Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Chamber Symphony, opus 83a
Shostakovich began work on his Fourth String Quartet in April 1949, during what his long time collaborator, the cellist of the Borodin String Quartet, Valentin Berlinsky described as “the most difficult year for him.” Shostakovich had been denounced by the Party in 1948, and found himself for the second time in his career in fear for his life and the lives of his immediate family. As part of a desperate effort to rehabilitate himself within the musical establishment, Shostakovich worked on a cantata called the “Song of the Forests” alongside the new quartet. “Song of the Forests” was a work of pure propaganda, written in praise of Stalin “the great gardener” in celebration of Stalin’s to convert Russia’s steppes to forest land. The success of that piece in the eyes of the authorities brought Shostakovich a certain degree of respite, but he continued to be extremely cautious about presenting new works until after Stalin’s death. Shostakovich completed the quartet on the 27th of December, and applied to the Ministry of Culture for a commission fee. He and the members of the Borodin Quartet were summoned for an audition. Rostislav Dubinsky, the founding first violinist of the quartet, said that after playing the work through for the committee the first time the reception was quite frosty. Desperate to help Shostakovich receive a badly needed fee, they played the work a second time “more optimistically,” stripping away any anger or irony from their performance, and the Party representatives then accepted the work. Dubinsky’s colleague, Berlinsky, denied this story, which probably says more about the fraught nature of string quartet politics than about what happened that day. Although the new Quartet had officially been accepted by the Ministry, it was held back from performance until after Stalin’s death in 1953. It was one of a number of major works that had been written, in Shostakovich’s words “for the drawer” that came flooding out in the final months of 1953.
Shostakovich maintained a lifelong interest in Jewish music and was a vociferous critic of any form of anti-Semitism. Many of his works, including the Fourth Quartet, incorporate original themes based on Jewish models, and a number of these came from the years just after World War II, when Shostakovich observed with particular horror that even as the memories of the Holocaust were painfully fresh that anti-Semitism began to return to Soviet society. He is quoted in Solomon Volkov’s “Testimony” as saying:
“Despite all the Jews who perished in the camps, all I heard people saying was “The kikes went to Tashkent to fight.” And if they saw a Jew with military decorations, the called after him , “Kike, where did you buy the medals?” That’s when I wrote the Violin Concerto, the Jewish Cycle and the Fourth Quartet. None of these works could be performed then. They were heard only after Stalin’s death. “
In the case of the Fourth String Quartet, it is in the last movement that the influence of Jewish music is most obvious- it is a kind of slow-burn Klezmer march which builds to a monumental climax then tapers off into brooding silence. Many listeners find the extraordinary second movement of the quartet to be the heart of the work- it is deeply personal and melancholy in tone, while the first movement is more extrovert, and the scherzo distinctly Russian in mood.
The Fourth String Quartet was the fourth of five Shostakovich string quartets arranged for larger forces as “Chamber Symphonies” by Rudolf Barshai. Barshai had been the original violist of the Borodin String Quartet, before leaving the group to pursue a conducting career. Barshai had approached Shostakovich and asked if the composer would consider transcribing his Eighth Quartet for the strings of Barshai’s Moscow Chamber Orchestra. Shostakovich declined to do so himself, but encouraged Barshai to have a go, and was sufficiently pleased with the result that he allowed the orchestration to be published as his Opus 110a. Barshai’s later efforts became more ambitious, moving beyond string orchestra for the first time with his orchestration of the Third Quartet by adding solo winds, and then in this arrangement by adding winds, brass and percussion. It is the most ambitious reimaging of any of his chamber symphony arrangements, but result still sounds remarkably like the work of Shostakovich himself.