Shostakovich: String Quartet No.9 in E flat major, Op.117 (1964)
Moderato con moto –
Adagio –
Allegretto –
Adagio –
Allegro
The clear, if gentle, development from the generally outward looking, classically orientated quartets of Shostakovich’s middle period to the intensely personal and rarefied music of his later years seems temporarily suspended – even reversed – by the pair of quartets (Nos.9 and 10) from 1964. In their different ways they could be said to consolidate and summarise Shostakovich’s achievement in the medium thus far, No.9 aspiring to the large scale symphonic quartets of the post war decade (Nos.3 and 5) whilst No.10 reflects more the serene poise and relaxed spaciousness of their neighbours (Nos.4 and 6). In the meantime, of course, Shostakovich had composed the seventh and eighth, whose significance in the light of his final period almost makes them seem like “trailers” for the last five quartets. Inevitably they also had a certain effect on their two immediate successors, although in No.9 this is barely discernible.
In fact, the scoring in this work is for the most part full and sonorous, though always economical – as at the very opening, where the second violin’s endlessly oscillating quavers over a tonic pedal create an extraordinarily mesmeric impression of suspended animation. This whimsical quality persists right through the first movement, only rarely rising above a mezzo piano; now it simply intensifies for the ensuing Adagio. This is entirely homophonic in texture, beginning with a brief but poignant viola solo, as if recalling the sixth movement of Beethoven’s C sharp minor quartet. A searchingly chromatic meditation for the first violin leads this daringly simple little piece into one of the composer’s own favourites – a fleet scherzo, wry and witty, which bursts with energy once the mutes have been discarded; then all of a sudden the din breaks off to reveal a fairy-like scene aglow with tingling trills, pretty tunes, magical glissandi and pizzicati. A far cry from Ophelia’s interment in the cemetery…. so how extraordinary that this scintillating music should have been lifted straight from that very moment in the score he had recently completed for G. Kozintsev’s celebrated film production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet – first shown just a few weeks before the final version of the ninth quartet was begun. “My father speaking in opposites” – as Maxim once remarked to us….? The next movement might have been more appropriate for such a scene: an Adagio haunted by melancholy intonings, meandering solo lines, and empty silence. This spell is twice shattered by explosive solo pizzicato chords (actually tracing the main theme of the movement), followed by gong like strokes on each of the three lower instruments, over which the violin’s impassioned recitative seems to mark the emotional climax of the work so far.
These four well defined character pieces, simple but succinct, have suggested a combined purpose and direction; their collective ambitions are now realised and balanced by a big movement of wide ranging outlook, at once increasing radically the scale of the work as a whole. The finale in fact accounts for one half of the composition’s entire length (in terms of pages and bars), and justifies this in its summing up of previous constituents within its enlarged sonata form. All the material is derived from earlier themes, setting the seal on a complex system of thematic relationships which unobtrusively bind together the diverse ingredients of the quartet. The main part of this final Allegro is a quick 3/4, changing to duplets in the Dionysian second subject but returning to the original metre for a huge development section which gathers the fragments together with unerring purpose, low key at first but eventually culminating in a fugue of thrilling energy and dissonance. This charges headlong into a reprise of the fourth movement’s recitative (now given to the cello), after which the whole ensemble launches into those dense pizzicato chords. The final section is a quasi-recapitulation in 4/4 time, starting almost imperceptibly but gradually gathering force with thrilling momentum: steady, massive, but exhilaratingly unstoppable.
Quartet No.9 was dedicated to Shostakovich’s third and surviving wife, Irina Antonovna, whom he married in 1962 and who accompanied the composer when he visited the Fitzwilliam in York. She was many years younger than her husband and appeared to look after him with total devotion. Since his death she has worked tirelessly on behalf of his music, and is currently compiling a complete scholarly edition of his works, as well as running a Shostakovich archive in the House of Composers in Moscow – where she still resides for part of the year, in the flat where he himself lived and composed much of his music. I have myself visited her in her home on a number of occasions; last time I was there the study still remained more or less as it was during his lifetime: there was an enormous desk, with a photograph of Stravinsky in its glass working surface; other significant photographs were spread around: of Mahler, Britten, Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya, but dominated by a large bust of Beethoven. There were the wall bars which poignantly bore witness to the physical exercises he was compelled to do each day because of his ill health. On one section of the wall opposite the desk hung a collection of diplomas, awards, and doctorates, together with one or two drawings and photographs of Shostakovich himself – but these were added later by his son Maxim, as Dmitri Dmitrievich himself never permitted such things to be displayed.
Quartet movement (Allegretto) in E flat “Unfinished Quartet” (Op.113, 1962)
On 18 November 1961 Shostakovich wrote to his friend and confidant Isaak Glikman, “…. I finished the Ninth Quartet, but was very dissatisfied with it so in an excess of healthy criticism I burnt it in the stove. It is the second time in my ‘creative life’ that I have pulled a trick like that….”. The previous month he had already told Glikman that he was writing a quartet in “the russe style”, but then in May the following year he mentioned to his wife Irina that he had begun his ninth quartet (which would ultimately be dedicated to her); the Beethoven Quartet announced its inclusion in their 40th anniversary season in Leningrad; and in a press interview on 20 October 1962 the composer said that “I am working on the Ninth quartet. It’s a children’s piece, about toys and going out to play. I am planning to finish it in about two weeks”.
But it was not until 1964 that Shostakovich conceded to Dmitri Tsyganov (leader of the Beethovens) that the quartet he had finished on 28 May was a completely different Ninth, and the one “the newspapers were talking about two years ago” did “not work out”, “has been scrapped” – “well, maybe I used a few bars”. Anthony Phillips later writes (in his translation of Glikman’s Story of a Friendship, 2001), “It seems more plausible that Glikman has misdated this letter a year earlier than it was actually written, than that Shostakovich destroyed two unsatisfactory ninth quartets”….. Witness the letter itself: “It is [only] the second time….” Yet in 2003 Olga Digonskaya and Olga Dombrovskaya discovered in Shostakovich’s archives an incomplete manuscript score of 225 bars headed “Quartet No.9, I Allegretto, D. Shostakovich, Op.113”, with four more sheets of drafts and sketches. Clearly NOT burnt in the stove!
Mme Digonskaya proposes an entirely persuasive hypothesis that this fragment is indeed the “children’s” quartet that “did not work out”, rather than the burned quartet in “the russe style” – so that, it follows, Shostakovich did indeed make three attempts at a ninth quartet! We cannot be sure how much material from the first of them was re-deployed in the present fragment, nor whether the children went out to play in a deliberately “Russe” style! But its harmonic and melodic language is instantly recognisable from the first movement of the complete No.9 that eventually came down to us. Even the tempo matches up, its Allegretto seeming to work at about the same speed as the Moderato con moto, crotchet = 160, of the real Ninth. This magnificent work retained the key of E flat (the plan for 24 quartets in every key was already up and running), if not its catalogue number – it became Opus 117, to preserve its correct chronology (Opus 113 was itself to be used three times! – after the two quartet failures the number was transferred to the symphonic poem Babi Yar, and thence to Symphony No.13 when this became incorporated therein as its first movement).
The material of the “children’s quartet” movement has been collated by the composer Roman Ledenyov into a performing score, which was first heard on 17 January 2005, in a concert in Moscow by the Borodin Quartet celebrating their cellist’s eightieth birthday. Soon afterwards the Fitzwilliam – having in the seventies been sent each of his last three quartets by Shostakovich himself, enabling them to give their British and Americanpremières – received two copies of this score: one from Moscow, and the other from Paris! So it is fitting that they were then able to add this “new” work to the list of “firsts” they have presented in the United States – but not (for “political” reasons) in the UK this time …
© Alan George
