Shostakovich: String Quartet No.15 in E flat minor, Op.144 (1974)
Elegy:- Adagio –
Serenade:- Adagio –
Intermezzo:- Adagio –
Nocturne:- Adagio –
Funeral March:- Adagio molto –
Epilogue:- Adagio – Adagio molto
Shostakovich’s last quartet was completed in the Autumn of 1974 at Repino – a special composers’ retreat on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, not far from Leningrad. Because of the death of Sergei Shirinsky (immediately following a rehearsal of this work) the première in Leningrad was taken over by the Taneyev Quartet (the Beethoven Quartet, with its new ‘cellist, was later able to introduce the work to Moscow); as with its two predecessors, the first Western performance was given (this time in Manchester) by the Fitzwilliam. The composer himself wrote of it, “I tried to make it a dramatic work; it is hard to say whether I succeeded.” Such a remark must surely provoke a few raised eyebrows; but if one is not over-dogmatic in one’s interpretation of the word then this quartet is indeed a drama of tense psychological conflict, a conflict involved with the notion of existence passing into the infinity of oblivion. A brief preliminary perusal of the score will give a reasonable impression of the piece: for more than twenty pages nothing seems to happen at all; thereafter the staves occasionally blacken with a brief flurry of activity, quickly settling back into the simplest quartet texture imaginable – frequently reduced to a single lonely line of notes, meandering along, half hoping to re-encounter lost companions. At the end one will have searched in vain for an Allegro, an Allegretto, or even an Andante, since all six movements are headed Adagio, and with the same metronome mark (except for the fifth: Molto Adagio!).
The Elegy opens with a diatonic fugato of unearthly beauty, “contrasted” by a second subject melody initially supported by no more than a unison pedal C, sounding almost like a lone Scottish piper (the composer did visit that country – notably in September 1962, for the première of his previously suppressed fourth symphony). By the end of the exposition the time scale of the movement – indeed, of the whole quartet – is fairly well established: the intentional monotony is now driven home in a kind of pagan-religious chant, mesmeric in effect, characteristically Russian with a faint smell of the Orthodox, which might remind one of the Andante funebre in Tchaikovsky’s third quartet; or that oppressive scene in the chronicler monk Pímen’s cell, in Boris Godunov. One can almost compare this Elegy to the vast, monolithic landscapes of Siberia which, even if one has never experienced them at first hand, somehow come clearly to mind with the help of pictures and descriptive accounts to stimulate imagination. In a sense such music does not really belong to this era at all. Nowadays, and particularly in the West, we live our lives at so unhealthily hectic a pace that it is almost unnatural to have to accept and adjust to a slower time scale. Music like this Fifteenth Quartet of Shostakovich, or (more familiarly) the late Adagios of Beethoven and Bruckner, afford us the priceless opportunity of challenging the passing of Time. One cannot stop Time; one cannot even slow it or quicken it; but one can be less aware of it. Shostakovich helps us to do that here; just as, in the central section of the thirteenth quartet, he can, in a sinister way, do exactly the opposite by inexorably tapping out every beat of Time. Fyodor Druzhinin reports that the composer asked the Beethoven Quartet (in which he was violist by then) to “play it so that flies fall off the wall and drop dead in mid-air, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom”! – a reminder of how self-effacing he could be, but also of how his mischievous sense of humour would come through even in such a context as this.
The extraordinarily hypnotic tension is eventually relieved by a succession of shrieks, as if that terrible ending of No.13 is being relived over and over again, like a nightmare. The macabre Serenade thus heralded is a kind of slow waltz with a limp, which gropes along with little discernible sense of direction, eventually losing itself in a barely audible pedal note on the cello. All of a sudden the Intermezzo explodes onto the scene with a violent torrent of notes – although the cello remains quite unmoved, as if no longer conscious of what is happening above. It may seem perverse for some of these pieces to be labelled Adagio: the frantic activity of this Intermezzo and the opening of the Epilogue hardly sound like slow music, and the Nocturne flows along more like an Andante. Similarly the Serenade is not really an Adagio in character. But clearly there must be some kind of poetic or psychological idea behind the concept of attaching the same tempo heading to each movement, with – for the most part – the same pulse as well. The range and scope displayed by Joseph Haydn in the succession of slow movements which constitute his Seven Last Words is truly astonishing, and it is not unlikely that their influence may well have enabled a similarly extraordinary range here: Shostakovich’s “Six Last Words”, perhaps?
The listener’s nerves will now be soothed by the bitter-sweet Nocturne, its plaintive melody weaving its way sadly through gently undulating shadows. But its underlying restlessness in the end gives rise to an ominous sounding rhythm which the two violins softly tap out pizzicato. These muffled drumbeats prove to be a premonition of the Funeral March, which finally arrives on stage with emphatic unity. Curiously, the main part of this movement is entirely solo, each melodic strain being punctuated tutti, like a refrain, by the march rhythm.
The Epilogue seems to be no longer of this world; it is hardly a movement in its own right at all, more a painfully poignant recollection of previous experiences. It erupts with almost as much force as the Intermezzo, but thereafter manages only to look back on blurred memories of earlier areas of the work, amid a weird succession of rustlings, tappings, wailings, and shudderings. Instrumental colour is exploited in a highly original way, imparting a truly eerie, almost supernatural, quality – likened by one prominent Latvian writer to “the howling of the wind in the cemetery”: assuredly, popular opinion in the former USSR believed that, with this work, Shostakovich was composing his own Requiem, as surely as Mozart was composing his in 1791. The semitone trill is an ever present spectre, as it is so often in these final compositions; and it would not be too far-fetched to speculate on its significance as a symbol of this stricken man’s death obsession, which continually haunted him during those last years. At the end it leads the way to the final chant, through it, and beyond it into nothingness. Shostakovich takes leave of the string quartet in a state of resignation and acceptance.
© Alan George
The Last Quartet by Shostakovich
Preparing for his death,
he scales ours, pares
it to perfect fourths and fifths – familiar
dimensions that ease
the anonymity of heaven
or hell –
dissolves fugality
to a discernible
tremor.
Thean Logan, Lewisburg, USA, September 1978
