Already in the 1930s Shostakovich learned the risks of suggesting—in even the most abstract way—anything that might be taken as political commentary in a composition. Mostly his difficulties arose with opera (especially Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which got off to a gloriously successful beginning for more than a year until Stalin happened to see it and decided that it was all but pornographic). And symphonies, too, because they spoke to large audiences could be “dangerous” if they did not suggest affirmation and glorification. During World War II, Shostakovich’s music could be (and certainly was) heard as nationalistic, supporting the USSR in the “Great Patriotic War,” but when he wrote the quirky Ninth Symphony—a complete change of pace—in the months following the end of the war, he found the work attacked for its much lighter character, its use of vaudeville fanfares and circus music tricks (as if, indeed, he was announcing to the Politburo, “You are all clowns”). Such an interpretation from officialdom was risky at best.
 
Meanwhile Shostakovich had begun composing what became one of the great cycles of string quartets, in part, surely, because the intimacy of the medium, the fact that it did not address vast multitudes with ostensibly political commentary, saved it from being interpreted by non-musical government functionaries.
 
The String Quartet No. 3 came immediately after the Ninth Symphony. Shostakovich completed in on August 2, 1946, and signaled his pleasure in the work by dedicating it to the Beethoven String Quartet, for whom he wrote almost all of his quartets. He wrote the second movement first (at the end of January 1946), then the first movement (completed May 9) and finished the rest by August 2 in his summer dacha at Komarovo, a village outside of Leningrad.
 
It was a deeply serious work in five movements (a frequent characteristic of Shostakovich at his most serious. The work had to wait only five months for its first performance (December 16, 1946), but already the political situation made the reception of the work difficult. And even though musicologist Daniel Zhitomirksy insisted, in 1947, that “In the wealth and versatility of its ideas, the Third Quartet surpasses everything the composer has composed in the sphere of chamber music,” the score was clearly not headed for official favor. Though it was never on a governmental list of “banned” works, performances were limited for some years to private ones in the homes of sympathetic listeners. The musicologist Marina Sabinina recalled the Third Quartet, along with Songs from Jewish Folk Poetry  that she and friends performed privately in tribute to the composer and the ideas contained in his works, but which had disappeared from public performance.  The members of the youthful Borodin Quartet also rehearsed the Third Quartet in the office of Vissarion Shebalin, then director of the Leningrad Conservatory. They left the doors open so that the music would spread all over the conservatory,  and, as he recalled, “Students came running to hear it.”
 
Fyodor Druzhinin became the violist of the Beethoven Quartet in 1964, when his teacher became too ill to continue with the ensemble. He described one of the rare occasions when Shostakovich allowed his emotions to show.

Only once did we see Shostakovich visibly moved by his own music. We were rehearsing his Third Quartet. He’d promised to stop us when he had any remarks to make. Dmitri Dmitriyevich sat in an armchair with the score opened out. But after each movement ended he just waved us on, saying,  “Keep playing!” So we performed the whole Quartet. When we finished playing he sat quite still in silence like a wounded bird, tears streaming down his face. This was the only time I saw Shostakovich so open and defenceless.

The five movements of the quartet contain themes that are cross-fertilized from one part to another, a practice that became increasingly common in Shostakovich’s later works.  He originally gave titles to many of the movements, but later—perhaps in a desire for self-preservation—left on only the tempo designations. After all, the quartet was composed in the immediate aftermath of a military victory, and yet it not only recalls the losses of the past but hints at future problems—hardly the kind of program that a Soviet apparatchik would approve!

The opening Allegretto begins almost as an homage to Haydn, the father of the string quartet, in its cheerful dactylic rhythms over a simple accompaniment figure in the lower parts. The basic motif of two sixteenths leading to an eighth runs throughout the movement and recurs later in the quartet as well, reminding the listener of happier times gone by. The one-time heading for this movement was “Calm unawareness of future cataclysm.”

Moderato con moto is the marking of the second movement, and its suppressed designation was “Rumblings of unrest and anticipation.” The viola begins an ostinato figure in quarter-notes outlining an arpeggiated triad; the motoric character of this figure later simplifies to simple repeated notes, or repeated chords, in the steady 3/4 beat with one voice or another singing a kind of rapidly lilting lamentation.
 
A harsh scherzo, Allegro non troppo, with irregular alternations of 2/ 4 and 3/ 4 time, suggests a driven brutality that rarely gives an inch. This can easily represent “The forces of war unleashed.”
 
The ensuing Adagio alternates strong outbursts (sometimes in unison) of lamentation (“Homage to the dead”) echoed by softer, more private representation of grief in a lighter texture and a higher instrumental range. Eventually the sustained lamentation dies away in the lowest register, with the viola mourning alone over a soft pulsing—as of muffled drums—in the cello.
 
The closing Moderato takes off directly from the last note of the viola in the previous movement and begins a gently rocking, consoling musical idea in the cello, later echoed canonically by the first violin. But consolation is not the only issue at stake here. The Haydnesque dactyls return from the opening movement recalling a more innocent past and, by extension, everything else that has happened. By the close, Shostakovich is telling us that such innocence can never be fully recovered.

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Jean Sibelius
1865-1957
String Quartet in D minor, Op. 56  (Voces Intimae)

Outside of his native Finland the fame of Sibelius is based almost entirely on works for orchestra, most notably, of course, the series of seven symphonies composed between 1899 and 1924. Yet he did not write a single orchestral piece until he was in his mid-twenties, and none heard with any frequency today until he was nearly thirty. His early work contained a rich outpouring of chamber music. Yet after embarking on orchestral composition with some degree of success, he turned all but completely away from the various combinations of chamber instruments for the rest of his long life, and he declined to publish even those early works that he had in his trunk.

The early interest in chamber music came, of course, from the fact that he could hear that music performed, whereas there was not yet a permanent orchestra in Helsinki at the time of the composer’s birth. By the 1890s, when he discovered his natural flair for the orchestra, most chamber music forms were simply laid aside, and even the earlier works, evidently based on classical models, often do not survive complete.

The only large chamber work by Sibelius, far and away his most successful contribution to any medium of chamber music (though it has never really been famous), is the D minor string quartet, Opus 56, to which he gave the title Voces intimae (“Intimate voices”). Sibelius composed the work mostly in London in the early months of 1909. He had gone to England to conduct some of his works at a time when English musicians were becoming more and more enthusiastic about him. He spent several months there, frequently invited to gatherings of musicians; yet he felt unable to take part fully in any congenial gatherings because he was required to abstain totally from the free flow of liquor (in an attempt to avoid his own tendency to alcoholism), and his hosts later said that he gave the impression of a man who never laughed. According to press announcements made after his return to Finland, he was working on two further string quartets, but Voces intimae, which was already completed at the time of that announcement, is the only one ever to have been published. Perhaps the ideas sketched in the later, abortive quartets made their way, transformed, into the Fourth Symphony or one of the other later works.

The quartet has an unusual five-movement ground plan, with the middle three movements consisting of two dance forms balanced on either side of a central slow movement. A similar layout is found in some early works of Haydn, though there is nothing else Haydnesque about Sibelius’ work. For one thing, Sibelius provides a chain of connecting links between one movement of his quartet and the next, restatements and developments of thematic ideas that cause the five movements to be inescapably intertwined.

The first movement has a concentration and sense of flow that make it one of his finest achievements, a compelling argument lurking under a relaxed musical surface that suggests, here and there, the modal character of Finnish folk music. The D minor (or Dorian mode) of the opening is impressively contrasted to the smiling A major of the second theme, and the sense of continuity is quite wonderful. The scherzo that follows is based on material derived entirely from the first movement, turned into feathery whispers; the derivation only becomes evident at the end, which quotes the A major theme of the opening movement directly. The slow movement is less concentrated, but it contains many beautiful ideas that commentators have linked to the Fourth Symphony, begun a year later, and it contains some of the most passionately expressive pages Sibelius ever wrote. The second scherzo, Allegretto ma pesante, is perhaps the most direct and rustic in its musical expression, which starts out like a heavily clomping dance of country folk, though it reworks material from the slow movement. The finale is more like the epic Sibelius that we know from the orchestral works, built up with an exhilarating momentum that recalls the great tone poems, while at the same time presenting itself as a true string quartet that happens to have been composed by a great symphonist.

                                                                                          © Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

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