Shostakovichs 8th String Quartet - Essay Example

Order #224989 Shostakovich's 8th string quartet "Who was Shostakovich" This is the question that makes the of a magazine article by Richard Taruskin. And the first paragraph is a summary of the ways in which the Russian composer was seen: "To his fellow citizens he was a great artist and a patriot. In the West he was seen first as an anti-fascist hero, then as a Soviet toady, and later as a dissident. To critics and musicians he was either a keeper of the symphonic flame or a clumsy provincial who was debasing musical values. To our author he is not only the greatest Soviet composer but the greatest Soviet artist of all, and the creator of what may turn out to be the twentieth century's most precious artistic legacy--precisely because his music can never be fully understood." (Taruskin, 1995) Born on September 25, 1906, into the family of an engineer, in St Petersburg, Shostakovich didn't appear to be, in his first years of childhood, as talented as he proved to be later on. But as his parents loved music very much and considered that it was necessary in the process of a child's education, Shostakovich the child received musical lessons. The young Shostakovich showed great interest in music and began studying it seriously, and more than just interpreting other composer's music, he started composing his own pieces of work. As most of the great composers, Shostakovich spoke through his music. As for his personal life, he didn't like to show too much of it. "He was an intensely private person who guarded his personal life and feelings jealously. What all but a very few close friends and family members were permitted to experience of the man was the stiff faade of a civic-minded public servant and consummate music professional." (Fay, 2000 p.2) It's only after his death that the publication of memoirs, diaries, letters, revealed facts about him and his life, some of them controversial. Christopher Norris (1984) shows that Shostakovich's performances of his own music reveal a great flexibility of tempi and the tendency to exaggerate the extremes of his metronome marks. The same source reveals the fact that the members of the Beethoven String Quartet were life-long friends of Shostakovich and this is what gives flexibility to their interpretation. Norris emphasizes on the fact that there are many examples in Shostakovich's chamber music, of movements of unrelenting loudness. And he presents some of these examples: the second movements of the eighth and Tenth Quartets and the Violin Sonata, and most of the third movement of the Third Quartet. Norris analyses in detail the String Quartets. When dealing with the eighth, he begins by showing that the composer is careful about the placing of accents and stresses. And he gives an example: "when the lower three instruments are intoning the revolutionary song "Tormented by the weight of bondage" fortissimo espressivo in octaves, the first violin's independent part has accents on every note to help the balance."(Norris, 1984 p.23) The composer's commentator also remarks the conflict between dissonance and consonance and the task of the performer who must interpret the music using "the appropriate fingering, stress, balance, rubato and vibrato, to highlight the patterns of tension and release." (Norris, 1984 p.23) Norris admits that sometimes the consonance and dissonance are no more than the result of purely horizontal lineality, but he considers that most of the times, the context is deliberately tonal. About Shostakovich's musical style, Martynov says: "AT A FIRST HEARING of Shostakovich's music one is struck by the remarkable facility of his style. So effortless is his manner of solving the most complex problems of composition that it would seem nothing is impossible to him. Few of his contemporaries can compare with him in this. Such creative ease, moreover, is a sure sign of great talent and consummate skill." (1947 p.154). He points out the fact that the Russian composer "worked with extraordinary facility and speed": "his String Quartet was written in a few days and the superb slow movement of his Fifth Symphony came on a wave of inspiration which held him under its spell for two days." (Martynov, 1947 p. 154). Yet, he adds the fact that it's not always the case and what seems to be very easy may have taken long years of practice. Max Graf, as well as Martynov, describes Shostakovich as one of the modern composers who doesn't care for sketchwork, an improvisator rather than a tone philosopher. But again, just like Martynov, the critic shows that this is not always the case. And he takes the example of the Ninth Symphony which has three different starts. Two are the main elements at war in Shostakovich's work, in Martynov's opinion: the striving for the simple and for the clarity of the melody, as is the case with the themes of the Scherzo in his First Symphony, the E-minor Prelude and Intermezzo of his Pianoforte Quintet and the attraction towards the pretentious, to the uneven stride of intervals and distortion of fundamental scales. Jennifer Gerstel discusses the existence of irony and deception in the works of Dmitri Shostakovich. Belonging to an age of political instability, associated with the death of Lenin and Stalin's rise to power around 1928, Shostakovich expressed through his music, truths that could not be voiced otherwise. "The symphonies he wrote in his middle period, culminating with the Tenth Symphony (1953), are full of hidden messages, in-jokes, and allusions through which Shostakovich could phrase his frustrations, alienation, doubt, hope, and yearning, for an informed group of listeners. Certainly Shostakovich elicits special meanings from specific combinations of musical notes in a piece such as the Tenth, where his musical characterization of Stalin in the short and brutal second movement signals his disgust, blending emotions of furious anger with a technical refusal of melody. Noting the "dual process of intensification...and constraint," Fanning suggests that the "frenetic surface activity and underlying tonal paralysis ...have the music spinning like a rat in a trap"" (Gerstel, 1999) "Deception-allusions", as Gerstel names them, are present in many of Shostakovich's works. The string quartets are no exception to this, only that here, the themes are of a more intimate and personal nature. They became "a diary into which the composer confided secret, private thoughts." (Roseberry, 1989 p.13) And this because the quartet was shared with a smaller number of people. The Eighth Quartet is one of the best examples that Shostakovich's quartets are containers of strong messages. It has been considered that this was intended as a final work, "a kind of musical suicide note, composed immediately after he was forced to join the Communist Party" (Gerstel). In a letter to Isaak Glikman of 19 July 1960, he was writing: "I have been considering that when I die, scarcely anyone will write a work in my memory. Therefore I have decided to write one myself." (qtd. in Redepenning 210) The DSCH motif - which the composer first introduced in the Tenth Symphony as a symbol of personal freedom from Stalin's tyranny and which meant the transposing of his initials D (for Dmitri) and SCH for (Shostakovich) into musical notes (corresponding in our alphabet to the pitches D, E flat, C and B) intertwines in the Eighth Quartet with the melancholic and wandering themes characteristic of Shostakovich's creations in order to render ideas and emotions. In addition to direct musical quotations from his Eighth Symphony and the Second Piano Trio, Shostakovich includes, in this quartet, melodies and fragments from his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk. Among quotations from other works, particularly important are a Russian revolutionary song "Tormented by the hardships of prison" and a Jewish folk song from World War II, whereby he positions himself with the victims of the Holocaust and suggests that he is forced to dig his own grave. This was considered deeply subversive material because of the institutionalized anti-Semitism of 20th-century Russia. The Eighth String Quartet is "one of the bleakest works" Shostakovich wrote, says Bridle. Despair is ever present here and there is no hope of reconciliation. "The opening itself is tenebrous, and totally unrelenting, the mood not shifting until the cathartic attaca writing of the second movement. Eugene Drucker, violinist with the Emersons, says of the second movement, "you have the extreme violence .......: it depicts the frenzy and violence of war, and it's in that context that the Jewish theme is shrieked by the two violins in octaves"" (Bridle) Listening to the quartet you feel at first sadness that then transforms into desperation, as if you were chased by an unseen force and you could not escape it, nor face it. And it looks as if nothing is going to change; desperation is only pierced by shafts of sadness and pain. It's a dark world, a gloomy image that the melody creates. There are passages and shifts, yet not from sadness to joy, which would have brought about hope, but from a stage to another of gloomy feelings: more or less profound sadness, more or less acute despair. The tearing sufferance expressed in the slow beginning is followed by pure and increasing agony intertwined with accents of fury, in the alert fragment. Joachim Braun argued that Shostakovich frequently adopted "a Jewish idiom as a language of dissent", a highly risky but profoundly resonant maneuver, since at the time he wrote the Song Cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry in 1948, "the entire Jewish intellectual elite was either under suspicion or under arrest, including the compilers of Jewish Folk Songs, Dobrushin and Yuditsky" (1985, p.262, 263). In the eighth quartet there is also an allusion to the Fifth Symphony whose ridiculously exaggerated optimism in the finale mocks Stalin. "Shostakovich's fifteen string quartets, along with Bartok's six, are the greatest of the twentieth century." (Bridle) But they differ in several aspects. While Shostakovich's are melodic, lyrical and often direct (and perhaps more intimate, not least in the final three), Bartok's are abrasive and often make for an uncomfortable listening experience, although they are extremely powerful. "Shostakovich stands on a particular pinnacle alongside Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven: they are the only composers to have achieved equal success in symphonies and string quartets." (Wigler) Wigler sees Shostakovich's string quartets as private diary - the personal testimony of a composer who witnessed World War II, Stalinist terror, the Krushchev thaw, the Cold War and the stagnation under Brezhnev. "Melody supposedly sublimates pain, which is why we hear so often about Mozart's premature, impoverished death and the paranoid misery of Shostakovich, harried by cultural bureaucrats. Their stories also testify to art's abject dependence on social power. A scornful official booted Mozart out of the archbishop's palace in Salzburg; Shostakovich, having been accused of cacophonous anarchism by Stalin, spent the rest of his life awaiting arrest, and always kept fresh underwear and a toothbrush in his briefcase in preparation for prison."(Conrad, 2006) Although the author begins his article by stressing on the martyr character of Shostakovich, he continues with a pleading in favor of his rebellious attitude, or his "lethal laughter." Conrad shows that the Russian composer confronted the Soviet regime, but by using subtle weapons. "He began as a jeering farceur, and ended as a more duplicitous ironist, professing respect but intimating contempt." (Conrad, 2006) Although the Soviet aesthetics prohibited subjectivity, Shostakovich found a way of ensuring its survival: the transcription of his initials in German musical notation is a proof of that. In Shostakovich's works, says Olkhovsky, "there appears a clearly expressed tendency towards contact with the "neo-classical" trend of contemporary Western music. This tendency represents a synthesis of "constructivism" and emotionalism, classicism and romanticism. In this sense their work tenaciously unites the old with the new. On the level of ideas this synthesis is expressed in the fact that the concept of the "tragic collision" between the artist and society, which dominated the minds of the Russian pre-Soviet artistic intelligentsia, continues to exist in their creative consciousness, only immeasurably deepened and extended by the conditions of Soviet reality." (Olkhovsky, 1955 p.192) This combination of what was and what is to come, made his music more accessible, more understandable, brought the plastic images they expressed through melody closer to the listener. Olkhovsky notes that this melody is associated with the idea of beauty and sincerity, with what comes from within the human soul. Shostakovich enjoyed great fame: "WHEN, on July 19, 1942, Dmitri Shostakovich Seventh Symphony was heard for the first time in the Western Hemisphere, the name of the young composer was as familiar to Americans as those of Stalin and Timoshenko." (Seroff, 1947 p.3) But that doesn't mean that he was deprived of sufferings and inner struggles. That would have been impossible in a context as the one in which he lived and created. "It is clear that Shostakovich constantly had to adapt to the changes in the political climate, but how did he reconcile that with the preservation of his artistic and personal integrity" "This is not so much a "dilemma" than a determination to continue in any direction that hadn't been blocked off." (Laki, 2000) Indeed, the Russian composer managed to express through his music feelings and ideas, impregnating his works with his personality and with a revolt which, although not explicit, unveils itself to the receptive listener. Bibliography 1. Braun, J. (1985). The Double Meaning of Jewish Elements in Dmitri Shostakovich's Music. Oxford: Phaidon. pp.262-263 2. Bridle, M. Dmitri Shostakovich: The Complete String Quartets. The flying inkpot. WEB: http://inkpot.com/classical/shostaqtem.html 3. Conrad, P. (2006). Laughter in the Dark: Shostakovich Has Come to Represent the Tragedy and Terror of the 20th Century, but This Overlooks His Impudent Humour, Writes Peter Conrad. New Statesman. Vol. 135 4. Fay, L. (2000). Shostakovich: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.2 5. Gerstel, J. (1999). Irony, Deception and Political Culture in the Works of Dmitri Shostakovich. Mosaic.Vol.32. Issue 4. p.35 6. Graf, M. (1947). From Beethoven to Shostakovich: The Psychology of the Composing Process. New York: Philosophical Library. p. 375 7. Laki, P. (2000). Shostakovich: The Dilemma of the Artist under Totalitarianism. In Lincoln Center's Shostakovich Symposium, February 2000, New York City 8. Martynov, I. (1947). Dmitri Shostakovich: The Man and His Work. New York: Philosophical Library. p.154 9. Norris, C. (1984). Shostakovich: The Man and His Music. London: Lawrence and Wishart. p.23 10. Olkhovsky, A. (1955). Music under the Soviets: The Agony of an Art. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. p.192 11. Redepenning, D. (1995). Shostakovich Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge. p. 210 12. Roseberry, E. (1989). Ideology, Style, Content, and Thematic Process in the Symphonies, Cello Concertos, and String Quartets of Shostakovich. New York: Garland. p.13 13. Seroff, I.V. (1947). Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life and Background of a Soviet Composer. New York: Alfred a Knopf. p. 3 14. Taruskin, R. (1995). Who Was Shostakovich. The Atlantic Monthly. Vol.275. Issue 2. p.62 15. Wigler, S. (2003). Shostakovich: String Quartets. Andante. WEB: http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfmid=21340 Read More