Dmitri Shostakovich - Chamber Symphony op. 110a
An arrangement of Violin Quartet No. 8 in C minor by Rudolf Barshai (1967)

Shostakovich allegedly said of his Violin Quartet No. 8 in C minor: “I have dedicated it to myself.” Indeed, the composer’s musical monogram D-ES-C-H (which stands for D-E flat-B in the German notation) appeared as a leitmotif in the first bars of the piece; it had already been used in Tenth Symphony and also appeared, together with a quotation from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, in his later Viola Sonata.
The work was written in July 1960 (in a record time of three days) at Gorisch near Dresden, where Shostakovich was working on the music to a German-Russian film, Five Days, Five Nights. The quartet honoured the memory of “Victims of Nazism and war” – hence its poignantly tragic expression.
The piece consists of five connected movements. Its three Largos are the principal elements of its dramaturgy: the first and the last define the limits of the form, while the middle one, funereal in character, serves as the focus of expression. The symbolic space opens here with a threefold exclamation, somewhat after the manner of Beethoven’s fate motif, the key being a quotation from the Russian song Broken by the hardships of captivity and Shostakovich’s self-quotation: a motif from his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which, in 1936, brought the regime’s harsh criticism on the author. The Largos are separated by scherzoid elements: Allegro molto is a dark and motoric toccata and Allegretto, according to Krzysztof Meyer, seems “a waltz made unreal.”
The music of Quartet, following the composer’s favourite strategy, is a mesh of self-quotations and, as he himself confessed, allusions to Wagner or Tchaikovsky.

Małgorzata Janicka-Słysz