Shostakovich: String Quartet No.7 in F sharp minor, Op.108 (1960)
Allegretto –
Lento –
Allegro – Allegretto
The seventh quartet is surely one of the most significant works Shostakovich ever composed – a claim which has not generally been made on its behalf, maybe because its uncontested status as the shortest of the fifteen makes it a prime candidate for the metaphorical sweeping under the carpet. But it didn’t just take Webern or the septo/octogenarian Stravinsky to prove that brevity need not be directly proportional to content (witness the length of this particular programme note!); and even if this quartet is simply short, rather than “a novel expressed in a single gesture” (to paraphrase Schönberg on Webern’s Op.9), its epigrammatic allusion to a whole range of emotions leaves an after-impression of something far more substantial and complete than the promise of twelve minutes’ music might normally be expected to provide. It is “complete” also in another respect, in that its cyclic construction – whereby the music of the first movement’s recapitulation returns as part of a sad little waltz to finish the whole work – gives the feeling of having come full circle. Brevity is not the only channel through which this quartet demands attention – although if the popular image Shostakovich created for himself in his noisier and more protracted works should still abound, then an element of surprise might also contribute to that attention. Of course, the “noise” isn’t here either; which doesn’t mean there is no loud music – as will be heard in the wildly frenzied fugue, which surges relentlessly onwards with torrential fury in the first half of the finale. Rather, it is the very spareness of texture through the other two and a half sections of this quartet which helps to suggest new directions. Extended solos and duets are by no means absent in the first six quartets; but here they are immediately established as a norm, with the principal material of the first subject being presented in just a single line of notes. The opening of the Lento stretches this to two lines, thereafter extending to three with notable infrequency (the eventual calling on all four instruments is occasioned only by octave doubling).
And so we have touched on the essential nature of the seventh quartet and its formative influence on Shostakovich’s later music. This central movement is the “inner sanctum” of the work, an encapsulation of loneliness and grief; dignified, objective, without tears. 1954 had seen the death of Shostakovich’s dearly loved wife, Nina Vasilyevna. It was not his first experience of bereavement but it was certainly the cruellest, and he never really got over it. The timing was unfortunate too, in that he had only recently recovered his artistic communication with the musical public, since the death of Stalin in 1953 had enabled him to end his self-imposed withholding of all works composed since the infamous Zhdanov attacks of 1948. But six years were to pass before a delayed reaction to the tragedy of Nina’s death at length enshrined her memory in music. On the surface this little quartet might seem an oddly elliptical tribute; but was there an apocalyptic ninth symphony to celebrate such a momentous event as the end of the war…? So a great Requiem might have been equally out of character. However, there is no doubt that he felt particularly close to the seventh quartet, as was clearly witnessed by the present author during the composer’s visit to the Fitzwilliam Quartet in York in 1972, when he specifically asked to hear it. Its creation precipitated an obsession with human mortality which itself was not fully divulged in his music until some years later.
At a reception following a performance (by the Fitzwilliam) of Quartet No.7 in Lincoln Center Julius Bloom, late respected New York writer and connoisseur, was moved to compare the stillness of the Lento with the Heiliger Dankgesang in Beethoven’s A minor quartet (Op.132) – his favourite chamber composition. He went on to remark that in this quartet Shostakovich “seemed to have touched a nerve so deep that even he may have been surprised by it”. No more sensitive an appreciation could be made of the work, and no more touching a memorial could be created to a lost companion.
© Alan George
