• This textural process constitutes a gradual reconstruction: rom the personal, conessional tone of the voice-and-drone Arioso 1 , in progressive stages back towards the more abstract philosophizing of the contrapuntal ugato. Yet that fugato itself will not actually rematerialize until it inds its place within the ully ledged fugue of the last movement. The 'vocal' line of rio so 1 , in vn ' 1 , is a paraphrase of the second subject of the irst movement of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, itself one of the great conessional masterpieces of the symphonic repertoire. This similarity might not have attracted notice had Shostakovich himself not drawn attention to it (see Appendix B , 1).7 It is most apparent in the rhythm of seven evenly spaced up-beats. In addition the themes share a characteristic melodic cadential motif (marked with brackets on Ex. 3.3) that in Shostakovich's Quartet will germinate in later movements, and the overall character of both is a succession of elaborated sighs. Finally, Shostakovich crafts his melodic lines so as gradually to approach the down/up contour of the Tchaikovsky model. Arioso 1 falls into in ive strains - of 3 , 3 , 5 , 5 (i.e. 1+4) and 3 bars separated by 'breaths' . The irst strain is melodically eatureless, being merely an outgrowth of the descending seitones rom the DSCH ugato and the Frst Symphony quotation and orming an extended up-beat to a conventional two­ note sighing cadence. This sigh becomes all-important. The second strain reverses the chromatic descent of the irst and, as it approaches the sigh, introduces the all-important melodic twist bracketed on Example 3 .3a. The thrd modiies this twist as an added initiation to another downward line that now begins to approximate the contour of Tchakovsky's theme. The ourth elaborates the sigh beore adapting the contour of the third strain to shadow the Tchakovsky still more closely. The ifth strain (rom 2]) consists only of a ragment, leading into a counterpoint to the DSCH motif that punctuates Ariosos 1 and 2. In harmonic terms virtually nothing happens in rioso 1. But the melodic lines conceal an echo of the mini-Urlinie of section A and a meditation on its neighbour-note motifs, derived rom the bass line beore the appearance of the First Symphony quotation (see Ex. 3 .7 below) . In addition there several points of longer-term structural signiicance. The f�" to e�" sigh at �6 picks up The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

63

e

7 Valentina Kholopova notes further similarities in rioso l to the passage at 1 in Shostakovich 's Cantata The Execution of Stepan Razin ( 1 964) but these are very tenuous (holopova 1 997 , p. 1 6 1 ) .

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

64 Ex. 3.3

a)

(a) First movement, Arioso 1; (b) Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6, irst movement, second subject

J 63)

,Frpr l ¥Jl1u)l s ir l if PF I P" Fl -

[cf.°2, t7, Exx. 3 . 1 4, 3 .20]

&?1, J1r l " n1JJ1 & Pz nJ1 �@l @l nJJIJ I J l 'JJJl&J J

�

)

[Largo

�

=

I

s

s

.._ I

1 �1

�

.,

.

�

ritenuto -._

P=f

-

P= / -p

==

the already well-lagged anomalous pitch-class E�. here registering, in highly characteristic ashion or Shostkovich, not as a consonant major third against the tonic pedal but as an B appoggiatura to the minor third. The modal lattenings of second, ourth, and even eighth degrees in Arioso 1 are not only afectively signiicant in themselves; they also point ahead to the tonal drift of the. last movement (see bass lines in Ex. 3 .30 below) . The breathing space beore Arioso 2 (j5-l) eatures a diminution of the dactylic rhythm that preceded Arioso 1 and grafts on the sigh motif (j56). In this way a new motif is generated that will underpin Arioso 2 in its entirety and eventually orm the crucial link between the irst two movements (see Ex. 3 .6

below).8 Used as a counterpoint to Arioso 2, it will bring the neighbour-note igures of Arioso 1 into more active play. The characteristic modal degrees of Arioso 2 are the same as those of Arioso 1 , but in some cases reinterpreted. D� in vn . 2 behaves as it did there, as an appoggiatura to C (the resolution sometimes being delayed); but � is now notated, and heard, as Eq: not only does it no longer fall as an appoggiatura to E�. but E� actually rises to i (vn. 2 )111). n now behaves equally decisively as Bq , in the imperfect cadence link that closely shadows the DSCH motif (vn. 1 -i). Throughout rioso 2, Shostakovich is scrupulous in his notation of enharmonics. For instance, his Eq becomes H once again at �6, where it consorts with D�. reminding us of its altenative status as a dark diminished ourth. The 'vocal' vn. 1 part of rioso 2 is more regular than its counterpart in Arioso 1 , by virtue of its three eight-bar strains. It alludes to the Fifth Symphony (main theme of the irst movement) both in intervallic content and in rhythm (slow-moving dactyls). And this allusion is woven into the abric of the Quartet by virtue of the stepwise descending contour (echoing the irst strain of Arioso 1 , but now expanded rom semitones to whole tones) and through the emphasis placed on the concluding sigh. When the second strain (rom )9) tuns into an inversion of the stepwise descent at 5� , based around the notes of DSCH, the sighs are taken over into the vn. 2 counterpoint (Ex. 3 .4) . Crucially, the concluding DSCH chorale cadence at � , echoing that at the end of the First Symphony quotation (5-2]) . is now rhythmically in augmentation and reharmonized so as to emphasize the chromatic descent (vn. 2 and viola) and the role of H (viola). The link to ioso 3 (2]-]2) echoes the dactylic rhythm that underpinned Arioso 2, both in its original orm and in diminution. But the cello gently shifts rom down to A , in preparation or a reworking of Aioso 1 , whose melody the cello now paraphrases . Up to this point the rioso sections have been dominated by vn. l ; now the espressivo marking encourages the cello to stand in relief against an accompaniment that is considerably more mobile than beore. The obvious expressive unction of Arioso 3 is to provide a more intense reworking of rioso 1 . But it also serves, as already noted, to lead back smoothly rom the predominantly solo-and-accompaniment texture of riosos The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

65

.

c

8 If a historical precedent is sought, how about the bass igure either side of the E major outburst in the slow movement of Mahler 's Fouth Symphony (-' J, J5 )? Shostakovich's reversal of mode and dynamic converts a utopian vision into a dystopian one .

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

66 Ex. 3.4 a)

(a) First movement, Arioso 2; (b) Symphony No. 5, irst movement, irst subject

m

(Largo

p

\

J

, Pj

f .,-

:

\ ..

:

=

63)

l "'I

,f

_1

I

" r rr �

Li

T t ..-.

" .,r , Y r l.,j I

1�1

, ...

r Dr

�

r' r

l .._1

-

lj l �:::i r ,f 7

- ·p

� rr ,f

1 ._

-

1 -,1

-;

1

rr

�

-

] ed espress. cresc.

p dim.

p dim. ­

� b)

1 and 2 to the counterpoint of the First Symphony quotation. Lke Arioso 1 , Arioso 3 runs to ive strains, this time of 3 , 3 , 2 , 5 and 4 brs. The frst strain and the· irst half of the second are identical with those of rioso 1 in intervallic shape, the conclusion of the second strain being slightly adapted or humonic reasons; the third strain is cut of in mid-stream at D and redirected. Trough these three strains the accompanying voices have gradually been regaining

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

67

individuality, throwing of the torpor of previous pedal-points and helping to generate an increasing expressive urgency, always building on the neighbour­ note igure. From D the ourth and ifth strains eature calmer collaboratio.ns between the cello and the upper parts (the ormer str�in becoming briely diatonic beore retuning to the chromatic nom and 'almost losing sight of the Tchaikovsky rhythm); the vn. 1 line rom D harks back to Arioso 2, as if urther to mark Arioso 3 as a kind of development section in miniature. Harmonically rioso 3 is the most mobile section of the movement, though none of its non-tonic chords enjoys catential conirmation. It passes through A minor and F sharp minor triads beore sliding back to C major at l, then touches again on A minor and F sharp minor beore sliding chromatically towards the C inor DSCH that ushers in the inal section of the movement. What gives these progressions direction and coherence is the stepwise rise and fall of vn. 1 , harmonically supported at points by a rising and alling arpeggio and peaking at the crucial non-diatonic Eq that has already eatured so strongly in the movement. One way of understanding this harmonic drift is shown in Example 3 .5. The overriding unction of Arioso 3 is thereore to suggest arch scheme to the middle of the movement, by reworking rioso 1 and hence completing a rame or Arioso 2. Yet by orging a link back to the counterpoint of the First Symphony quotation, Arioso 3 at the same time alls into the line of increasing textural complexity rom Ariosos 1 and 2. This is a most delicately balanced compositional process. n

Retun of the First Symphony quotation (I-l)

The retun to the First Symphony quotation is spliced onto the DSCH punctuation exactly as beore (]- I , cf. 2]-5�) , save or details of dynamic and a subtle onamentation of the viola line at 13 as if in response to the prominent neighbour-note igures earlier in the movement. The two-part contrapuntal extension is now redirected and elongated (]1- ) , emphasizing its ramework of chromatic falling thirds and thereby leading naturally into the chromatically enriched chorale harmonization of DSCH at 1Q3-7 (which is borrowed rom the version heard previously at 1). The dactylic punctuation and neighbour-note melodic igure retun in vn. 2. This is clearly a gesture of closure. But it was also heard at the initiation of the second Arioso, and it thereore leaves open the possibility of yet another Arioso phase, at least until the dramatic Beethovenian ('Coriolan'-lke) crescendo on its last, incomplete appearance. The place of this motif

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

68 Ex. 3.5 a)

]

(a) First movement, Arioso 3; (b) Arioso 3, analytical reduction

[Largo

J = 63]

' dim.

� b)

in the evolution rom irst to second movements is shown in Example 3 .6. First movement: summay

The germinal idea of the movement - musically as well as programmatically - is clearly the DSCH motif. All the thematic raw material, consisting principally of neighbour-notes and stepwise ascents and descents , is assembled rom its two semitone steps. Not only that, but the main themes of all our succeeding movements (not just the DSCH signature) are motivically preigured (see Exx. 3 .3 above, 3 .6 below). The First Symphony quotation is introduced punningly, the last note of DSCH becoming the irst of the quotation. The allusions in Ariosos 1 and 2 to Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony and to Shostkovich's own Fifth are related to one another and to DSCH by

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis Ex. 3.6

69

Evolution of dactylic motif from irst to second movement

3] IJ

·g g I J g

�

� i' •11 r �

]

=

J J l1v�

Allegro molto

o

'

120

_/

J J

their stepwise alling contours (semitonal and whole-tone, respectively) . Arioso 3 is a more ree-ranging development of Arioso 1 ; its accompanying voices continue the evolution of Ariosos 1 and 2 in such a way as to lead back to the contrapuntal texture of the First Symphony quotation. The orm of the movement as a whole thereore has a modiied rch shape - Al A2 B 1 B2 B la A2. But the non-retun of the opening ugato (Al) means that its idio­ syncrasies remain uncorrected; they will be picked up later in the work, speciically in the inale. Shostakovich's choice of his First and Fifth Symphonies or quotation and allusion suggests that one thread running through the work may be a chronological retrospect over his career - the First Symphony heralded his dramatic breakthrough to fame as a 19-year-old student; the Fifth secured his rehabilitation in 1937 after the public disgrace of the previous year. Harmonically the movement is largely static. But every tiniest detail is expressively telling, thanks to its place within the overall scheme. To understand the harmonic ramework that gives logic and tree-dimensionality to tonal counterpoint it is necessary to 'read' the actual verticals (often dissonant, so as to impart subtle shades of musical motion) as substitutes' or hypothetical consonant ones, which are present in the actual score only as 'diagonals' . This process leads to the middleground analysis presented in Example 3 .7 , which reduces the ugue subject to its concluding leading-note­ to-tonic motion and the ugato as a whole to an unresolved imperfect cadence. In similar fashion the two-part counterpoint of the Frst Symphony quotation may be collapsed into harmonic parallel thirds in order to explain its part in the broader low. Given that the fugato, the Symphony quotation, and Ariosos 1 and 2 are all solidly rooted in C major/minor, it is not dificult to represent

70

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

the movement as a succession of miniature Ursatz progressions, with the major-third melodic inlection of Arioso 2 standing out as a modal mixture to be 'composed out' in Arioso 3 (with considerable subtlety, as Ex. 3 .5 above suggests). The miniature �1-i Urlinie that eatures in the pre-rioso stages of this movement is initiated by salient E�s in vn. 1 -1 ]; ]5-1) , led down through the d of the viola (3�) to the tonic that both concludes this section and opens the central Arioso phase. Though the irst two riosos are hrmonically uneventful, they do bring to the surface the neighbour-note motion of the lead-in to the First Symphony quotation. The third Arioso then picks up and prolongs the anomalous E� of Arioso 2, as shown in Example 3 .5b above. The concluding section of the movement connects the harmonic parallel thirds of the quotation extension to the enriched orm of the DSCH cadence, providing suicient closure to balance the all-important absence of a ugato restatement. However, the last word is given to the neighbour-note motif, in a potently incomplete guise. Second Movement: Alegro

moto

The opening Largo is one of remarkably ew slow irst movements in the mainstream quartet literature after Beethoven's Op. 1 3 1 and Bart6k's No. 1 .9 The efect of its slowness, as with the B eethoven quartet, is as if to suppress and delay the expected activity of a traditional irst movement - rather in the manner of an extended introduction - so that this may burst through in the orm of hyperactivity in the second movement.w The Allegro molto second movement, with its perpetual-motion textures, brutalistic accompaniment and relentless fortissimo dynamic (only varied rom � to ]), epitomizes one of Shostakovich's most characteristic modes of expression: the deiant, wr-lke, substitute-Scherzo (or other examples see Symphonies 8, 10, 1 1 , 12, Quartets 3 , 9, 10, 12). Its material is so dominated by the dactylic rhythm of the movement's opening theme and by the intervallic content of the DSCH motif that virtually any bars taken at random would be suficient to identify the 9 Coincidentally Charles lves's Quartet No . 1 of 1 898-1 902 also begins with slowish (Andante con moto) ugal writing on a pre-existing theme: in this case the missionary hymn 'From Greenland's Icy Mountains ' . 10 Compare with Beethoven 's ' Moonlight' Sonata, Op . 27 No . 1 , where the suppression of activity in the opening movement is particularly intense and if anything reinorced by the nonchalant Scherzo , demanding release in the presto inale .

Ex. 3.7

First movement: analytical reduction

Middleground I

I FUGATO I l

/ AIO02 1

� "

I DSCH I First Symphony Quotat1on" ' 3 3 (2)( 1 ) " =

Middleground 2

?-= �1,1,

b

Background�

dz �= � lz

L '

�

I DsCH I

'

A

I DsCHI

31

(l)

j jI -

r

(V)

r (I)

( I) �

3

I r I

•"• I q° f A

-q3 -

•

,

-

I

A

(l)(!)

pj I 3

.

L (V)(I) -

q����3_ ������������ --�

r

2l

I

\"A

(V)

d)

I DSCHI I DSCH I First Symphony Quotation

q

r (!)

A

-q3-

r

.. (!)

I

PT A

-3

L I

_3

P: r

2

I

j J

r r ..J. -

V

-

I·

.

JJ

[ r

v

I

I

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

72

composer. In act this is precisely the kind of obsessiveness likely to infuriate anyone allergic to Shostkovich. The clearest model or this character and texture is the third movement of the Eighth Symphony (Ex. 3 .8). That movement is in its tum an outgrowth of the mechanical-Scherzo episode in the. inale of the Fourth Symphony < l167l- lt91j ) . In Shostakovich's string quartets, however, the only clear

1 F • J u : 1 r w 1 : J l1 ! 1 t l 4 � J J J I J l 1 J , I I 1 !; : t :; : 1 1 r �� 1 1 r r� : r• : ; : � J J . � � ] 1!;� l1,J l1,J • l 'rl

Ex. 3.8 a)

(a) Second movement, opening; (b) Symphony No. 8, third movement Allegro motto

o

=

121

1

1

J .J

� 1 1 �� 1 ' * J: 1 � ; � t ! I I!: �t t !!t I I I l��;r��l1�1,�14+ 0-�?1;, :tj �JI �· :t·j �J 12

� :-b)

J

ff

Allegro non troppo J

b. 1 7

f mare issimo f .

=

152

ff

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

73

precedent is the third movement of No. 3 , also in G# minor. Lke that movement, the Eighth Quartet's Allegro molto pushes the quartet medium to the limit, indeed to the point where it invites the extra power of the ull string orchestra (which is only delivered; however, at the expense of dramatic ocus and of the essential expressive qualities of struggle and violated intimacy). The ormal basis of the movement is an incomplete double Scherzo and Trio, whose sections become progressively more. concentrated, until the retun of the Trio section is cut of in mid-lig�t and the last balancing appearance of the Scherzo is omitted altogether (see Fig. 3 .2). This double incompletion leaves a strong sense of uninished business when the third movement bursts in.11 As in the first movement, several of the main sections are punctuated by the DSCH motif, which is also embedded in the motivic material and which triggers the main theme of section D in the Trio phase. The texture essentially consists of two streams - hyperactive thematic lines underpinned by mono­ lithic chords or ostinati. Occasionally one or the other stream may branch, orming a subsidiary melodic (but almost never rhythmic) counterpoint. Schezo 1: Al

(l]- �)

The intenal orm of the Al section is articulated by the recurrences of the opening theme at ] , J9, ] and ]], making progressively expanding sub­ sections of 8 , 17 and 50 bars. The impelling orce or the movement is the dactylic motif evolved rom the punctuating bars in the irst movement (see Ex. 3 .6 above) , whose original perfect-ourth outline is now compressed to a minor third. The tempo, according to the metronome mrking, is almost precisely our times as ast as the wrgo. And Shostkovich reinorces the proportional relationship visually by notating the second movement in 2/2, so that the dactylic motif reads exactly the same as in the irst movement - minim plus two crotchets - despite its perceived double diminution. As the marking of semibreve 120 suggests, the real metre, as in the mercurial Scherzo of Borodin's Second Symphony, is 1/1 (if in doubt, imagine a conductor attempting to beat two in a bar!). It would be possible to notate the movement in halved or quartered note-values, with a time signature alternating between 2/4 and 3/4 or 2/4 and 5/8 , but =

11 Several comentators , beginning with Ginzburg 1 96 1 , p. 33 1 ( 1 97 1 , p. 1 97), suggest a quasi-sonata om design, with a brief development rom � to � - The point is arguable, but it does not afect the sense of incompletion at the end of the movement.

ll

li

Al

Bl

�

Cl

�

D1

A2

�

B2

]

D2

�

C2

Trio 2

Scherzo 2

Trio I

Scherzo I

ll

(variant)

(quasiDSCH variant o f A)

(quotation)

(DSCH variant of C l )

Accumulates

Accumulates

High point released

Accumulates

Resumes

Accumulates

Accumulates

High point maintained

f

ff

JJmolto espress.

f espress.

f]

f]

ffp cresc

f cresc. motto espress.

Fig. 3.2

Second movement: overview

The Eighth Quatet: An Analysis

75

Shostakovich's chosen notation efectively communicates the intensity he requires, since musicians instinctively give more weight to 'longer' note­ values (as Beethoven too knew well - see numerous of his ast Scherzos and inales) . The spacing of the aggressive accompanying chords echoes that in the third movement of the Eighth Symphony (see Ex. 3 .8 above). It produces a gruf, percussive attack that Shostakovich could have lened rom the orchestral textures of Stravinsky and Musorgsky, or equally rom the piano writing of ' Liszt. In the opening eight bars the intervallic compression of the dactylic motif combines with its rhythmic diminution and with the lattened second degree against the G sharp minor tonic to create an instant impression of violence and constraint. The irst violinist experiences this constraint most orcibly, since the instruction to play on the G string or 12 brs not only results in a hoarse timbre but also compels the ingers of the left hand to bunch together even more tightly than if the chromatic passages were played on the D and A strings. The sense of constriction sets the tone or the Scherzo as a whole. It craves release, which in a sense will be granted in the movement's Trio section (rom §), with its wider intervals and modally sharpened degrees. At the same time the cromatic writing at the opening of the movement maintains a link with the DSCH motif, since the extension of the dactylic motif by semitones above and below re-establishes the characteristic diminished-ourth outline (see also vn. 1 at 5-2] and several linking passages to ollow) . In all these ways the opening eight bars ashion a template or the movement. And they do so in one urther important respect: continuations, such as at ]s-8, tend to eliminate intervallic and rhythmic diferentiation, here outlining ully chromatic lines in a steady stream of crotchets. This elimination of thematic character makes the topic of dehumanization a dynamic process rather than one of mere static depiction. The second paragraph within section Al )9- ]) extends the stream of undiferentiated crotchets in vn. 1 and brings in vn. 2 to restore the dactylic rhythm (though now with chromatic segments) and to prepare or the restatement at ] . The harmony in this paragraph can be understood in more than one way. Essentially it jacks up the initial G sharp minor tonic to A minor, over a retained tonic pedal. This altenation of tonic and lat supertonic is a avourite instinct of Shostakovich's harmony, as it is of certain Jewish, gypsy and Spanish musics (see the stylized Andalusian intonations in the Scherzo of Shostakovich's Piano Quintet - Ex. 3 .9b; cf. Ex. 3 .8a above). But the 'move' is non-unctional, in that it merely proposes neighbour-note altenatives to the tonic rather than taking part in a cadential progression. Altenatively it may

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

76

be understood as not moving at all, but as merely adding an exceptional number of lat (i.e. dark) inlections to the tonic minor mode (in this instance, �2, �4, �5 , �8 , even ��9 at 5-1] , if the composer's scrupulous enharmonic notation is ollowed - see Ex. 3 .9a). Either way, the key to understanding this passage is that it rests on extended tonic harmony rather than harmonic progression of any kind. Ex. 3.9

(a) Second movement, modal inlections in opening section; (b) Piano Quintet, third movement

a)

b)

The third sub-section within A 1 (j- l) begins as a straight repetition of the irst, but in its sixth bar it short-cuts to a paraphrase of the rising continuation of the preceding paragraph ( ] 13- i), propelling the music towrds the same melodic e" ocus ( j - � , cf. 2�- >. This is then roughed up semitonally by "; and the dual E/F ocus is retained or seven bars in both treble and bass, after which it rises back towards G# at �4 in the treble and � in the bass. From ] harmonic control shifts to a vague diminished­ seventh aggregate, with an increasingly tenuous g#' at the centre and strong d' and B at the extremes. Otherwise coherence in this paragraph rests with two reerential elements: the DSCH motif (sometimes reordered) and the

rhythmic cells already strongly established. From I the perpetual-motion crotchets and dactylic rhythms are in competition, with undiferentiated repeated-note chords spurring them on (these are in efect diminutions of the aggressive, pu�ctuating chords in the · preceding paragraphs) . At ll the texture inverts or our bars: the perpetual-motion crotchets transer to the violins, with the dactylic rhythms now eliminated (ollowing the established template of diferentiation suppressed) , while the punctuating chords transer to the viola and cello. After these our bars the two elements of the texture are more reely mixed. Meanwhile, rom J to D the thematic line in the bass moves almost entirely within diminished-ourth boundaries, in chromatic­ scale segments, arriving at j1 at the DSCH level in a variant of that motif, beore the deinitive retun of DSCH in its dual function of punctuation and self-assertion, rom J5• Here DSCH its in snugly with the G shrp minor tonic triad, illing the gap between the third and ifth degrees, a eature clariied between ms and D where the B ( S) and B� ( H) components are metrically accented. The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

=

Scherza

I:

Bl

77

=

(�-l])

The convulsive energy that has impelled the movement to this point could easily run out of steam. It needs constantly to be renewed. The beginning of section B 1 at � accordingly allows the two violins to draw breath, while the viola takes over the theme at the DSCH level that will remain virtually constant until the onset of the Trio section at � . The renewal of the violent impulse is evident through the course of B 1 in the inexorable rise of the thematic line, here covering two octaves rom d' to d . There are also subtler ways in which the music conserves, then releases, its energies. The cello retuns to the aggressive punctuating chords of the opening of the movement, at irst on of-beats, then in the diminution amiliar rom �-j , thereby gradually intensifying the percussive impact of the texture up to the entry of the irst violin at ]. As beore, the dactylic motifs tend to dissolve inio undiferentiated crotchets, while the main thematic line crystallizes ever mote clearly around DSCH. These eatures are held ast rom � to � . at the same time as the punctuating of-beat sff dyads retun, now roughed up into semitones and urging on towards a crisis point, much as they did in the Seventh Quartet, third movement (Ex. 3 .10). This gesture has its origins in the most violent pages, often sexual in connotation, of Shostakovich's notorious opera The idy Macbeth of Mtsensk District, to which later movements of the Quartet will make more explicit reerence. The phrase structure of section B 1 shows an allied process of "'

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

78 Ex. 3.10

(a) Second movement, lead-in to rio; (b) Quartet No. 7, third movement, lead-in to recall of irst movement

� b)

[Allegro J >

>

=

176)

>

>

>

>

>

intensiication, more compact than in section Al and expressed as progressive clariication rather than expansion. It moves rom balanced our-bar phrases with links at D5-13, 2-1 ] , Js6, and 3- 1 � - to six-br phrases at �-� (Fig. 3 .3). Hence, even though no crescendo is indicated, section B l gives the impression of a continuous accumulation towards the Second Piano Trio quotation that announces the arrival of the Trio section at � .

l] Phrase structure Nature of links Fig. 3.3

4+9 rising

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

�7

79

•]

l

l'

�

4+2 static

4+2 rising

4+3 rising

6 (2 x 3) 6 + 6 (3 x 2)

Second movement: phrase structure in Scherzo Bl

Harmonically section B is anchored on a bass off#. In its inal accumulation this ocal point transers up the. octave (rom @ ), retuning decisively at the lead-in to the quotation rom 2] . The lowest note of the DSCH motif at ] 1 6 also unctions as a leading-note anticipation of the C 'minor tonic of the new section. A further anticipatory aspect may be detected in the vn. 1 lines at ji-3 (cf. ]l4). Trio 1:

CJ

(lJ- l>

As with the quotation rom the First Symphony in the previous movement, the theme now quoted rom the Second Piano Trio has to adapt to its new environment. Most obviously, it is louder and aster (the minim unit in the Quartet is 240 per minute, whereas the equivalent quaver in the Piano Trio is marked at 144 and in Shostakovich's two recordings goes at about 184). This change accommodates the theme to the driven character of the movement as a whole and to the dramatic unction of a climax zone (as opposed to its original function as a stable element within a sonata-rondo exposition) . The original chordal pizzicato accompaniment could easily have been taken over and would then have ollowed quite logically rom the aggressive punctuations already set up in the Scherzo (Rudolf Barshai's orchestration actually combines the punctuating and arpeggiated igures). In choosing arpeggiated chords instead, Shostakovich was presumably aiming or maximum orce rom the quartet medium and or rhythic and textural diferentiation rom the surrounding Scherzo sections (Ex. 3 . 1 1 ) . The Piano Trio theme its into the movement by virtue of its inherent obsessional quality and of the programmatic association Shostakovich evidently elt between his personal motto and a Jewish dance theme already associated in many listeners' minds with persecution (the Second Piano Trio appeared at the same time as revelations of the Nazi concentration camps, and its inale soon became associated with those images) . But the quoted theme also restates the Quartet's by now amiliar altenation between diferentiated and undiferentiat�d rhythms (see violins 1]- �). Melodically it registers as

80

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

Ex. 3.11 a)

(a) Second movement, rio section, opening; (b) Piano rio No. 2, inale, second theme

jmolto

(Allegro molto o =

l

\ I

:

120]

espress.

� #.. -� I

ff;mo/to /� -

-

espress. ..

..:LI

1

-

�r ? �/ � 8

J -

J

�

..: I

-

-

-

�r / a/ V

' •

/� J

.l

_ f . ..

8

-

..

...i

_ �r

:

b)

f espress.

an expansion of the DSCH motif, since it is similarly bounded by two semitones (F#/G and m/C) , but it now covers a perfect-ifth span rather than a diminished ourth. The doubling of the violins at a two-octave distance (derived, of course, rom the two hands of the original piano part) is texturally striing in a quartet context and clinches the sense of a climax to the accumulating tendencies of the Scherzo. By comparison with the Piano Trio original, the continuation of the theme eatures an extra rotation of the our-crotchet/semibreve igure - or no immediately apparent reason. Just as curiously, the original version already had one more rotation of this igure than a regular phrase structure would

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

81

suggest. (Cutting out one bar rom the Piano Trio version or our brs rom the Quartet would reveal the disguised regularity of phrasing.) Inconsistent though this may seem, it calls or no special comment. Shostakovich probably wrote out these bars rom memory, and in any case the number of rotations of the motif was mainly dependent on his instinct or an appropriate degree of intensiication, which is to say: almost anything other than the squareness of the 'our-bar' phrase. The further continuation of the quotation paraphrases the continuation of the original (Quartet �-�. cf. Trio -3� violin and, or the downward sequence, 1 11 021 - � ) . From � the accompaniment reverts to choppy chords in the manner of the Scherzo (but also of the Piano Trio original), inally reaching down to DSCH (rom 3� ) in preparation or the next section. In this respect the music rom � to � roughly parallels the design of the third paragraph of Scherzo Al (�-). its comparable unction being essentially to space the two sections of the Trio (Cl and Dl) and to keep the movement's driving motion in the oreground. Once again the melodic material is entirely based on the diminished-ourth motif and chromatic steps (almost exclusively the latter in the case of vn. 2). Harmonically this continuation is relatively inchoate and simply ills the registral space between the Piano Trio quotation and DSCH (see especially the cello line rom � ) . Trio 1 : D J (l]- ll)

The second section within the Trio phase sees the maximum saturation of DSCH motifs, not only in the movement but in the entire Quartet: theme and accompaniment are both dominated by it, in simultaneous augmentation and canonic diinution (taking the minim version rom l as the norm). Texturally there close parallels to the preceding Cl section, with the violins again doubled (initially in octaves and tenths) and the viola and cello hnessed in support. At the programmatic level this close association of sections C 1 and D 1 , and thereore of DSCH and the Piano Trio theme, seems to reinorce Shostakovich's self-identiication with the Jewish theme and, by extension, with the sufering of the Jews themselves. The chromatic triplet swirls actually have associations with more than one ethnic tradition - they are as characteristic of the Andalusian olk idiom as of Jewish klezmer (cf. Ex. 3 .9b above) . But the general notion of self-identiication with an oppressed community is an important one and will be signiicantly enhanced in the ourth movement. The evolution of the new theme at � can be traced rom the beginning of the movement as !- progressive widening of intervals (Ex. 3.12). It is the wide e

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

82 Ex. 3.12

Second movement, intervallic expansion

J minor 3 rd

diminished 4th

I

1, � r

perfect 5th

1e f

interval of the motif that Shostakovich plays with in order to saeguard the inner vriety of this section, narrowing it on its inverted orms between � and �. reverting to the major-sixth (= diminished-seventh) outline as vn. 1 hits the highest notes of the movement (4�), and inally restoring the original altenating diminished-seventh and minor-sixth orms or the cello and viola statements rom �-m. As in Scherzo B 1 , this section incorporates a necessary retreat in terms of sheer weight of sound. The registral space narrows towards � , in order to make room or several stages of intensiication later on. At this point the phrase structure clariies into regular our-br units, ending with altenated our- and six-bar units rom � to � . Harmonically the section is very static, rooted as it is in the C minor implications of the DSCH motif. But the reer phrases linking low to high registers between � and � are interesting, since vn. 1 here echoes the same our-note motif that was careully evolved in the opening movement's irst Arioso and that will eature heavily in the quotations of third and ourth movements (see Exx. 3 .3a above and 3 . 1 8 , 3 .21 below). The vn. 1 line at �-� , between the chromatic segments at the outer ends, is a paraphrase of the initial motif of the movement, preparing or its perpetual-motion variant at the retun of the Scherzo rom m. It is worth considering how musically impoverished the D 1 section would be had Shostakovich stuck to the octave doubling he stats with at �4-7• Instead he varies the doubling of his violin lines with tenths (between ] and

� ). major sixths (J!), tritones (I B-1 1 ) and major thirds (� 14), while the viola and cello vary between major and minor sixths at 4-1 � . Elsewhere the doubling is unsystematic (violins �-� , �5-]), and even within an The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

83

apprently regular doubling Shostakovich occasiomtlly .roughens things up seemingly or the sheer hell of it (violins l-1). At �-�, instead of a more literal melodic inversion of the theme (which would be perfectly easible hrmonically), he concentrates on the degrees of the dominant minor ninth of C minor, giving this first half of the section a degree of hrmonic consistency within its largely non-unctional ramework. The liking passage rom � to � is almost entirely motivically and linerly, rather than harmonically, directed. It is a ind of articulated noise (in orchestral terms it could efectively be accompanied by a crescendo on suspended cymbal and side drum) beore the intensiied repeat of the main motif of the section. This 'noise' element is in a line -of evolution - rom erlier 'in-between' passages in the movement !]13-20, J ] , � � , � � ) and is thus a part of a controlled large-scale lux between thematic and non-thematic writing. By comparison with � - � the instrumental pairs at �-� re reed rom their yokes, and the violins continue to enjoy a less systematic intervallic doubling on their two ascending waves towards the retun of the Scherzo at ] . Approaching the end of this section, vn. 2 re-emphasizes the centricity of C, beore the dominant G side-slips back to the movement's tonic of G shrp minor. Schezo 2: A2, B2 (l!- lJJ

The retun of the Scherzo is truncated in more than one way. Most obviously its two main sections are reduced in length (A2 consists of 26 bars, as against the 75 of Al ; B2 consists of 30 bars as against the 50 of B l). The immediate reason or this is the removal of DSCH iguration (originally at whose appearance is delayed until the lead-in to the retun of Trio D after 3 1 . This elimination allows the two Scherzo sections to low into one. Harmonic contrast is also reduced, as B2 is articulated merely by its six-bar lirtation with the E minor triad at � i6 (echoing in concentrated orm the hrmonic contrast of Al rom ]). In addition Shostkovich devises an almost systematic oreshortening and demarcation of phrases by comparison with the expansiveness and luidity of their irst presentation. This technique of structural oreshortening is common to the late phases of almost all of the Scherzos in Shostkovich's sring qutets. What is new is the capital he will mke of it in contributing to the movement's sense of non-completion within the overall scheme of the work.

l-1·

84

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

Textural roles are swapped round, with the viola taking the lead in A2 (originally vn. 1) and vn. 1 repaying the compliment by taking the lead in B2 (originally viola). Textural inversion is also applied to the harmony, as the tonic pedal in Al is now in the treble, while the bass moves to the Neapolitan degree. Again it is a moot point whether the changes of harmony at � and � are better understood as neighbour-notes to the tonic triad or as modal lat degrees (here second, ourth and ifth). Either way the perceived sense of harmonic movement is less than the look of the page might suggest. The dactylic rhythms originally chracteristic of the main theme have been eliminated - they will reappear at ] in the quasi-DSCH link to the retun of Trio section D. This suppression of rhythmic proile and of the DSCH motif once again emphasizes the music's brute struggle or survival - it is as though individual personality is once again threatened with obliteration. At the same time, musical orces are clariied. Like section B 1 , but working rom a diferent level, B2 is constructed as a long cumulative ascent, harping on the diminished-ourth outline on its way to the reappearance of the quasi-DSCH link at . The neighbour-note chords rom � to I now eature A # and C # , pitches diatonic to G sharp minor, and all the chromatic-scale segments in A2 and B2 are rising - compare the mixture of rise and fall in Al and B L The breathless of-beat chords at � .- 1 2 appear earlier than in the original link to section Cl (rom �1); but their prematurity is justiied by the previous eliination of of-beat chords rom the accompaniment (� - � ; cf. D1-1 3) . All in all the recasting of material in this Scherzo retun is remarkable testimony to Shostakovich's sense of structural timing and to the adaptability of his technique, as he seeks to convey a headlong, lemming-like rush to destruction. Trio 2: D2, C2 (W-�)

The predominant character of the retun of section D (rom ]), as of its model, is determined by its ixation on DSCH, and its single-mindedness is enhanced by the coninement of the violins to strict octave doubling and by the avoidance of sequential extensions. The aim, even clearer than in the retun of the Scherzo material, seems to be to convey a continuous onrush to oblivion. At the mid-way point ) there is the most striking example of textural retreat in the entire movement, as all our instruments suddenly drop in dynamic beore the crescendo towards the inal section (the bracketed/ on the irst beat at � in the old Collected Works score is in all probability Dmitry

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

85

TsYganov's editorial addition, and it has been eliminated in the 200 1 revision of the score) . The efect is of the volume control being suddenly tuned down by whatever orce is controlling the onrush. This, then, may be understood not merely as a device or manipulating audience excitement but rather as a urther indication of the music's lack of individual will. The expected retun at ] of the Piano Trio quotation (cf. � ) is delayed until ] . Shostakovich has reversed the original order of sections C and D, or several interconnected reasons. First is simply the avoidance of predictability. Secondly, having eliminated DSCB rom the return of the Scherzo, Shostakovich now has the opportunity of bringing it back with renewed impact - beore the Piano Trio quotation rather than after it. Equally important, he has in mind a quasi-programmatic link into his third movement, which will crucially involve that quotation. In this reversal of sections, D2 unctions as a prolonged up-beat to the Piano Trio theme and efectively eels grafted on to the accumulation of Scherzo B2. Accordingly, the viola and cello rom ] paraphrase the original viola and vn. 1 Scherzo material rom l to � and the linking vn. 1 material rom � to �. creating a complex overlay and continuing the sense of structural telescoping. The intenal construction of these lower pats is based on an initial pedal-point on d ' , driven upwards towards a inal ocus onf # 'f#" and g '/g" in preparation or the retun of the Piano Trio quotation at ]. As in Scherzo B2, the intenal construction of this upwrd drive is unsystematic, except or its (possibly coincidental) avoidance of the pitch-class E and its unsurprising reliance on diminished-fourth motifs and chromatic-scale segments. The interval between viola and cello gradually and irregularly diverges rom unison to octave, in two waves corresponding to the violins' phrase division at �- Conceptually the scheme thereore consists of two rising wedge shapes. Given the salience of pitch-classes D, B and A�, and of G in the lead-in to � , there is also a hint of dominant harmony preparation or the C minor arrival of the next section. As beore, the Piano Trio quotation (section C2 rom �) unctions as a prolonged passionate outburst, in this instance dramatically cut of at the end of the movement (or programmatic reasons to be discussed in connection with the ollowing Allegretto) . The texture is reversed rom the original presentation - violins swapping with viola and cello - and the arpeggios are laid out or the violins in such a way as to maximize the quartet's achievable volume. The shift of harmony at � is new. It is the kind of move that might conventionally set up a retun to the tonic rom the dominant of the supertonic via a circle of ifths. Instead it becomes ixated, along with the theme. Non­ resolution is precisely the aim of this inal section.

86

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

Second movement: Summay The Allego molto's allusion to the Eighth Symphony (1943) and quotation rom the Second Piano Trio ( 1 944) apparently continue the line of chronological retrospective begun in the . first movement. At the same time their violence and sense of outrage, to which the DSCH motif as it were bears witness , could easily be tken to reinorce the oicial dedication of the Quartet 'To the Memory of the Victims of Fascism and War' . But the more important issue is how these reerences are integrated artistically. The nature of Shostakovich's compositional challenge in this second movement is how most efectively to sustain its obsessive, driven character. First and oremost this involves lexibility in the intenal processes of harmony and prase structure, setting of the undamental rigidity of rhythm, dynamic and gesture. For this is not merely a piece of machine music on the lines of Prokoiev's 'Factory' rom Le pas d 'acier or of Alexander Mosolov's notorious work of the same name, derived rom the Prokoiev. Rather this is music in which the mechanical and the human vie with one another, in the course of a single progressive intensiication . The . intensification is achieved by various musical means , including malleable phrase structure, fluctuation between dactylic and undiferentiated rhythms , progressive intervallic expansion of the basic dactylic motif, sparing use of tonal assertion (mainly to articulate section beginnings) , careul disposition of aggressive articulation (with sff conined to the Scherzo sections) , and periodic attenuation of texture, register, rhythm and in one instance dynamics , in order to create space or renewed accumulation. The same process culminates in the telescoped retuns of both Scherzo and Trio sections, wherein ormer phrase extensions become phrase contractions , material previously placed end to end is overlaid, and ormer quasi-developmental extensions are eliminated, thereby creating an accelerating tempo of events towards the end of the movement. From this last point lows the second pressing compositional issue: how most efectively to lead into the third movement. This is achieved by a double non-completion of the structure. The retun of the irst section of the Trio phase (C2) is cut of in mid-stream, so that the irst phrase of the third movement may both 'complete' it and lead on to new music. And the Allegro molto's overall design is of a double Scherzo and Trio, with the inal retun of the Scherzo missing altogether, so as to dovetail with the next movement and leave a sense of structural incompletion and of issues still to be addressed. The basic thematic material is derived rom the first movement by

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

87

intervallic contraction of its principal accompanying motif, producing the Allego motto's characteristic initiating dactyls. DSCH is taken over as a punctuating motif, also becoming the principal thematic material or Trio · section D. As beore, chromatic-scale segments eature �s extending material, and C minor is tken over rom the first movement· to orm a secondary key area (Trio, sections C l and D l ) . From the Schenkerian point of view the harmonic structure o f the irst movement was almost entirely uneventful. That of the second movement, by contrast, is dangerously inchoate. Bui that staticity and that inchoateness are germane to the movements' respective musical characters . A prime objective of the opening argo was to suppress momentum in avour of non-progressive meditation; and a prime objective of the second movement is to release that pent-up energy in a stream of barely controllable violence. The long-term goal is or the inale to 'correct' all such ' shortcomings' . All the same, even in the throes of near chaos Shostakovich never ails to achieve a balance between harmony and gesture. The oreground graph in Example 3 . 1 3 shows the structural aspect of this balance, indicating the harmonic control behind the accumulation-by-ascent in sections Al and B 1 trough to the high points at the beginnings of sections C l and D l , and through A2 and B2 to 02. The second­ level analysis shows the coordination of the basic G sharp minor tonality of the Scherzo with the C minor of the Trio by means of 'voice exchange' , while the movement's harmonically open end acilitates the surprise switch to G minor or the Allegretto third movement. Third Movement:

Allegreto

Shostakovich and Prokoiev each made highly signiicant contributions to the genre of the waltz: both to the danced variety (in their ballets) and, more particularly, to the waltz in the context of multi-movement instrumental cycles , where it unctions as an archetype of physicality. Prokoiev tended to respect the established parameters of the genre, tweaking them with piquant harmonies and balletic exaggerations. Shostakovich, by contrast, tended to be more subversive, building in incongruities of tempo and gesture in order to convey physical unease and, perhaps , existential disquiet. Examples would be the reluctant slow waltz motion of the irst movement (especially the second subject) of his First Quartet, or the dark, driven quality of the third movements of both this work and the Second Quartet. Grotesque waltzes abound rom his Fourth Symphony on, a particular speciality relevant to the third movement of the Eighth Quartet being the devilishly driven waltz introduced at an apex of

.g :: o .g m 0 s� " 0 -� 3

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The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

89

accumulating tension (or example in the Fourth Symphony, first movement, at � ).12 In the third movement of the Eighth Quartet a palpable sense of discomfort rises in part rom the unresolved tension of the !XCeptionally violent preceding Allegro motto. In Shostakovich's instrumental works , such violence requently sends out shock waves , which are then absorbed either by a lamenting passacaglia (as in the Second Piano Trio, Eighth Symphony, First Violin Concerto and Tenth String Quartet) or, as here, by an altenative angle on the scherzo archetype. In many ways the Tenth Symphony ofers the best point of comprison with the Eighth Quartet, since its watchul, waltz-like third movement plays a similar pivotal role in the overall structure, as well as eaturing the DSCH signature or the irst time in Shostakovich's work (see pp. 32-35 above) . Yet the role of that movement in the symphony's overall dramaturgy difers in that its preceding Scherzo is completely self-contained, while its ollowing inale is essentially a ast movement, whereas in the Quartet the preceding Scherzo is cut of (doubly so, as has been noted) and there are still two movements to ollow, both of them slow. The balance of tempo in the Quartet as a whole demands that the waltz be another ast or astish movement, though as noted above, pp. 380 , the third movement's Introduction appears on a published page of Shostakovich's draft score and may possibly represent the first music conceived or the Quartet. The structure of the Allegretto parallels that of the Allegro motto in several respects. It is another double Scherzo and Trio, with a quotation embedded in the Trio section, abbreviated retuns of both Scherzo and Trio (more literal than those of the Allegro motto), and no inal retun of the Scherzo, so as to lead into the next movement with a sense of structural incompletion (see Fig. 3 .4) . Strict adherence to Shostkovich's metronome markings reinorces continuity by mking the third movement's prevailing quaver motion identical with. the second's prevailing crotchets. However, by contrast with the blazing Allegro motto, the Allegretto is a shadowy movement. The dynamic level is mainly quiet, with momentary aggressive outbursts; and within the basic triple-time metre there is an intrusion in the shape of the alla beve Cello Concerto quotation in the Trio section. Apart rom the looming background presence of the 'incomplete' second movement, discomiture is suggested rom within the Allegretto's waltz tempo and texture by a combination of hrmonic, textural and gestural means, and by irregularities within the phrase structure. At the retun of the Scherzo the general sense of unreality is heightened by the addition of mutes . 12

See Sheinberg 2000 , pp . 29 1-96.

�

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Inroduction

A

B

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E

Intro . ABA

CD

Scherzo 2

Trio 2

Truncated retun

Truncated retun

Fig. 3.4

Schezo 1

Trio 1

Waltz

Transition

Third movement: overview

Cello Concerto quotation

Arioso

Intoduction (]-�)

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

91

What should ollow the general pause bar at the end of the second movement? - clearly the �ompletion of the Jewish theme quoted rom the Piano Trio, as at -s�. However, the DSCH motif at the head of the third movement is a substitute or this completion, at the same declaring a latent musical ainity. The Piano Trio theme has been the most powerful extenal marker of oppression in the work up to this point, and the DSCH motif the most powerul marker of Shostakovich's personal identiication with whatever surrounds it. Not or the irst or the last time in the Eighth Quartet, Shostakovich seems to be bearing symbolic personal witness to the horrors his music symbolically describes. The trilled crescendo on the inal note of the DSCH motif is a reinder, perhaps coincidental, of the famous crescendos (likewise on B) liing the murder and tavern scenes in Berg's Wozzeck, an epiphanic work or Shostakovich, who saw its 1927 Leningrad production. With or without its crescendo, the penetrating trill gesture sets the seal on the violence, protest and witness-bearing of the Allegro molto, and it will echo - sometimes quietly, always disturbingly - trough the rest of the Allegretto, sending a chill through the answering phrases to the obsessively repeated main theme. The two main functions of the rest of the third movement's introduction are as a bufer zone between the two Scherzos and as a quarry or several of the most important ideas of the movement to come. If the second movement was dominated by rising contours , the third is correspondingly doinated by alling ones , as the Introduction already proposes . At the same time the Introduction preigures the main motivic proles of the movement (Ex. 3 . 14) . It also sets up the our-br phrase structure that will characterize the Scherzo section (the only exceptions being the one-bar extensions at � 1 and � 1 4, a three-br elision at 1 1 and a one-bar elision at 1 }). Without the key signature and the harmonic arrival at � to guide us, we would have considerable diiculty in predicting the tonal outcome of .the Introduction. Once that arrival has taken place, however, the harmonic sense Ex. 3.14

Third movement, Introduction motifs as paradigms

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92

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

of the preceding descent becomes clearer. It passes through lattened degrees of the G minor tonic, in particular A� and C�, which are another anticipation, this time of the movement's most characteristic hrmonic progression (see Ex. 3 .15a below) . Scherw 1 : A ( � - � )

The Introduction seems to have been in no doubt as to the rhythm of the theme to come. But it has been unable to discover the tune. Vo . 1 now reverts to DSCH, as if to say: 'I'll just play this until the rest of you ik of something better to do.' The additional preatory D in the motif both supplies rhythmic vriety and conorms to an expanded version of Shostkovich's initials, since his paronyic (middle name, tken by convention rom the ather's irst name) was Dmitriyevich - hence DDSCH. There is an obsessive, impotent quality to this main theme, expressed not only in its repetitions but also in the inability of the hrmony to do more than shift to chromatic neighbour-notes. It trails of despondently beneath vn. 2's disurbing trill (contrasting with the second movement's upward-driving chromaticisms in the answering phrase of its main theme). The frst nine-bar prase tuns out to be a alse start. At the first 'real' statement that ollows (rom 114) an answering 1 1-bar phrase is managed, drawing on the introduction ( ]1 -2 = I --1) and praphrasing its downwrd trajectory. The bass line tiptoes warily up one more chromatic step to A, losing the frst beat of the bar, and is instantly met by a squeal rom the second violin, a grisly echo of the opening two notes of the movement. The passage is then repeated, in classical Scherzo ashion, except that the inal ee bars re elided at 11, balancing he previous one-bar extensions at �1 and � 14• As might have been suspected, though it has never been proposed in print, this main theme is yet another of Shostakovich's allusions. The proof is on the published page rom his draft score, where the theme appears alongside a near­ quotation rom the mistuned violin chords in Saint-Saens's Danse macabre an idea Shostakovich may have been tempted to add to the Quartet's und of quotations , beore deleting it in avour of the introduction as it now stands (see Pl. 2) . That the Danse macabre stands behind Shostakovich's Allegretto as more than a merely generic ainity is conirmed by a comparison of their main themes. Even the modally lattened neighbour-note harmony is preigured in the Saint-Saens (Ex. 3 . 1 5) . Scherw 1: B, A (�-])

The second section, beginning at 1 , is even more regular in phrasing than the

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis Ex. 3.15

93

(a) Third movement, main theme; (b) Saint-Saens, Danse macabre, main theme

a)

[Allegretto d =80)

b) [Mouvement modere de Valse)

b. 33

irst, with eight our-bar units laid out in pairs: ab/ac/ab/ad, all fote, by contrast with the subdued dynamics of Scherzo A. The (a) prases , the first in each pair, counteract the passive, unsystematic, stepwise alling contours of Scherzo A with determined, regular, wide-intervalled rising lines . These re built on the open strings of vn. 1 and are reinorced in two of the answering phrases (b) by pizzicato e"s on vn. 2. These open strings, the insistent repetitions of the accompaniment and the 'Spanish' mordent iguration (echoing the second movement, section D) all point again to the inluence of Saint-Saens's Danse macabre. The remaining answering phrases, (c) and (d) at -1] and 8-1], are reminders of section A - of the DSCH waltz theme and the waltz accompaniment, respectively - the irst sounding more brutal than beore, the second more lyrical. The harmony of the first and third pair of phrases ()1-8 and ] 1-8) closely shadows that of Scherzo A in its chromatically astringent modal basis and in its move to the lat supetonic (D� in relation to the local tonic C) . The second and ourth pairs need more careul consideration. Prase (c) (+-1 �) ofers a whole-tone vriant of the lat supertonic (C # =rn) , unctioning both as a neighbour-note chord to C minor and as a potential approach chord (unrealized) back to G minor. Phrase (d) (7-1j) eatures a related whole-tone aggregate that is .given its own auxiliary harmony and inds its way back to G

94 Ex. 3.16

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8 Third movement, Sections A and B, analytical reduction

minor by chromatic sliding. Meanwhile the overall trajectory of the top line in section B bridges the gap rom the e" ocus of the (a) phrases back up to the b" ocus of Scherzo A (Ex. 3 . 1 6) . Where the second movement evolved b y a process o f increasing intensiication into its Trio section, at the corresponding point (rom 1 .>the third movement dissolves back into its original Scherzo theme (by no means an uncommon procedure, of course, or classical Scherzo-and-Trio structures) . The cello now sustains the bass notes (at J5 the 1 979 Complete Edition score misprints a or a�; this is corrected in the 2001 DSCH reprint) , and the concluding phrase short-circuits the continuation, erupting in a spasm to bring the Scherzo section as a whole to a concise close. In this last paraphrase on the falling contour the two violins together ill out a total chromatic space. Trio 1 : C, D, E ( � - �)

The central Trio phase of the third movement is episodic, unstable and cryptic. As in the Allegro mo/to there is a signiicant overlapping of Scherzo material into the Trio, extending at least as far as the appearance of the songul theme at ] (section E). Beore that, two brief but clerly distinguished sections (C and D) are identiiable, each wiry and determined in chracter, each haunted by memories of the Scherzo, neither one ully developed. Eventually the cello's lyrical theme (section E) will succeed in putting the tensions of the Scherzo behind it, but only at the cost of all physicality and willpower. It is a ghostly lament, all the more intriguing or the act that, despite its songul quality, it is not a quotation; overlaid by a chromatic slithering accompani­ ment, it eventually peters out in despondency. It seems that the protest mustered by the Allegro mo/to in its Trio section is beyond the Allegretto's power; all that is possible instead is a retreat into inwardness. Section C (�-b echoes the determined character of Scherzo B and scans as a miniature version of that section, with phrase structure ab/ac. The

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

95

two (a) phrases of this main Trio theme (rom the entry of vn. 1 ) are a sequentially extended DSCH motif in a new 2/2 metre; the answering (b) and (c) phrases remind us of the initiating rhythms and motifs of the Introduction (see Ex. 3.14 above) . The preceding link rom the Sche:zo (2 �- �his the simplest of downward sequences on a transposed DSCH motif, efecting a straightfoWard stepwise shift rom G minor to F minor. In the Trio theme itself, the stepwise rising tendency of the harmony of the Scherzo is echoed, leading away rom the tonic in the initiating (a) phrases, then back to it in the (b) answering phrase (�8- 13). Answenng phrase (c) (rom 5�) leads on via a disguised circle of ifths to the B lat tonic of section D (Ex. 3 .17) , which enters as an interruption of the phrase structure of section C, the irst bar of � being the point of elision. The · unction of the answering phrases is in prt to prepare or the main motif of section D (rom �), a transposed quotation of the opening of the First Cello Concerto which has been in preparation all the way rom the Introduction, indeed all the way rom Arioso 1 in the frst movement (Ex. 3 . 1 8 ; cf. Exx. 3 .3b, 3 .14 above) . Similarly the anapestic accompaniment rhythm in section D is the outcome of a process stretching back via the concluding gestures of Scherzo A @ 1-8) and the viola accompaniment to section B (� 2 f-) to the dactylic rhythms of the main theme in the second movement (J1 -4). Now or the irst time the anapest igure settles on repeated notes, which will prove to be a urther link in the chain towards the deinitive statement at the beginning of the ourth movement, where the anapests, crucially, will be beginning-accented. No sooner has section D stabilized on a tonic B lat major - the acadeically correct relative major or this movement - than it drifts away by downward chromaticism (compare with the upward chromatic tendency of previous progressions in this movement) . The harmony then vacillates on either side of the local tonic beore the cello theme of section E settles on the previously avoided tonal centre of m . Ex. 3.17

Third movement, rio section C, harmonic reduction

f: �

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Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

96 Ex. 3.18

(a) Third movement, rio section D, opening; (b) Cello Concerto No. 1, irst movement, opening

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The cryptic presentation of the Cello Concerto quotation at � is only ully explained by what will happen to it in the succeeding Largo. Its short-lived appearance here, transposed but more or less in its original guise, suggests that its knotty determination and propulsiveness are things the Eighth Quartet may aspire to but never be able to hold on to. In this way its presentation encapsulates the unrealized potential of the Allegretto as a whole, just as pointedly as did the more obviously unproductive main theme. Replacing the repeat of section D that might have been expected had the Trio set out to match the construction of the Scherzo, section E is the most stable and, prtly by vtue of the high cello timbre, the most lyrical and soulful passage in the third movement. The phrase structure is very regulr, but with an open-ended conclusion: aabb/ccde/aabb/f' , where all units are of two brs, except () (three bars) and (f') (ten bars); the () units thus orm a kind of written-out rallentando. Until this point the thematic line in the Allegretto has been carried almost entirely by vn. 1 . Even the Cello Concerto quotation was deliberately not given to the cello, so that its timbre could be saved or this moment, where the high tessitura lends it a wispy, vaporous quality. The cello theme cries out or identiication as a quotation or allusion. Yet it is neither, or at least it has never been identiied as such. Rather it is one of

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

97

Shostakovich's many DSCH paraprases, ounded on a permutated version of the motif. In its rocking, keening quality and its scoring it is strongly akin to the slow movement of his First Cello Concerto - the. work just quoted - as well as to later pieces such as the 'Suicide' movement of the iourteenth Symphony (1 969) and the raming viola soliloquies of the Thirteenth Quartet (1970) . More speciically, the link between the two halves of the theme (4� - � 1 ) , where the accompaniment moves into parallel ourths rather than ifths, echoes the main motif of the inale of the Third Quartet, or which Shostakovich had proposed (in rehearsals with the Borodin Quartet, so it would seem) the subtitle: 'The Etenal Question: why and or what?' Two of these afinities re shown on Example 3 . 1 9 . Almost rom the beginning of the third movement, chromatic or near­ chromatic up-beat igures have been knitting the fabric of the music together. Initially they were downward moving, by contrast with the ascents of the second movement. At the opening of the Trio section (especially rom 5�) they were inverted to upward igures , and in this orm they supplied the extension material or section D (rom 6�). Now in section E they re channelled into an undiferentiated stream of altenately rising and falling quavers in the violins, their mainly perfect-ifth doubling suggesting distant kinship with the main theme of Scherzo section B . In music as economical and ocused as this, texture and gesture are always organic components in the overall argument. Harmonically section E is in limbo, anchored only by the melodic centre of b' in the cello and b" in vn. 1 . If we take B as a weakly expressed 'tonic ' , the modal construction of the cello line may be said to eature lat second, lat outh, and on occasions diminished thrd, diminished ifth and diminished seventh degrees , eventually settling on the diatonic ourth (e") that has been an ever-present support in the accompaniment (vn. 2). The inal phrases pivot away towards this ' subdominant' level, neutralizing the potential ren to a B 'tonic' .

Scherzo 2: Introduction, ABA (�-}; Trio CD (�- ])

The cello's inal e" hovers over the retun of the Scherzo like a mysterious chink of light. As a gesture it resonates historically with the inale of Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 , 'From my Lie' , the benchmark auto­ biographical string quartet, where the violin's held e"" in the inale famously represents the composer's tinnitus. In Shostkovich's Quartet it is a symbol of we know not what: it is an incomplete thought, the cello's sad song having rozen the heart . . Perhaps the not knowing, the vague sense of unease, the

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

98 Ex. 3.19

a)

(a) Third movement, rio section E; (b) Cello Concerto No. 1, slow movement; (c) Quartet No. 5, inale, opening

[Allegretto

I J. =

80]

1��= 1: ;1 �1 e1 p

espress.

�.b.

l

.. l

-

..

-

•

-

;;

Moderato J =

c)

B P)

.-:

9:

p

}

PF

�

'

*· k. �

100 -._

� I

.

cf Ex.3. 1 9c

.� -

---"

J:

incompletion, are precisely what the harmonically alien e" connotes - plus the act that it is pt of an important transitional strategy that will prove crucial to the link with the ollowing movement. The retun of the Scherzo and Trio rom 1 is characterized by muted

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

99

sonority, placing the entire last phase of this movement in a diferent kind of reality rom the irst - as it were in shadow rather thanlight, in reminiscence rather than the present tense. Structurally the retun is merely a compressed version of the irst half of the movement, with repeated bars and superluous material excised (Fig. 3 .5). This kind of telescoping of the later stages of a Scherzo movement is nothing new or Shostakovich. It had been second nature to him rom his Op. 1 on. In the Eighth Quartet it continues the stictural parallel with the Allegro molto second movement and acilitates the connection to the Largo ourth movement by denying a sense of completion. In conjunction with the reduced dynamics and muted timbre, this abbreviation reinorces the third movement's cowering quality and its sense of inability to unold reely, of eventually simply running out of steam. The inal page is emblematic (rom ]). R�ther than striving upwards , the extension of the Cello Concerto quotation slips down disconsolately, illing the chromatic gaps in its main motif. It then proceeds to do similarly with the gap between its lowest note and vn. 1 's open G string. From �9 the Cello Concerto motif nrrows , just as the linking motif between the irst and second movements did, over another harmonically open-ended cadence; this mkes or a graphic representation of depressed sprits, like a scolded dog crawling into a coner to sleep. '3 After this inal failure of the anapest rhythm to produce harmonic movement, rhythmic diferentiation fails altogether, and the vn. 1 Introduction

Scherzo A

Scherzo B

�-· 11= �-�·

11- ·�= D-tm

� -·� = ·� -· �= �-! ll t ]_ t �

Rescored; cello. pedal carried over;

Rescored;

Fig. 3.5

1-·�.

Softer;

�- !�

excised excised

Scherzo A

ticulation lightened (staccatos in

7-2�)

Trio C

Trio D

�-] = �� � 1-13

� ·4 = � 14

excised Dynamics and articulation lightened

28 bars of varied extension

Third movement: phrase structure in outer sections

13 The natural next step of this chromatic narrowing would be into microtones . This was a move Shostakovich never made . But Schnittke did make it, with very much the same efect of expressive constriction - cf. the main theme of his Piano Quintet ( 1 972-76) in its presentation on the string quartet.

100

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

line loses all energy. Repeated notes prolierate; crotchets slow to inims , to seibreves, and inally to the equivalent of a 'long' (our tied semibreves) . Even the hint in the last eight brs of the much-quoted medieval chant, the Dies irae ,14 is denied closure. Although the petering-out of the ending of the movement is quite diferent in character rom the end of the Allego molto, the structural impact is comparable in its double incompletion: Trio 2 lacks a restatement of section E, and the movement as a whole lacks a inal balancing retun of the Scherzo. Third Movement: Summay An important part of the story of the third movement is its unrealized potential. This topic is proposed as early as the first main theme, which trails of into mid-air, the resulting rustration being expressed in the angry punctuating gestures at �7, 3 � , 3 D and, more extendedly, s-2� and a-2� . Unrealized potential is even plainer to hear in the Trio section, where two promising ideas , identiiable with Shostakovich himself through his signature and self­ quotation, are cut of beore ully lowering. The Cello Concerto ( 1959) quotation brings the chronological retrospective running through the Qurtet almost up to date, but its determined character is short-lived, and a dazed, disorientated lament ollows (section E, rom j), its subject and object being deliberately unspeciied. The sense of unrealized potential may be more ully appreciated if we imagine how the movement might eel if the structure had been ully worked out - if the Cello Concerto quotation had been extended and section C restated so as to balance Trio 1 as a whole, thereby obviating the need or the disorientated lament of E; and if the restatement of C and D in Trio 2 had not been allowed to trail of despondently but had led back to a balancing statement of Scherzo A and B . With those amendments the result would have been a classically rounded orm. But it would have bone no compelling relationship either to the movement's main thematic material or to the dramaturgy of the work as whole. As it stands, Shostkovich's Allegretto is an artistically precise expression of psychological impotence. And as such it its perfectly between the utile rage of the Allego molto and the torpor of the ,rgo ourth movement. No knowledge of background events is necessary in 14 With which , it goes without saying , Shostkovich was well acquainted - see Aphorisms, Op . 13 ('Dance of Death ' ) , Hamlet, Op . 32 (' Requiem' ) , Five Days, Five Nights, Op. 1 1 1 ('Dresden in Ruins ' ) , Five Romances on Texts fom the Magazine 'Krokodil ', Op . 1 2 1 (No . 3 'Caution' ) .

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

101

order to register that essence; such knowledge may add a dimension to our understanding, to be sure, but only as the beginning of the story rather than the end. One of the more remarkable musical eatures of the .third movement is its determination to prolong a treble m in a structure firmly rooted in G minor. The friction this creates is heightened by vn. 2's nagging trills in Scherzo A; and in the lament of Trio 1 (section E) , Bq is elevated to the status of a modal tonic. Meanwhile the tonal drift of the movement is via a circle of ifths latwards - rom G minor to C or Scherzo B , to F minor or Trio C , and to B lat major or Trio D , rom which the more weakly articulated tonality of Trio E acilitates a punning retun to the 'alien' melodic m (Ex. 3 .20). Fourth Movement:

Largo

It is normal practice or the ourth movement in Shostakovich's ive­ movement designs to be conessional in tone, to ollow unbroken rom the previous movement and to lead without interruption into the next. There was a cluster of such pieces between 1943 and 1 946. The ourth movement of the Eighth Symphony ( 1 943 , a work rooted, like the Eighth Quartet, in C minor) is an extraordinarily dark passacaglia in G sharp minor; it acts as a shock­ absorber to the two preceding violent scherzos and liks into a quizzical inale. In the Ninth Symphony ( 1 945) the ourth movement altenates between stentorian brass summonses and funereal orations or the bassoon; the bassoon then swaps roles in an instant, leading of the inale in tones of gentle bufoonery which will eventually modulate into snarling aggression. The Third Quartet ( 1946) parallels the Eighth Symphony in using a unereal quasi­ passacaglia to absorb the violence of the two preceding scherzos and to orm the bridge to a shell-shocked inale. In all these cases , images of war are clearly to the ore, and the ourth movement of the Eighth Quartet is similarly marked by gestures of outburst, resistance and lament. Yet semantically and structurally the role played by this movement is diferent rom any of its predecessors, in that the violent Scherzo was supplied by the second movement rather than the third, while the third movement (rather than the ourth) served as a kind of bufer zone. As a result the need to absorb shock at this point is not so pressing. In act the ourth movement will provide some new shocks of its own. It is commonly elt that this Largo enshrines the essence of the Quartet's message - rather too explicitly or some, as noted in Chapter 1 (see p. 1 5 above) . I n its eloquence and directness it certainly has the eel of a vitally

Ex. 3.20

Third movement, analytical reduction

Middleground 1

I Schezo I

�

�

��

9

q..�·�-.,

�

I Schezo I

Cello Conceto quotion

]

]

Middleground 2 " 13

Middleground 3 \

l �J

1�;: ; : I

;� �� :; ;l == �,= 9:: A

::I::

I

III

A

A

III

A

III

A

:;: I

.

I

III

I

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

103

important personal statement, one in which the composer's soul is laid bare. But in act the nature of the quoted material shifts the balance away rom the personal towards the communal, and the subtlety of musical presentation transmutes both dimensions into art. As Glikman has. noted, paraphrasing Heinrich Heine on poetry: 'It seems to me that many· of Shostakovich's scores are pearls that once were tears.'15 Glikman was not reerring to any speciic work, but this movement seems an admirable illustration of his image. The basis of the design - three Ariosos ramed and punctuated by semantically charged recurring materi3. - relects that of the preceding Largo, . the irst movement (Fig. 3 .6, cf. Fig. 3.1 above). Yet some commentators have preerred to see the movement as a mirror of the Allego molto second movement and thereore as contributing to the Quartet's supposed overall rch structure.16 This is a misleading observation, based as much on wishful extrapolation rom the (deceptive) similarity of the frst and ifth movements as on the woolly concept of the shared 'dramaticism' (Bobrovsky 1 961) of the second and ourth. In act there is a much truer comparability of design between the second and third movements - both of them being incomplete double Scherzo and Trios - and betweeD"the irst movement and the ourth and ifth taken together, as will be seen. Outbursts 1, 2

(�-�. �-�)

The reception history of the Eighth Quartet comes sharply into ocus around the ourth movement's opening Outbursts (Ex. 3 .2 1 ) . In the early days these were read at the crudest level of programme music - onomatopoeia according to which the held a# in vn. 1 represented the drone of bombers, while the f pesante chords denoted the explosion of bombs or anti-aircrat ire.17 This description was apparently validated by the story of the work's having been composed under the impact of the ruins of Dresden, and it persisted in many later accounts. Latterly, however, the more avoured interpretation is once again crudely onomatopoeic, except that the repeated­ note chords are now said to represent the NKVD's early-moning knocks 'on th� door.18 This view is broadly consonant with the reminiscences of Glikman, 1 5 Glikman 200 1 , p. 321 . 1 6 Martinov 1 960 , Bobrovsky 1 96 1 , p . 220 , ramer 2002 , p . 234 . 17 Smith 1 962 . The crescendo in vn. 2, viola and cello at �-• was present in the

1961 original printing but omitted in the 1 979 Collected Works score and has not been restored in the 200 1 revised reprint. 1 8 ' Once we have given up dutiully persuading ourselves to hear bombs alling in

�

�

@

Freely composed (quasi-allusion to Lady Macbeth passacaglia)

Revolutionary song

Symphony 1 1 , third movement ll l 21

Lady Macbeth , Act 4 1 479 1 2-·

Violin 2, Viola, Cello

Violin 2, Viola, Cello

Violin 1

pp cresc. ff

ff dim. p

�

�

Allusion to Cello Concerto/The oung Guard/Beethoven Op . 1 35/Wagner Gotterdimmerung

Outburst 1

Fig. 3.6

Arioso 1

Fourth movement: overview

T]

Outburst 2

pp cresc. ff

Arioso 2

pp

Link

Arioso 3

]

Outburst 3/Arioso 2

Cello

pp cresc. mf dim. plpp

p dolce

f/pp

Lebedinsky and others (see Appendix B , 1 and 2) . Happily, no one has taken the idea to its vulgar extreme by picking up the anapest repeated-note igure as a rhythmic signature (see p. 36 above) and concluding that this proves that it is Shostakovich or whom the secret police are knocking. It is not hard to guess why certain passages in Shostakovich's works should inspire such literal-minded responses. When, as here, there is a strong sense of structural disjunction (albeit less drastic than, say, in the chorale coda of the inale of the Fourth Symphony)19 and ?f quotation/allusion, there is always a sense of interpretative space opened up between the music and the listener - a 'hermeneutic window' as Lawrence ramer has helpully called it,20 through which images rom lie beckon to us. Whatever else may be in question, there is little doubt that the opening of the ourth movement looks like such a window. The urge to cast Shostkovich as either anti-Fascist or anti­ Communist (or both) then conveniently tells us what may be seen through the window. Several things might make us pause or thought. The very ease with which interpretation has shifted rom alling bombs to knocks on the door is, or should be, disquieting. Can the conviction of the leader of the Borodin Quartet, who worked on the Eighth Quartet with the composer and who or nearly 30 years insisted on the 'falling bombs' view, be lightly dismissed?21 Surely both onomatopoeic interpretations are merely subsets of the range of meanings the passage allows, none of which has any necessary connection with the composer's intention. Once the issue of quotation/allusion is more closely examined, it will be seen to ofer little support to onomatopoeic interpretation of any kind. What may emerge instead is an understanding on a higher level of generality as regards programme, and on a higher level of speciicity as regards musical structure. In short, this vividly gestural music can be understood more artistically. In order to explore that possibility, it may be helpul to exaine the passage in several stages, with a progressively broader ocus. There is no mistking the challenge of the opening gesture as it intrudes The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

105

the ourth movement of [Shostakovich's] Eighth Quartet, we stand a chance of recognising that the igure in question actually represents a ist pounding peremptorily on a door in the middle of the night' (MacDonald 1 998, p . 583). 'And the knocks on the door by the KGB [sic] , you can also hear them there' (Maxim Shostakovich, ibid. , p . 390) . 1 9 See Fanning 200 lb, pp . 1 20-3 1 . 20 ramer 1 990, pp . 9-1 0 . 21 Dubinsky 1 989, pp. 283-84 .

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

106 Ex. 3.21

Fouh movement, opening

Largo J = 1 3 8 m

w cresc.

ffpesante

upon the torpor into which the Allegretto has ebbed. But the question remains as to how it nevertheless relates to the ongoing processes of the Qurtet as a whole. According to the look of the score the violent repeated-note anapests could be understood harmonically as approach chords (an eviscerated augmented sixth, perhaps) to the C sharp minor tonic suggested by the key signature. In the longer term that will indeed prove to be the most helpul diagnosis. But if the innocent er detects any harmonic salience at all at the beginning of the movement, this would rather be something based on G, the pitch-class at the top and bottom of the chords. The held vn. 1 a# that emerges rom behind the anapest chords can then easily be understood as a minor third degree. The previous movement was. in G minor, even though the tonic apprently slipped rom view in its inal bars. The vn. 1 line rom J9 eatured an intervallic contraction of the quoted Cello Concerto motif, balancing the intervallic expansions in the irst half of the second movement (see Ex. 3 .1 2 above), and it ended with a deliberate absence of harmonic ocus. Its notation in sharps rom � was really no more than a convenience or the player. If this passage is read in lats, the connection between the movements becomes apparent: both the end of the Allegretto and the beginning of the Largo are suspended above a G minor tonic. Clerly the non-reactive presence of the held vn. 1 a# at the beginning of the ourth movement is something to be dealt with - its near-silent insubordination is almost as disturbing as the Outburst chords themselves. Yet far rom explaining it in the easiest way, the three up-beat bars that now ollow (�;) contradict the G minor hypothesis, outlining as they do a C sharp minor triad, tritonally opposed to G minor. Now the f chords become less easy to read; they arrive, as the score-reader (but not the ear) has already been able to predict, as augmented-sixth approaches to the dominant of C sharp minor. That implied resolution has to wait. The next cycle of up-beat unisons and violent chords (� ) is a tritonal transposition of the irst. Now the up-beat 10-20

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

107

bars reinorce G minor, and the anapest chords can be read as augmented sixths (m-C#) in that key. Evidently a stand-of has been reached between G and C sharp minors. Then the chords divert to the irst ull triad of the movement - F sharp major at 8 � at last orming aull . consonance with the drone a#. Only now does the drone shift, briely suggesting another Dies irae head-motif beore settling onto the held g# that leads into the rst rioso. The above explanation is admittedly farly tortuous or a passage whose emotional impact is so direct. But it is, worth the trouble, because or anyone listening to the music rather than reading the programme note, the emotional efect of these Outbursts has as much to do with what happens to the opening gesture as with what it might or might not be intended to stand or in the real world. The shock efect of its intrusion on the sonolent ending of the Allegretto is undeniable, and there is no legislating or how literally or abstractly this wake-up call should be taken. Either way, its musical subtlety should not be underestimated; or without that subtlety, the wrangling over its interpretation would be the only thing to care about, and the music would deserve the scon of its detractors. There are further subtleties to ponder. The repeated-note chords are clearly augmentations of the anapest accompanying chords to the previous movement's Cello Concerto quotation at � and � . now, crucially, accented at the beginning (the up-beat igure at J� conirms the relationship - Ex. 3 .21 , cf. Ex. 3 . 1 8 above). The switch hee to beginning-accented anapests registers as a wilul reversal of the passive element in that quotation (where the accompaniment dovetailed classically with the theme), and the malignant quality of the repeated-note chords is enhanced because they are now used with the end of the melodic motif rather than being separate rom it. Whatever positive self-assetion the Cello Concerto reerence briely betokened is here stood on its head, or at least urgently challenged. The genesis of the up-beat motif can also be traced back as far as the irst movement (see Ex. 3 .3a above). Its lyrical appearance there, organically woven into the fabric of the irst rioso, is transmuted into something steelier in the third movement (see Ex. 3.14 above) and into pure malevolence here at the opening of the ourth. This process of brutalizing a theme irst heard in lyrical guise is familiar rom Shostakovich's First Symphony on (see the irst movement, second subject, at ] and �) but most famously rom the irst­ movement development sections of the Fifth and Eighth Symphonies. In principle this is similr to the process already observed in the irst two movements of the Eighth Qurtet, where quoted material was made either more sorrowul or more violent than in its source. But this is the first time the Quartet has both quoted a theme 'in character' (the Cello Concerto theme -

at � and ]) and gone on to transmute that character. In other words, no knowledge of the original quoted source, or what it might 'stand or' , is necessary in order to register the sense of violation. A still wider ocus takes us urther outside the work, and, crucially, outside the Quartet's established procedure or self-quotation, which in the irst tree movements ran chronologically through Shostakovich's output. It takes us back to 1947-48 and to Shostakovich's ilm score to The Young Guard (Alexander Fadeyev's story of an underground youth organization in Ukraine during the Nazi occupation), where the same motif is the basis of the movement usually known as 'Death of the Heroes' , though titled 'Procession to Execution' in its irst publication (see below, Ex. 3.22b). This is clearly not only a musical source or both the Cello Concerto and the Quartet (and known as such rom earliest days22) but also a semantic association that chimes in with the surface character of the opening of the ourth movement and with the subtextual imagery of quotations still to come. Fadeyev's novel relates that beore their execution the young victims sang the very same revolutionary song that Shostkovich will quote in the second rioso at �-] (see below, Ex. 3 .24 and Appendix A) . What is happening in the oh movement is that the chronological aspect of self-quotation is being weakened, while the association of topic (speciically death and imprisonment) is strengthened. Not that we have to think of a ilmic procession to execution when we hear the opening Outburst, any more than we have to imagine · an actual knock on an actual door or even a split screen displaying both images. We are of course ree to think such thoughts when we consider where the music comes rom. But there is another kind of imagery we can hrdly escape - of ateul challenge in a psychological sense - and this is orced on us by the power of harmony, structural context and gesture, and by the power of music-historical resonances beyond Shostakovich's own works. For example, the gesture of three slow up-beats ollowed by inimical repeated notes recalls the opening of 'Scrbo' rom Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. Admittedly the afinity depends in part on the act that most pianists play the up-beats much more slowly than Ravel's requested modere; however, there is additional support or the idea in harmonic terms, particularly when the second appearance of Shostakovich's Outburst gesture is examined (Ex. 3 .22a, c). As or the anapest repeated chords, their pedigree extends back to the inale of Beethoven's Op. 135,23 a particularly suggestive resonance, since this is a 108

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

22 Dolzhansky 1 965 , p. 50. 23 See Kramer 2002, p . 238 , where the Shostakovich example is (revealingly)

mistranscribed.

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis Ex. 3.22

109

(a) Fourth movement, Outburst 2; (b) The Young Guard, 'Death of the Heroes', opening; (c) Ravel 'Scarbo', opeing

b)

l!�f?l;:1= � c)

Modere

,urdine

late Beethoven string quartet (about as high in philosophical terms as a composer can aim; recall Shostakovich's reerence to Op. 1 3 1 at the opening of his irst movement) and moreover a amous instance of Beethoven inscribing his score with a motto: 'Muss es sein?' (Must it be?) In a sense Shostakovich simply intensiies that question and takes its answer deadly seriously. Finally, if there is anywhere in the Eighth Quartet that accounts or Shostakovich's cryptic remark to Glikman concerning a reerence to Siegried's uneral music rom Wagner's Gotterdimmerung (see Appendix B, 1), this must be it: the resemblance between their peremptory repeated-note chords is slight, but the programatic association of a hero's uneral certainly chimes in with the. Young Guard reerence and with the movement's central Arioso.

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

1 10

Evidently a complex network of intrinsic and extrinsic factors underpins the opening of Shostakovich's ourth movement. Imagery of disquiet and challenge is given artistic precision by mid-range harmonic tensions, and the resultant negativity establishes a powerful orce-ield or the rest of the movement. Arioso I

( J-M

After the F sharp major cadence, the vn. 1 line recalls the Dies iae link into the ourth movement, as though the whole dramatic process of torpor ollowed by challenge is going to be repeated sequentially, possibly beginning with another appearance of the Outburst chords at � . The unison f entry of the lower instruments at this point is a meaningul contradiction of that expectation. In efect it negates negativity and seeks a new kind of airmation, the lik being strongly orged by dynamics and scoring (the lower three instruments in octaves). By virtue of the solidity of the dominant-tonic move this gambit confirms the hrmonic orientation of the preceding Outburst music as a delayed resolution to C sharp minor, The pedal a#, as it tuns out, was really a suspended major sixth degree in that key, analogous to the ll" suspended over the G minor Scherzo reprise in the third movement (rom �). The pedal-point will be further 'dealt with' in the contrapuntal inner voice to come (still on vn. 1 , rom � ), while the beginning-accented anapest quavers once again become end-accented and melodically directed (see Ex. 3 .23a, esp. � - �). The course of the ourth movement now shadows that of the irst, in its move to an Arioso that is conessional in tone and ensrines a semi-allusion. In this instance the semi-allusion is to the passacaglia theme rom the entr'acte between Scenes 4 and 5 in Act 2 of The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District just after Katerina Izmaylova has murdered her tyrannical ather-in-law, where the composer orces us to register the ull horror that none of the chracters on stage displays. The Quartet Arioso's C sharp minor tonality and latter-than­ minor modal degrees (minor second, diminished ourth, diminished ifth, diminished seventh and a hint of the diminished octave) are identical with that passacaglia. (For a very similar mode with the same tonic, see the Scherzo theme in the inale of the Fouth Symphony at l167l - l1 68 I and the second movement of the Seventh Qurtet at � - � ; all these are examples of what Alexander Dolzhansky has dubbed the 'Alexandrian pentachord' .24) The act 24 See Cpenter 1 995 , pp . 92-98 .

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis Ex. 3.23

111

(a) Fourth movement, Arioso 1 ; (b) The Ldy Macbeth of Mtsensk Disict, Interlude between Scenes 4 and 5

a)

.__., == = col'� - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - _ J

,

cresc. ::: col' � _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ - - - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ f _____________J

1 .. I � :

"

If >" - ·

"F" . >

-._

�>r· �r·f· >

dim.

�

>r I

dim. >�

,.

r

. -

f

P=,..

..

- r, e p di•

coll' _ _ _ _ _ _ - - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ - - -- - ------ -- - -- - - - -- --���: - _ _ _ - - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ - _ _ �- - - _ - - _ - - _ _ J

that this mode is ounded on the same (unordered) intervals as DSCH is a coincidence that can scarcely have escaped Shostakovich's notice, at least by the time of his Eighth Quartet (Ex. 3 .23) . The Arioso theme could itself easily have become a passacaglia, independent in material rom the rest of the work and analogous to . the ourth movement of the Eighth Symphony. Instead Shostakovich has his eye on a structural connection with his irst movement, where Ariosos over

112

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

pedal-points dominated the central phase. The rioso consists of eight our­ bar units, reinorced at their outset by ull dotted minims in the melody, most of them tied over to minims or dotted minims: rom � the counterpoint on vn. 1 joins in emphasizing the irst bar of each our. The frst ive units orm an expanded 8+ 12-bar composite phras� (to recreate the hypothetical 8+8 model, imagine an elision rom 5� to 9�) . This is balanced by an 8+4-bar composite rom � (again, to recreatethe 8+8 model, imagine either �5-a or �9-12 repeated), which also serves to prepare the ground motivically or Arioso 2. In the bufer zone beore Arioso 2 (]- �) , the Outburst theme retuns, now more stabilized in C sharp minor (see Ex. 3 .22a above). The rhythmic diminution of the up-beat igure at ]1 is efective not only as a further impacting of the Cello Concerto motif but also as a oil to the re-augmentation of the dotted minim 'up-beats' at 3� . The latter introduce a transposed DSCH motif, punningly reerring back to the flatter-than-minor mode of Arioso 1 and once again emblematically identifying the composer with the unereal intonations of the surounding music. As beore (2�), a pedal g# is the thread of consciousness that links to the ollowing section. Arioso 2 (�-�)

With rioso 2 we arrive at the compassionate heart of the Quartet. By contrast with Arioso 1 this is marked not f espress. but pp poco espress. , perhaps as a wning to irst violinists not to play the prima donna. With the exception of the hairpin diminuendo on the last note, there is not a single dynamic inlection indicated in the theme. We have moved, it would seem, rom a loud, personal declaration (rioso 1) to a soft, communal one. Virtually every commentry devoted to the Eighth Quartet mentions the source of this Arioso as the revolutionary song amuchen yazholoy nevoley (among many possible variants I avour the translation Tormented by Harsh Captivity).25 However, none, so far as I know, reproduces the text or music of the song or even points to where these may be ound in print or on record. There is in act no deinitive source, but all printed versions, at least one recording, and all Russians I have asked, agree that it is always sung in duple or quadruple metre. Shostakovich's triple sub-divisions may then relect a conscious choice to smooth the rhythmical edges and, perhaps, not to pre-empt the duple sub-divisions of the Lady Macbeth quotation to ollow. Published 25 Occasionally, however, its appearance in the Quartet is misidentiied as the passage I have described as Arioso 1 - see e.g. Rowland and George 1982, p . 23 .

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

113

versions show several minor variants to the melody, particulrly as regards the last phrase. Shostakovich ollows Mihail Druskin's 1954 study of Russian revolutionary song in not repeating the inal prase, but he rejects Druskin's version of the melody at this point (see Ex. � .24b).26 It was well known that this song was a avourite of Lenin's, and it remains an open question whether and in what way this fact might be relevant to Shostkovich's choice - whether, in other words, it might betoken some kind of genuine tribute to Lenin (particularly in view of the Lenin-based Twelfth Symphony he was already mulling over and which he would compose the ollowing year) or whether (as Richard Taruskin assumes21) it was part of a strategy or the potential deniability of more subversive intentions. For a full text, translation and urther inormation on the provenance of the song see Appendix A. The revolutionary song stands out rom the musical abric of the ourth movement and of the Quatet as a whole or two main reasons. First, its phrase structure is entirely regular: our eight-bar phrases, the irst two more or less synonymous, the last two used as a balancing answer in a classical sentence structure. Secondly, its melody falls entirely within the natural minor (Aeolian) mode. In both respects it registers as a clriication of Arioso 1 , where the same number of bars were more irregulrly subdivided and where the basis of the melody was one of Shostakovich's very personal latter-than­ minor modes. The vn. 2 counterpoint in Arioso 2 initially moves in the same low register as that of vn. 1 in Arioso 1 , but then arcs up above the tonic at the overlap between the two halves of the song (a move highlighted by the hairpin inlection at s-2 � ) . Anyone who doubts Shostakovich's ear or expressive counterpoint should perhaps y to invent an altenative vn. 2 line comparable to his in economy and pathos . As in Arioso 2 in the irst movement @ )- ] ), the viola and cello pedal-point reinorces the sense of listening to an important statement. The end of Arioso 2 is decorated with an orthodox plagal cadence in the lower parts ( j 24) which is then echoed and extended in a variant progression that altenates the tonic with G minor rather than F sharp minor harmony. This 26 Other published versions of the song may be found in 16 massovich revolyutsionnich pesen (dlya gitari) [ 1 6 Revolutionary Songs (or guitar)] (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1 932) , p. 4, and Antologiya sovetskoy khorovoy muzici [An Anthology of Soviet Choral Music] , vol . 1 (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1 988), p. 7 (arrange­ ment by Boris Shekhter) . 27 Taruskin 1 997 , -p . 495 .

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

1 14 Ex. 3.24

(a) Fourth movement, Arioso 2; (b) Zamuchen yazhooy nevoey

[Largo � =

a)

m

�b)

&•1 ;I &• F

138)

J i J F ) JJ. � F --

- be

Jp F p �I

za

na - rod -no -ye

[From Druskin

1 954, pp. 4243 .

de

-

-

ley,

lo

ty

zhil,

F

F

slo - zhil,

�I J J J

ty

0

go

-

IJ

J 1

�- �I r·

pp

8 J JI .

v

0

go

lo - vu chest

-

-

J J

lo - vu

F

chest

t II

) J I.

no

slo - zhil .

.

no

�I

v bor'

go - lo - u chest - no slo - zhil.

b. 7

7 p I

J

ty slav-no -yu smer- t'yu pochil . . .

For translation see Appendix A]

variant as sung on Melodiya 3308 697- 8700

&• J

'

f J JJ

Za - mu - chen tya- zho-loyne - v

JI

t

slo -

II

unusual cadence eels natural, partly because it harmonizes the modal diminished-seventh and diminished-octave degrees that have been a principal contrapuntal ingredient in both Ariosos. It also recalls the tritonal opposition of C shrp and G inors present rom the Outbursts at the beginning of the movement. In act we ight reasonably expect this tonal opposition to retun at this point in Outburst gestures, by analogy with � - � . Their suppression may suggest that Shostakovich was aware of the danger identiied by Taruskin (of 'strtling juxtapositions . . . reiterated until they become failir' : see

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

1 15

p. 21 above). Instead, this echo of the Outbursts' harmonic basis allows the structure to remain relatively ree-lowing, while the harmonic, and thereore expressive, ocus . of the movement remains tight. The second phase of this linking section (rom ] ) · initially suggests a possible lead back to the revolutionary song, built as it is on the same rocking rhythms and regular our-bar phrase structure. In act these bars are an allusion to the third movement of the Eleventh Symphony, which are in tum based, at least according to Lebedinsky, on the revolutionary song 'Welcome, the Free Word of Liberty' (heard at 11081 in that �ork)28 (Ex. 3 .25). In the Qurtet these bars continue the plagality of the first part of the lik, dwelling on the F shrp element; in act resolution to the tonic will be delayed until the second half of Arioso 3 . When the violins' a � inlects to a # @]9-10), F sharp major briely eels lke the tonic. This inlection too has more than local signiicance, given that the 'problem' of A#/m within a C sharp minor context has been vital to the intenal ebb and low of this undamentally tonally static movement. The pp marking just beore this point acknowledges its poignancy, just in case a violinist might be too unmusical to react.

Arioso 3 ( j - @)

The irst violin raises the poignant A# towards the light (3�), drawing vn. 2 upwards with it. The cello now has its second opportunity in the work to sing out in its highest register (the frst was at �-� in the third movement). Arioso 3 quotes rom Katerina Izmaylova's music in Act 4 of Lady Macbeth, where, her murders having been discovered, she is being marched in a prison­ gang through Siberia. At night she comes to the men's quarters to ind her lover, Sergey, previously the oreman on her estate and the man on whose behalf and with whose complicity she has committed her isdeeds. Ignorant of the fact that Sergey has meanwhile cooled towards her and is tuning his attentions elsewhere, she tells him how much she has missed him during the day (Ex. 3 .26) . In the theatre this short-lived moment is touching in its dramatic irony, since the only person unaware of Sergey's callousness is Katerina herself - a vital step along Katerina's road to heartbrek, despar and suicidal vengefulness. In the Quartet the absence of stage action is amply compensated or by the richer musical context; apart rom which there is another potent musico-symbolic dimension to consider. This quotation sets the seal on the ourth movement's concatenation of 28 Lebedinsky 1 960 , p. 25 . I have not been able to verify this claim.

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

1 16 Ex. 3.25

�b)

(a) Symphony No. 11, third movement; (b) Quartet No. 8, ourth movement, link between Arioso 2 and 3

(Adagio J=72 (poco piu mosso))

l�f 1 t. �t l ! : I

emblems of imprisonment and death. At this symbolic level it takes the communal tone of rioso 2 (the revolutionary song mouning a fallen com­ rade) back into the realm of the personal (the composer's empathy with his operatic heroine, as in rioso 1 , but now shaded more with pathos than with horror) . This Arioso is again built on our-bar units, but with rather more lexibility than Arioso 2; it scans as three units ollowed by our, with an elision between the two large phrase composites (� 1 2 being the conclusion of one and the beginning of the other) . The harmonic basis at this point - F sharp major - is the key of the tenderest moments between Katerina and Sergey in the opera (see, or example, Act 2 l 3 1 3 l - l3 t 6 I ), as it is of the tierce de picardie with which the Seventh Quartet ends (that being the work dedicated to the memory of Shostakovich's first wie) . Quite apart rom its immediate context, then, this key suggests connotations of love and serenity. Arioso 3's prolonged initial emphasis on F sharp major harmony, inlected by neighbouring gx ' and ex ' in the violins, expands on the plagal tendency rom the previous link passage. The third our-bar unit (�9-1 2) returns to the movement's overall tonic of C sharp - inlecting the gx' as a�' , and conirming that the F sharp harmony was really only part of an extended plagal cadence. In the context of the movement as a whole, rioso 3 stands out because it is in C sharp major and inlected by a sharpened ifth, whereas the previous

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis Ex. 3.26

1 17

a) Fourth movement, Arioso 3; (b) The Lady Macbeth of Msensk

Disrict, Act 4 a)

� b)

]2

l . I

[Adagio J=76) '

I

Se ryo

l1 I

I

-

:

l . I.

I :

..

'

-- -

-

-

�

•

Ved' tse - liy den' s to - boy ne

:. .

-

-

kho-ro - shiy

zha,

=-

..

\1 I

I

-

-

-

-

� -

I

vi - de - las',

I�

-

"

-

Na-ko-nets

moy !

-

Se

-

-

-

to !

, ·� -

-

ryo " -

-

-

-

zha

-

I --

.

[Seryozha, my dearest! At last! I have not seen you all day, Seryozha.]

Ariosos were in C sharp 'latter-than-minor' mode, then C sharp Aeolian (natural minor) . Taken together, then, the three Ariosos display a progressive sharpening of mode, as well as a rise in tessitura (see Ex. 3 .27 below), and this serves to place Arioso 3 on a pedestal. The act that so little of the work has

118

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

been in the major mode reinorces the sense of pathos, making good the loss of the operatic original's dramatic irony; in addition, the cellist is reer to nuance the line against the held notes of the three accompanying strings than was the soprano in the opera against her pulsed orchestral background. Outburst 3/Arioso 2 ( �-@)

At 2 � the viola's held c# liks naturally with a retun of the opening gesture of Outburst. This lacks its previously unsettling pedal-point, and the repeated­ note chords mutate rom diminished to minor thirds, taking over the A# of the 'missing pedal-point' in preerence to their previous Aqs. The opening strain of the revolutionary song of Arioso 2 retuns con sordino (J1). Its concluding d#' pivots enharmonically to become the first note of another Dies irae head­ motif, punning with the E� of DSCH. This conjunction of Outburst motif, revolutionary song, Dies iae and DSCH is richly emblematic, identifying the composer, as Taruskin has noted (see Ch. 1 , p. 21 above) with the imagery of oppression running right through the ourth movement, and confirming him as ellow-victim, or at least as a witness. In this way the universal and personal aspects of sufering are symbolically drawn together. All this takes place amid the dying embers of the movement, where harmonic process is deliberately left vague, acilitating a retun without apparent exertion of will rom the ourth movement's C sharp minor to the Quatet's overall home key of C minor. In that sense this concluding phase is indeed 'inert' , to use Taniskin's pejoratively intended description of the entire ourth movement (see p. 21 above); its metabolic rate has slowed close to the point of expiration. Yet viewed in a broader perspective, this inetia is expressively precise. It tkes place at the far end of a process wherein individual protest (Arioso 1) has given way to communal compassion (Arioso 2), empathy (Arioso 3) and now inally self-identiication and witness-bearing. These are not the only terms that could be applied; diferently nuanced perormances would in tum nuance one's reactions. The point is that there is a progression, supported by the interplay of musical elements. The essence of this is the modal brightening as the mood interiorizes, then harmonic dispersal as the movement fades into the next. In this interplay of surface gesture (what Russian theorists call 'intonation') and overall structure, the modality, mid- and long-range harmonic continuity, prase structure, register and instrumental colour are all active. In this sense 'inertia' is very much relative. Tonal uniormity masks modal multiormity, which binds the Ariosos together into one evolving musical/psychological process. Awareness of allusions and quotations adds to an appreciation of the music's provenance, but it by no means contradicts or

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

119

supersedes a response to its intrinsic musical drama, expressed in terms of challenge, response, protest and compassion, all precisely delineated by processes of artistic shaping. Fourth Movement: Summay

Several vital things are happening in respect of quoted material. This is the only movement in the Quartet that ref�rs to texted music, thereby making the semantic associations all the more suggestive. At the same time the revolutionary song is the only music not by Shostakovich himself that is unequivocally quoted (as opposed to being merely alluded to) . Both this song and the quotations rom and allusions to Lady Macbeth and The Young Guard depart rom the chronological sequence that has run through the work to this point. It is true, as Kadja Gronke has observed, that Shostkovich had ongoing plans, at that time still thwarted by oicialdom, to revise the opera with a view to its rehabilitation, and in that sense the appearance of material rom Lady Macbeth here does no more than bring the chronological retrospective right up to date.29 Yet the act remains that the choice of quotations in the ourth movement represents a shift away rom the personal towards universal themes. It is a pivot rom one ' story' to another; and it will be or the inale to confrm the nature of that altenative story. In character and structure the ourth movement closely parallels the first, with its three Ariosos spaced by punctuating motifs in a Largo tempo. But the riosos are now more overtly songul, by virtue of their long, arching lines and squarer prase construction. The main structural diference is that in the irst movement Arioso 2 stood at the centre-point of an arch-like structure, with Arioso 3 unctioning as a reworking of Arioso 1 , whereas in the ourth movement riosos 1 and 3 are melodically unrelated and take their place in a continuously evolving musical and programmatic process, ending ultimately in disintegration rather than with neat, rounding-of cadences. At this point it may be worth considering aspects of non-recapitulation trough the work as a whole. In the irst movement the opening ugato is conspicuous by its non-appearance in the inal section. In the second movement all the material reappears in the concentrated space of the irst restatement, but the conclusion is doubly cut of, interrupting the Trio's quoted 'Jewish' theme in mid-phrase and witholding a balancing second retun of the Scherzo. In the third movement the cello melody of Trio section E has no 29 Groke 2002, pp . 57-5 8 .

1 20

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

restatement, and once again there is no balancing second retun of the Scherzo. The ourth movement's conclusion trails of, as in the preceding Allegretto . The non-rounded conclusions of movements 2, 3 and 4 are straightforward devices, analogous to cinematographic cuts and dissolves, or ensuring large­ scale musical continuity: each succeeding movement is, as it were, drawn into the vacuum left by its predecessor. But in addition the last movement will reer to crucial aspects of their non-recapitulated material - namely the irst movement's DSCH ugato, the 'latter-than-minor' modal construction of the third movement's section E and of the ourth movement's Arioso 1 , and the ourth movement's reerences to Lady Macbeth. It is the musical precision with which Shostakovich will deal with all these loose ends that will seal the Eighth Quartet's claim to 'perfection of orm' (to use Shostakovich's inverted self-deprecatory term in his letter to Glikman, given in Appendix A below). From a Schekerian point of view nothing at all happens in the ourth movement, since apart rom the link rom the opening Outburst into Arioso 1 , the entire harmonic content consists of modal shadings of the tonic C sharp. Harmonic mobility is provided in Outburst 1 by the altenation of C sharp and G minors, itself a carry-over rom the third movement, and across the three Ariosos by a careully graded use of modal degrees, rom latter-than-minor ('Alexandrian'), to natural minor (Aeolian), to major (Ionian) with shrper­ than-major inflections. Between and within these stable modes, various subtle relationships are embedded. The most signiicant of these is the AVA# oscillation, heard at its clearest in the extended plagality of the link between Arioso 2 and 3 and in Arioso 3 itself. This is ultimately traceable to the impacted harmony in the drone/Outburst motif of the opening bars of the movement (Ex. 3 .27) . Fifth Movement:

Largo

What kind of movement would adequately round of the Eighth Quartet? Would a ast inale, with an assertive, positive outcome, be conceivable? Hardly so, perhaps, or anyone amiliar with the work, though it is worth remembering that Shostakovich did conceive precisely such conclusions or his Ninth and Twelth Quartets, despite their no less dark, tentatively probing irst movements. In a work as symphonically conceived as the Eighth Quartet - where range of character is symbiotic with strategies of integration - nothing is predestined. So in choosing to close the rame with a slow movement that picks up on the material of the first, Shostakovich was taking just one of several possible options. Potentially it was an easy one, of course, in that he

Ex. 3.27

Fourth movement, analytical reduction

Edy Macbeth passacaglia] �

I Outburst I I

I Arioso I I

m

"

I�: '.###

=

:

· ·· "·

-

-

. L

· ..� ·� � -

-

I Arioso l I

I t•

•

• q • !•

.

�-

I

) Arioso 3 I

I Outburst 2 I Arioso 2 I

Lady Macbeth

@

I

I Outburst 31Aribso 2 I

l

L

l �n t 1 t 1 1 �

:

-

-

· ·· · · ·

· ·· · ·

I t•

-

I Arioso 2 1 t•

• II• #•

...

. !•

I

-

I t•

-

I Arioso 3 I «) #• •· # t• #• • •·

I

I

1 22

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

would be drawing heavily on pre-fabricated material; he had tried out something broadly similar in his Seventh Quartet just months previously. But the way he chose to go about the actual composition this time was far more demanding. The very ending of the work would not be the problem, since the irst movement ofered several ready-made solutions or a coda that would trail of into silence. Even so, to achieve greater inality than those parallel places in the first movement demanded sureness of timing and a proound instinct or large-scale checks and balances. The ourth movement has already responded to the first movement's three Ariosos, recasting that design in such a way as to suggest a shift in the condition of self-quotation, rom autobiography towards universality. The remaining problem is what to do with the first movement's truncated ugato. Not only was this not recapitulated in the later stages of that movement, but it had already proved itself incapable of unolding as a 'proper' ugue. Instead it gave way to a paradigm shift into quotation and reminiscence, setting the rest of the work on its necessarily idiosyncratic course. What essentially happens in the inale is that this paradigm shift is 'corrected' . The irst movement's unrealized ugue is here ully composed and quotation all but disappears. In this way the karma of reminiscence and self-relection is broken (Fig. 3. 7) . Exposition 1

(]-j)

When the cello takes up the DSCH motif at the tempo of the first movement, it seems that we have come full circle and that the laments and protests of the intervening movements have brought about no deeper wisdom. The accompanying vn. 1 line creates an overlap rom the ourth movement, using material rom the irst (the link between riosos 1 and 2 at ] ). Only with the entry of the viola is the inale set on its unique course. The 'rioso link' material opens up new possibilities or the ugal texture: paradoxically so, because what it seems to do is to orce the cello's DSCH ugue subject to mark time beore the next entry - something a textbook ugue should never allow. What Shostakovich is doing here is to use the link as the melodic model or a new aster-moving counterpoint, which he will lay under the second half of the ugue subject (cello 3-2m, cf. vn. 1 �34). This new counterpoint, bracketed on Example 3 .28 , becomes a regular counter-subject to the inale's irst two ugal expositions, creating clashes of an almost Purcellian poignancy (# 7 against �7 . though Purcell would never have countenanced such dissonances on strong beats and without melodic preparation) . These clashes, emphasized by tenuto marks in the score, are an expressive

�

]

•1

l

]

�

Fugal Exposition 1

Exposition 2 (Middle entries)

Climax zone; cadence

Exposition 3 (Stretto)

DSCH; First Symphony quotation

Cadence

ady Macbeth allusion to the ore (rom 3l)

Retun of frst movement opening . Muted

Smoothed out. ady Macbeth allusion instead of original extension

dim. to p

pp

p espress.

New countersubject (allusion to ady Macbeth)

p

Fig. 3.7

cesc. to f

Fifth movement: overview

pp cresc. to f espress. , dim. to pp morendo

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

1 24 Ex. 3.28

(a) Fifth movement, Exposition 1; (b) Purcell, Fantazia 4, opening; (c) The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Disict, Act 4, opening

� Largo d = 63

a)

" J

q-

' ::

:

� b)

"

J

:

c)

;J

._; � .. +� � == -

..

p

�

p

J.

�Adagio � = 76 f

�

n , -J .;. )' =

�:

I

::P1

j

' , --,,

I

:::.!

-

--

' I

tF

'I

I

1 .� -

�.

#\ �.

, � ...

-

_

1, 1 .:,

L-

1-.

..J

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

1 25

'tender spot' in the music, relieved somewhat by the descending sequence. At the same time the phenomenon of the regular counter-:subject is the irst of several sympt9ms of strict ugal composition, of a kind the frst movement did not display. The next symptom is that the succeeding entries in Exposition 1 no longer arive as stretto overlaps but are properly spaced - in act with one bar more than 'proper' spacing. This extra space allows or the sequential extension of the counter-subject and provides long-delayed compensation or the overlapping of subject entri?s in the irst movement's fugato. In addition the pattern of entries conforms to the textbook model of tonic-dominant-tonicdominant, whereas the first movement's ourth entry was at the anomalous subdominant level. The rhythm of the counter-subject and its relation to the subject are perfectly in accord with Baroque practice (as in the C sharp minor Fugue rom Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One, shown in Ex. 3.lb above) . But it also has a semantic aspect peculiar to Shostakovich, since the gesture (melody and rhythm combined) once again alludes to Lady Macbeth, where it appears on three occasions, each time related to the notion of sleeplessness.30 The most striking of these appearances is at the beginning of the inal act, where the prison-gang is marching wearily across Siberia (see Ex. 3 .28c; here too the motif ollows directly on rom a painul �7M dissonance). Proximity to the quotation rom that same Act (outh movement Arioso 3 , rom �), and to the revolutionary song about death in imprisonment (Arioso 2, rom �) suggests that an association of topic may well have been in the composer's mind. At the same time, by casting his new Lady Macbeth reerence as a regular ugal counter-subject he absorbs it into the higher, consoling realm of Music. At any rate this last extrinsic motivic reerence is seamlessly woven into the abric of the ugal texture, rather than standing out as something to be identiied and pondered or possible semantic signiicance. As in the ourth movement, Shostakovich is ushering us gently towrds new levels of meaning. There ollows a brief connecting episode (3-1 ]), another standard ugal device of course, often, as here, involving a reduced number of voices as a breathing space between passages of greater contrapuntal density. Motivic�lly these bars re based on the counter-subject (vn. 2 3- 1 ] , cf. vc. 3-2 �). Harmonically they leave several possibilities open, including a retun rom the G minor at the end of Exposition 1 to the tonic C minor. Instead the entry of vn. 1 at ] confirms a semitone side-step to A lat minor.

30 See

Fanning 1995 , pp . 1 4749 .

xposition 2; Climx one (] - J) 1 26

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

The prime unction of 'middle entries' in a ugue is to introduce tonal variety. In a Bachian ugue these entries are almost invariably in keys closely related to the tonic (no more than one sharp or lat away in terms of key signature). In his inale Shostakovich, rom the same premise, allows himself reer rein yet also conceives the most densely composed music in the entire Quartet. Re ollows a common patten of middle entries by introducing them in two pairs (vn. 1 and cello ollowed by viola and cello) . In each pair the temporal spacing of entries is more regular (which is to say more concentrated) than in Exposition 1 , while between the pairs contrapuntal activity is drastically reduced and the original temporal spacing adhered to. The counter-subject moves into greater prominence. In the irst middle-entry pair ( ] - D ) it its against each bar of the subject and is then given one bar entirely to itself (1D). In the second pair ]1-1) it alls rom view, in preparation or its crucial role in the cadential extension to come. Tonally these iddle entries range far outside the Broque key orbit, exploring progressively latter regions and thereby escaping the gravitational pull of self-reerentiality. The notation here is deceptive. In the cadence at 2 l, the viola rests on d�' . which is the local tonic, while the cello is adjusted enharmonically to c#" .31 As at the end.of the ourth movement the notation in sharps is clearly no more than a practical convenience, since the music continues to move latwards. To have retained 'true' notation - i.e. in lats - would have led into the outlandish­ looking key of F lat minor at @ 14, with a triple lat in the viola where the hrmony is an altered dominant ninth of this key (at 2- 1 � ) . This extraordinary latness relative to the C minor tonic (eight steps around the crcle of ifths) is in act crucial to the dark expressive efect of the music, and in order to appreciate this efect to the ull it is worth renotating the passage enharmonically (Ex. 3 .29) . Contrary to textbook decorum, vn. 2 is denied an entry in Exposition 2. This is in order to allow the cello to have the entry at ] 4 in the plangent high register that has eatured so prominently in the previous two movements (it would have been easy to contrive the episode rom 3ll or viola and cello rather than or vn. 2 and viola, thereby allowing the entry at � 4 to be on vn. 2 in an unremarkable register). This moment of intense lyrical pathos or the 3 1 This would seem to argue against the suggestion that players would do well to adopt non-equal-tempered tuning in the work: see Jackson 1 998 , pp . 63 1-32. For an exploration of similar tonal pathways , involving enharmonic renotation, see the slOw movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in C minor, D95 8 .

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis Ex. 3.29

1 27

Fifth movement, Exposition 2 (eharmonically renotated)

1:;, 1r1: 1f:1 l

�

I

�

� :

1

�I :�

:

l

.

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cello ·signals a urther shift away rom ugal strictness towards a synthesis with the never-very-distant lyrical-conessional tone. The irst violin's new stepwise counterpoint at � continues this process, picking up on hints rom earlier in the movement ( � 4 and 2- 1 j) . It directs the music �ith individualistic willpower towards higher regions, linking up with the pitch level that the high cello has just relinquished. It drives on sequentially towards the expressive apex of the movement, where vn. 1 has an augmentation of the counter-subject (4 ]) , its a" really being a hyper-poignant b' , marked, with restraint and artistic precision, with a single . From this point ugal activity ceases altogether, making way or a prolonged cadential extension worked around the counter-subject in the viola (2 ] - l 1 ) . Overall, then, Exposition 2 moves sealessly rom the relative monumentality of (lyrical)

1 28

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

ugue to the relatively personal realm of song with (contrapuntal) accompaniment. The ascending tendency of Exposition 2 (rom @), led by vn. 1 , is now balanced by a slow, undulating descent (rom 4 ] ) , until the crucial DSCH level is reached (]2) and the long anticipated cadence can be confirmed, still animated by the counter-subject in the viola. At the same time the harmony rapidly returns rom the extreme lat side to the tonic (see Ex. 3 .29). At the ocal point of the DSCH motif - vn. l 's b' at 1 4 - there is a reminder of the structural prominence of F lat (major) in the tree upper lines. This is of course no more than a decorated restatement of the cadence that led into Arioso 3 in the irst movement (l- J). But placed here, the F lat major harmony strongly echoes the latward harmonic trajectory of Exposition 2 , as if to conirm that the inale's drive towards F� was always an organic outgrowth of elements of the irst movement. Ultimately it derives rom the irst movement's melodic and harmonic vacillations, all the way back to the point where the tone of the work first modulated rom 'abstract' ugato into 'concrete' self-quotation (with the cello's ll at ]). At this point (�4) Shostakovich could easily . have contrived another Purcellian scrunch, with vn. 2 taking the counter-subject W against vn. l 's b�' . But he is saving this moment or later (speciically, or 7). As the other parts come to rest on the tonic, the viola counter-subject continues to descend, eventually itself settling or the irst time on the tonic. Then comes a moment of extraordinarily telling simplicity - a bar of measured silence, ollowed by the viola's tree bars repeated an octave higher by vn. 2 alone, with the last interval widened so as to lead on more naturally to the retun of the irst movement's ugato. This means that the Lady Macbeth 'sleeplessness' motif has been placed centre-stage, in a manner it never was in the opera. But that somehow matters less than the fact that one of the main musical animating orces of the last movement - the counter-subject - has at last been given its own voice: the quiet, but ininitely suggestive, voice of Music. Apart rom anything else, this is the only time in the entire work that the spotlight has fallen on vn. 2 - in compensation, perhaps, or its having been denied a statement of the ugue subject in Exposition 2. Exposition 3-End ( ! - ll1 2)

The second halves of movements 3 , 4 and 5 all contain signiicant passages restating material with added mutes. This is hardly a subtle ploy, achieving as it does a signiicant performative nuance without compositional efort. In previous quartets Shostakovich had made similar use of the muted timbre, and

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

1 29

often with a similar distancing efect; once again the late stages of the Seventh Quartet (rom ll) ofer a suggestive comparison. But never had he left the material itself so unvaried. The last page of the Eighth Quartet reaches all the way back to the opening of the irst movement, placing everything in between as a kind of lashback to the world of action rom a point of reflection - as do Captain Vere's monologues in Britten's Billy Budd and countless other raming devices in novels, plays and operas. Everything is seemingly as it was. We are left with the intensiied sadne�s of painul events re-experienced but also absorbed and viewed rom a higher perspective. A true artistic monument has been raised. In claiming this, I have reached the opposite conclusion to Lawrence Kramer's. He argues that, 'Instead of transiguring the anguish of the opening ugue, the closing ugue heightens it' (Kramer 2002, p. 235). But that view relies on the premise that the irst movement is a ugue, which it maniestly is 'not. And the act that the last movement is indeed a ugue - and one of such compelling musical logic - is surely about as powerful an indication of anguish transigured as could be imagined. That is not to say that there is no sense of 'heightening' , rather that the music does not acknowledge Kramer's dichotomy at all. The Eighth Quartet is not necessarily a tragedy pure and simple; though admittedly a lachrymose approach to the last movement on the part of the players could make it seem like that. Nor by any stretch of the imagination can it be considered a 'pseudo-tragedy' , as Kramer assets (ibid., p. 241); certainly no performance known to me would justify such a description. Rather the inale may be viewed as a tragedy transigured; and I believe that this is the way most ensembles instinctively respond to it. In Exposition 3 (rom j) the notated nuances encourage the performers to acnowledge this new wisdom. Apart rom the addition of mutes, the overall dynamic marking is now pp, where it was p, and the viola at 3J is no longer 'sola' - the poco espress. marking sufices. Strikingly, too, there is no longer a sf marking at the end of the last DSCH motif l3; cf. ]), since that moment of paradigm shift into quotation/reminiscence no longer needs to : be underlined. Indeed the moment needs not to be underlined, precisely in order to maintain the mood of philosophical relection. When the First Symphony quotation reappears, at J-7, it too is re-rticulated, with the same legato bowing as the ugal expositions, and its continuation is deleted in avour of the ugal counter-subject. The Purcellian dissonance strategically avoided at �4 now rematerializes at ]1, the viola dies away, as beore lingering on after the cadence, and the latent ainity of the counter-subject with the sigh motifs of the irst movement is made maniest (rom 2�). This long drawn-out sigh will be the last motif to sound in the work - in

1 30

Shostakovich: String Quatet No. 8

vn. 1 , after a inal DSCH cadence and rocking motif. In this way the unity of the personal and the universal is sealed. As at the conclusion of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov (revised version, 1 872) , where the Holy Fool sings of the etenal woes of Russia, the last sounds are an oscillation rom the lat sixth degree of the scale to the ith. In Musorgsky's inal bars there is no supporting harmony whatsoever. In Shostakovich's the harmonic suppot is an open ifth. And however the players choose to shade this conclusion, the laws ' of acoustics dictate that a aint major third - an Eq yet again - will resonate above the inal chord, as an unnotated overtone to the harmonic series expressed by all our instruments.32 This tinge of the major mode may represent no more than the merest glimmer of hope. Yet it is signiicantly distinct rom the abject gloom of a ull minor triad with no open strings, as, or instance, at the E lat minor conclusion of Shostakovich's Fifteenth Quartet. In this way, too, it is Music - the physical laws of music - that has the inal word. Fth Movement: Summay

Considering that the beginning of the work is inally recapitulated in the later stages of the last movement (beginning one bar in advance of its Golden Section, as it happens) it could be said that the inale has not only dealt with the most important issues left over rom previous movements but has also composed, in efect, the music 'beore the beginning' . It has inally given the entire Quartet the oundation it ' should have had' at the outset. The stretto element of Exposition 3 and its subdominant-level vn. 1 entry (16) were anomalous at the beginning of the work. But they are perfectly in place or the end of it, since the second half of a Baroque ugue is precisely where such eatures are most commonly ound. In act one of the two main types of Bachian ugue is the binary construction, with a strong central cadence point, after which intensifying techniques such as stretto, inversion, augmentation/ diminution and invetible countepoint may be introduced. Fugues 1 , 6 and 8 of The Well-Tempered Clavier work in this way; by contrast Fugues 2, 3 , 5 and 7 are episodic and contain no, or very ew, such devices. Taken as a whole, then, Shostakovich's ugal recomposition in the last movement gives us something very close to the principles of a Bachian binary ugue. Of course he strays well outside the boundaries of Baroque practice in terms of dissonance treatment and key scheme, which are determined by his personal style and by expressive purposes and structural relationships unique to the Eighth Quartet. 32 The only previous comentator to note this possibility is Ginzburg ( 1 96 1 ) , p . 332 and ( 1 97 1 ) , p . 205 .

The Eighth Quartet: An Analysis

131

Just as essential to the impact of the last movement is the fact that it is musically ully ormed and rounded of, whereas the first movement employed diversionary tactics - rom ugato to self-quotation to Arioso - and the two scherzo movements were telescoped in their later stages. and left incomplete, while th� Arioso-dominated ourth movement conormed to no inherited model but relected the idiosyncratic construction of the irst, leaving the anomalous failed fugue to be dealt with in the inale. Musical transcendence in the inale is thereore expressed at the level of overall design as well as in the local self-directedness of harmonic 'texture and in the vitual elimination of quoted material. In a work already unusual or Shostakovich in containing no movement in sonata orm, the fully worked-out ugue stands out as a region of concentrated musical experience. Even the elimination of the single-note crescendo, so prominent in all our previous movements, is emblematic of the shift away rom semantically charged gesture to pure(r) musical thought. At the most undamental level, there is no conlict between design and symbolism in this inale. And that may be just what it symbolizes - the healing, or at least the longed-or healing, of the rit between Shostakovich as Man and Shostakovich as Artist. As Esti Sheinberg observes (though not of the most appropriate movement): 'Through many other instances, such as the irst movement of his Eighth String Quartet op. 1 10 (1960) , the ugue is brought to the point that it becomes a symbol of his musical proession, in "Career", the ifth movement, in the Thirteenth Symphony "Babi-Yar" ( 1 962) .'33 That is a truth in need of elaboration. In the absence of a verbal text, the inale of the Eighth Quartet invites diferent reading rom that of the Thirteenth Symphony. It goes back to the placing of ugues at or near the end of extended character-vriation cycles, such as Beethoven's 'Diabelli' or Brahms's 'Handel' Variations, or indeed the Grosse Fuge originally at the end of Beethoven's B lat Quartet, Op. 130 . Each of these works has its own large-scale rationale. But what they have in common is the sense that beyond the worlds of eeling, action, mood and temporal existence in general, there lies a world of pure musical thought that has the potential to absorb and transcend all of them. ' Shostakovich's transcendence of the self-reerential tone of his previ6us movements depends equally on the proundity of his inale's relationship to those movements and on the details of its construction. The coarse elements of this relationship - the running tread of the DSCH motif, the deliberate non­ completion of the three inner movements and the resituation of the first movement's opening ugato as the concluding section of a binary fugue - are as important as the reined ones. As or the iner details, many of these can best 33 Sheinberg 2000 , p. 1 97 .

1 32

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8

be read rom a neo-Schenkerian reduction and rom a comparison of that with the reduction of the irst movement. The analysis shown in Example 3 .30 (cf. Ex. 3 .7 above) retains the notation in lats rom Example 3 .29. The most detailed middleground analysis in Example 3 .30 clariies the dissonance intensiication in Exposition 1 by comparison with the irst­ movement ugato, brought about by the presence of the counter-subject. It then highlights the role of the connecting passage at 4j {by comparison with the rst movement's quotation continuation at I 5 r) with its rising major thirds rather than falling minor thirds and its opening up to new harmonic regions rather than closing back to the tonic. Also clariied is the connection of the descending diatonicism of the counter-subject with the descending chromaticism of the inner voices in the inal cadences of the first and last movements (see, or example, the 'tenor' line rom ]1). The second-level middleground reveals deeper-lying orces, above all the harmonic mobility of Exposition 2 by comparison with anything in the first movement, its mirror-like harmonic construction (unlocking first the harmonic region of A lat, then F lat, then retracing its steps, beore inally granting the perfect cadence held over rom the end of Exposition 1 ) , and the role of m, taken rom the treble Ursatz of the irst movement and expanded to provide the structural F� harmony at the heart of Exposition 2. In this way the only glimmer of brightness in the first movement (Eq) becomes the extreme dark point (H) to which the inale is impelled. In Schenkerian terms the richly layered complexity of Exposition 2, by contrast with the relatively lat hierarchies of the other movements, is revealed as the most signiicant compositional eature of the entire work. Summary

This is the third of Shostakovich's quartets (after Nos. 5 and 7) to run without a break; Nos. 9, U and 1 5 are likewise continuous. In all these cases the last movement reers back to its predecessors, creating a compelling dramaturgical trajectory, but in many ways the inter-movement links in the Eighth Quartet are the most intriguing of all. Despite the irst movement's non-completion of its overall rch shape (i.e. the non-recapitulation of its ugato) it is at least locally complete and brought to rest, in that it ends with a irm perfect cadence in the tonic, which could otherwise easily have faded to nothing and allowed the Allegro molto second movement to restart after a conventional break. Instead of a ade-out, the crescendo link between the irst and second movements suggests a orcible shift rom one plane of experience to the other

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