Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio in E minor (1943–44) is a deeply elegiac composition, related conceptually to the piano trios that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed in honor of his mentor Nikolay Rubinstein, and that Sergei Rachmaninoff composed in honor of Tchaikovsky. Written amid World War II, Shostakovich’s trio memorializes the numerous friends and colleagues he lost during the Siege of Leningrad, the sacrifices of the Soviet people, and the Holocaust. While Shostakovich was completing the first of the trio’s four movements, he received word that his closest friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, had died; he became the score’s dedicatee. Shostakovich rehearsed the trio in Moscow, but reserved the premiere for November 14, 1944, in his birthplace of St. Petersburg (Leningrad), which had survived 872 days under the German blockade (September 1941–January 1944). He played the piano part, alongside violinist Dmitri Tsyganov and cellist Sergei Shirinsky, two founding members of the esteemed Beethoven Quartet. According to one member of the audience, “The music left a devastating impression. People cried openly.”

Introduction

Shostakovich is both the most famous composer from the Soviet Union and one of the most popular composers of the modern era. The range and size of his output eclipsed those of the composers he most admired: Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten, and (in the Russian context) Modest Mussorgsky. He served Soviet power, but also argued with it, reckoning in his chamber music with the failures of the Russian Revolution, the horrors of the Stalinist purges, and the trauma of World War II. His Second Piano Trio, completed near the end of the war, mourns the dead and laments the living—the people who survived, and their benumbed state.

History

Shostakovich dedicated the Second Piano Trio to Ivan Sollertinsky (1902–44), whom he had known since 1927. A polymath who lectured in the humanities and served as a creative advisor to orchestras and ballet companies, Sollertinsky was also Shostakovich’s creative advisor, and the letters between them are rich with insights into the workings of Soviet culture. These correspondences date from the late 1920s into the war years, when Shostakovich was in Kuybyshev (Samara) and Moscow, and Sollertinsky in Novosibirsk, working for the evacuated Leningrad Philharmonic. Food was rationed, Sollertinsky’s apartment had no heat, and although Shostakovich tried to arrange for his friend to be transferred to the Soviet capital, he failed.

Shostakovich: Trio No. 2 in E minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 67

Sollertinsky died in his sleep of heart failure in February 1944. The news reached Shostakovich through an obituary in the newspaper Sovetskaya Sibir’ (Soviet Siberia). He was inconsolable. “You and I will never see him again,” Shostakovich wrote to his assistant Isaak Glikman, who was then in Uzbekistan. “There aren’t words to express the grief tormenting my entire being.... I ask you: get some vodka from somewhere and we’ll take a drink (you in Tashkent, me in Moscow) on March 11, at 7 pm Moscow time to mark a month since the death of Ivan Ivanovich.”

Form

The first movement of the Second Piano Trio plays by the rules of sonata form, with an introduction, an exposition involving two themes, a development of those themes, and their recapitulation. It’s eerie and whimsical and ends in a dark place—with a violin line descending beneath the cello and piano in a texture of imitation between the three instruments that somehow also alienates them from each other. The second movement is a bleak, frantic rondo, and the third a brooding passacaglia, with each repetition of the harmonic pattern eerier than the one before. The final movement is a dance that, at the end, recalls material from the previous movements, but in an alien guise.

Analysis

The first movement opens with lonesome cello harmonics—created by pressing down on one note while lightly touching another to produce a soft pitch two octaves above—before passages of imitation between the instruments, at extreme registers, collapse into a pulsating second subject. The uppermost pitches are echoed at the lowest levels. Solid intervals between two simultaneous notes replace three-note and four-note chords, hollowing out the texture.

Sollertinsky’s sister heard something of his “con brio” (“lively”) speaking style in the scherzo second movement. Perhaps she also had in mind the movement’s ostentatious theatricality—how the dance-like second episode pushes aside the tortured, marcatissimo (strongly emphasized) swoops in the cello. The tune of the refrain, defined by leaps of a perfect fourth or perfect fifth, is contrastingly peppy. Shostakovich combines homophonic (chordal) and polyphonic (fugal) material: the music never flags. It’s an impetuously disorienting three minutes of music about a quirky individual—living, and then, just like that, gone.

The passacaglia third movement is built on eight heavy chords in the low register, repeated six times. As Sollertinsky would have explained to his university students, the genre itself was mercurial—equally suited to a despondent meditation, like the lament from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, or a magnificent flight of imagination, like the Chaconne from J.S. Bach’s D-minor Partita for Violin. Shostakovich’s treatment combines the affect of Purcell with the syntax of Bach.

The fourth movement contains Jewish elements: klezmer oom-pah, sharp seconds and fourths of the scale, and implied bitonality (two keys at the same time). Those elements combine in what has been called, in reference to the Holocaust, a “dance of death.”

Critical Thoughts

Sollertinsky was Jewish, his death the result of deprivations imposed by German invasion of the Soviet Union—thus the Jewish intonations in the score. Though these also have broader, more horrible associations: Shostakovich’s biographer Elizabeth Wilson believes that the fourth movement of the Second Piano Trio refers to the Holocaust and the tales of Jews being forced to dance on graves in the death camps. A correspondent for the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), Vasily Grossman, recounted this act of sadism in an article titled “Treblinskiy ad” (“Treblinka Hell”), but it was published after Shostakovich composed his trio, so he must have heard this specific tale from another source (if he heard it at all).

Pravda began to publish detailed descriptions of the death camps in 1943, often quoting from the English press and clandestine Eastern European radio broadcasts. The Treblinka “nightmare machine” was part of Hitler’s efforts to eradicate “the entire Jewish population of Poland,” followed by Catholic and Orthodox “Polish peasants.” Shostakovich’s references to Jewish suffering, heard in this composition and several others of later years—From Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79 (1948), the First Violin Concerto, Op. 77 (1947–48), the Fourth String Quartet, Op. 83 (1949), and the 13th Symphony, Op. 113 (1962)—shudder at the horrors of Nazism and the antisemitism that flourished in the Soviet Union before and during the war. The Soviet government did not want its own antisemitic actions—the pogroms, the establishment of Jewish autonomous regions in Crimea and the Far East, the blaming and shaming and grotesque caricatures—likened to Nazism. But Shostakovich made that association in his music.

Legacy

In 1946, the Second Piano Trio received a State Stalin Prize, the most prestigious award in the arts at the time. The committee members (composers, performers, bureaucrats) praised the score for “its simple, memorable, and instantly effective moments, which concentrated their attention and made them tap their feet,” according to the musicologist Marina Frolova-Walker. Still, the trio had its discomforts—harsh, crushed sounds, queasy, gnarled polyphony, and, at the end, a reprise of the chords from the passacaglia, now in the major—that put a stop to the toe-tapping. The academic literature on the score has seized on the aberrant passages, detecting signs of resistance to Soviet musical conservatism in the “unnatural” cello music, “perverted” fugal writing, “disfigured” themes, and interruptions or evasions of phrase endings, and of shallower references to death in the “sigh” motifs, choked-off, muted sounds, allusions to the Dies Irae, and monolithic harmonies that, when played slowly, decay in the ear.

Such assessments highlight the uncanniness of the music. The Second Piano Trio is a polished conception, cast in four traditional movements, with emphasis on ease of performance. But the melodic and harmonic content is wrung out, haggard, even wretched. Here is what culture has created, Shostakovich seems to say, and here is what war has destroyed.

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Article by Simon Morrison