A few months ago, I gave this introduction to a performance of Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet, given by my wife's quartet. If you are not familiar with the piece, try this from the Borodin Quartet.
Few
artists have come to represent their own time and place as much as Dmitri
Shostakovich, the Soviet Union’s preeminent composer who, from the 1920s until
his death in the 1970s, was Russia’s musical propagandist, conscience,
provocateur and human voice.
From
its earliest details, Shostakovich’s life was a tool of Soviet propaganda. Born
in 1906, he is alleged to have witnessed Lenin’s return to Russia, from exile,
in 1917. At 18, his precocious 1st Symphony was trumpeted around the
world as a dazzling example of a new wave of Soviet artists. This new paradise
of Communist Russia seemed, at first, a haven of artistic freedom: as long as
what you said was ideologically sound, it didn’t really matter how you said it.
Like
so many others, Shostakovich was lulled into a false sense of security, pushing
the boundaries of the musical language until firmly bitten by the culturally
and socially conservative crackdown of Joseph Stalin’s first years as leader of
the Soviet Union. Art was no longer to test the limits; only artistic
expression which the masses could easily understand, and which celebrated the
greatness of the communist utopia, would do. In this new hell of rigid rules,
denunciations and show trials, one misstep could mean death. Writers, artists,
theatre and film directors, friends of Shostakovich, disappeared, swallowed by
the human meat grinder of Stalin’s genocidal state. Footsteps in the hall; a
knock at the door; a visit to the headquarters of the secret police: thousands
were erased from life like this and not even their families would dare mention
their names again.
Shostakovich’s
brush with danger came in 1936, in the form of a damning newspaper review,
ordered, it is believed, by Stalin himself. The state newspaper, Pravda,
blasted his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, as “chaos instead of
music”. The message was clear – adapt or die. The composer, eventually, offered
his own amends for his past wrongs in the form of a Symphony. The symphony was
his fifth and, like Beethoven’s, it rises from fierce darkness to a conclusion
of blazing light. But little mattered more to Shostakovich than personal
artistic integrity. Within the triumphant bombast of the Symphony’s finale, a
kernel of defiance could be heard – a grin through gritted teeth. Shostakovich’s
admirers heard this, the authorities did not, and the pattern was set for a new
musical identity of outward conformity and inner resilience.
Little
did he know, though, that in allowing for the possibility of contradictory
meanings, Shostakovich would unleash a bitter battle to interpret his music.
Some have tried to dismiss him as a propagandist hack; others find
anti-communist barbs in every note; others still find a middle ground that
celebrates him as a composer of hugely affecting and original music. Nowhere is
this battleground of meaning more intensely fought than in the 8th String Quartet. Shostakovich
began writing the piece during a visit to Dresden in 1960. The visit may have
inspired the dedication “to the victims of fascism and war”, but clues in the
very music itself point toward an altogether different interpretation.
After
WW2, Shostakovich had begun using a four note phrase in his music: the notes D,
E flat, C, B which, when said in the German manner, become D, Es, C, H – the
first initial of his forename and the first three letters of his surname, in
the German translation. The Eighth Quartet begins with exactly this phrase,
confirming that this piece is not only about the victims of fascism and war; it
is about himself. He then does something remarkable – he constructs a fugue
with his own name. A fugue is among the most complex of musical forms – a way
of layering a tune upon itself within a very rigid set of rules – and was precisely
the kind of artistic complexity outlawed by the Soviet authorities. This isn’t
only a daring and dangerous step on the part of the composer; it is a
self-definition. “I am music”, Shostakovich seems to be saying here and, as if
to prove the point, he offers a few quotations from past works, such as the
opening bars of his 1st Symphony, followed by a resolute restatement
of his name.
It’s
clear that this piece, in five continuous movements, was an intensely personal
project for the composer. After his return from East Germany, he wrote to a
friend “When I die, it’s hardly likely that someone will write a quartet
dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write it myself... The pseudo-tragedy
of the quartet is so great that, while composing it, my tears flowed as
abundantly as urine after downing half a dozen beers. On arrival home, I have
tried playing it twice, and have again shed tears. This time not because of the
pseudo-tragedy, but because of my own wonder at the marvellous unity of form.” One
could be forgiven for balking slightly at the apparent self-pity of the
composer, but Shostakovich knew better than anyone that there was nothing
unique about his own personal tragedy. The Jewish folk theme blasted out in the
frantic second movement can be connected to one of the composer’s perennial
concerns: the suffering of others at the hands of others. Shostakovich was
submerged deep within the tragedy of the twentieth century and, with his unique
ability to express that tragedy, offered a memorial to the suffering of one
individual out of countless millions, namely himself. That this piece, and many
others, survived and are today celebrated and loved, offers hope that the
individual can endure in the face of overwhelming odds. And, that his music
remains enigmatic to the last, never meaning quite what it appears to mean, is
a fitting reminder that the dark and violent times for which it was written can
never fully be comprehended.
