Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110

Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75) wrote 15 string quartets between 1938 and 1974—for friends and colleagues (especially performers), and for posterity. By mixing and matching different styles, while parodying familiar genres, he paid respects to the quartets of Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Tanayev, and Béla Bartók. His Eighth String Quartet in C minor stands out in two respects: it was the only one that he did not compose in Russia, and the only that is explicitly autobiographical. This 1960 score teems with the ghosts of the composer’s past; he revisits his younger self and reconsiders what he did (or didn’t) believe in. Sifting through the rubble of his past in four notes—D–E-flat–C–B, or D–S–C–H in the German musical alphabet—he weaved the letters of his own name into the score. But never has something so personal sounded so alienated.

Introduction

The story of the Eighth String Quartet is tied to the score for a film. In July 1960, the Soviet director Lev Arnshtam enlisted Shostakovich write the music for a joint Soviet-East German (German Democratic Republic, or GDR) movie about war and art—damage and repair—titled Five Days, Five Nights (Pyat dney, pyat’ nochey/Fünf Tage, Fünf Nächte). Arnshtam invited Shostakovich to his studio in the GDR to review footage and work out a plan for the soundtrack. Shostakovich accepted, and traveled to Dresden for three days in mid-July. He liked the movie, and all seemed set for a fruitful collaboration. But instead of composing the music for the soundtrack, Shostakovich began work on the Eighth String Quartet, and finished it within three days. He turned up at Arnshtam’s office to confess that “I didn’t write the music for you. I lied when I said I was working on your music.” He continued: “In fact, I was writing a quartet, do you understand? I couldn’t help but write it. But for God’s sake, don’t fret. Your music will be written on time. Everything will be turn out right.” (And it did. He completed the music for Five Days, Five Nights on September 6.)

History

The plot of the movie Five Days, Five Nights derives from a book for Soviet teenagers based loosely on actual events: a Red Army lieutenant’s efforts to save the treasures of the Dresden Gallery from destruction in the final months of the Second World War. Arnshtam had collaborated with Shostakovich on several other films, and the director assumed that he could count on the composer. In the summer of 1960, Shostakovich traveled to Dresden, spending July 14–16 in the official GDR guest house in the Gohrisch health resort, about an hour outside the city. Shostakovich watched unedited footage of the movie, mapped out a plan for the soundtrack with Arnshtam’s team, and walked around post-war Dresden—a latticework of empty streets and bright green fields tended by sheep. Something about the desolation compelled Shostakovich to compose not the soundtrack, but his Eighth String Quartet. When Arnshtam heard both the quartet and the belatedly completed movie score, he realized that the two shared a point of reference: Shostakovich “laid his life, embodied in music, from the First Symphony to the tragic finale of the [Second] Piano Trio, at the feet of those people who had experienced the greatest violence ever directed against the human species, those who had died and those who remained alive.”

Shostakovich: Quartet No. 8 in C minor for Strings, Op. 110

Form

The string quartet, which lasts approximately 20 minutes, comprises five movements. The opening “Largo,” in C minor, is in a traditional sonata-form structure, with the first subject (the D–S–C–H/D–E-flat–C–B motive) presented in a four-part fugato (quasi-fugue) before it surrenders to a lament. The second movement, in G-sharp minor, and the third, in G minor, are kindred spirits: one a diabolical toccata, the other a mesmerizing waltz. The “Largo” fourth movement, in C-sharp minor, consists almost entirely of quoted material, while the fifth revisits the key and polyphony of the opening movement. The quotations and borrowings that had dominated the score to this point are expunged. All that remains is Shostakovich’s musical signature—obsessively, oppressively repeated, less an act of self-affirmation than of negation.

Analysis

The five movements are played uninterrupted. The D–S–C–H motive in the first movement is followed by a theme, in the first violin and viola, borrowed from Shostakovich’s First Symphony (1926)—his first major success as a composer. The first violin also references the Fifth Symphony (1937) in a falling gesture. Thus a prodigious success is conjoined with a success of another sort: the Fifth Symphony marked Shostakovich’s return to political favor following the denunciation of his opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934) and his ballet The Limpid Stream (1935). The second-movement toccata again features the composer’s musical signature—now referring to his Eighth Symphony (1943), which was briefly banned in the late 1940s—and, in the climactic middle, his deeply morbid Second Piano Trio (1943–44). The motive returns in the third movement: a waltz that ends by echoing the First Cello Concerto (1959). The fourth movement brings in Lady Macbeth, hammers of fate, intonations of the “Dies Irae,” a revolutionary anthem (“Tormented by Grievous Bondage”), and funereal references to Tchaikovsky and Richard Wagner. The fifth movement wraps back around to the first movement and its handling of the D–S–C–H motive—also the “Dies Irae” motive, which, in Shostakovich’s rearrangement, exposes the “devil’s interval” of the tritone.

Critical Thoughts

Shostakovich himself revealed that the string quartet was a mixture of self-references—a “hodgepodge,” as he tartly put it to his confidant Isaak Glikman, of “ideologically sinful” borrowings that he had spontaneously committed to paper. It was premiered on October 2, 1960, in Leningrad by the Beethoven Quartet (Dmitri Tsyganov, Vasili Shirinsky, Vadim Borisovsky, and Sergei Shirinsky), which premiered 13 of his 15 string quartets. Reviewers listed the most obvious self-references, while also commenting on the composer’s dedication of the quartet “to the victims of war and fascism.” The phrase is a cliché, of course, and it was attributed to the composer in an interview titled “The Happiness of Creating for the People.” A reviewer for Izvestiya described the work as a “harsh reminder” of World War II and the ongoing threat of fascist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan in the US—the subject of an article in the adjacent column of the newspaper.

The English-language literature on the quartet focuses less on the postwar European context highlighted by Russian reviewers than the obvious autobiographical implications. In her 2019 biography of Shostakovich, Pauline Fairclough claims that, according to the composer’s friend Lev Lebedinsky, “Shostakovich intended to commit suicide after writing the quartet by taking an overdose of sleeping pills: though his story is contested by other sources, it would not have been the first time that the composer seriously considered ending his life.” Yet less psychological speculation would suggest that he was thinking more broadly about unresolved histories—the reckonings that must happen to achieve true peace. The musical borrowings are thus ghosts who mark the presence of the past, an absence in the present, and the unrealized possibilities of the future.

Legacy

The Eighth String Quartet marked a disturbing turning point in Shostakovich’s career. He grew up mocking others, but here mocked himself as the subject of a totalitarian state that had negated its subject. No one in the Soviet Union truly could control his fate—hence the bitterness, and pitifulness, of the repetitions of D–S–C–H in the fifth, and final, movement.

Discussions of the Eighth String Quartet range from psychoanalytic to deconstructionist, and, among scholars, the score has both admirers (David Fanning) and detractors (Richard Taruskin). The first recording, by the Beethoven Quartet, is considered definitive, since Shostakovich personally coached the ensemble. Shortly after the premiere, the composer authorized conductor and violist Rudolf Barshai to create a version for string orchestra. His arrangement romanticizes the score, making it more appealing, but less affecting.

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Article by Simon Morrison