Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
String Quartet No. 8 in C minor Op. 110

It only took three days in July 1960 to produce one of the greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century chamber music. Officially dedicated to “the memory of the victims of the war and fascism,” written in a way as an aside to the soundtrack music of Five Days, Five Nights in Gorisch near Dresden, it is a work personal in the highest degree. Shostakovich confessed to Isaak Glikman that the cover of the score could well bear the annotation: “Dedicated to the memory of the author of this quartet.”
No wonder, then, that Eighth Quartet is at the same time a great “book of self-quotations.” The five movements of the barely twenty-minute work bring in themes and reminiscences of the First and Fifth Symphonies, Piano Trio Op. 67, Cello Concerto and the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District. The motif that brings together all sections of the quartet, played uninterruptedly, is a sequence of four notes D-E flat-C-B which, in the German notation (D-Es-C-H), are Shostakovich’s musical monogram.
∙ This motif functions as the basis of Movement One (Largo), which passes in a deeply elegiac mood. Its shape, analogous in a sense to a Bach or a Mozart devise, seems to provoke polyphony. Here, however, the polyphony takes the form of free flow within a lucid, almost solo texture.
∙ Allegro molto is a sharp contrast with its almost obsessive drive. The leading motif, used in diminution as ostinato as a melodic formula in augmentation, gradually reaches all voices. A double repetition of a quotation from Trio Op. 67 brings in an Oriental colour.
∙ Movement Three (Allegretto) is the only one to bring any respite, being a grotesque in a rhythm of a rapid waltz.
∙ The fourth part (Largo) is the lyrical and particularly poignant climax of the piece. It is especially marked by a quotation from the song Broken by the hardships of captivity, which the composer relates to himself – as anything else in the quartet .
∙ Movement Five (Largo) is more of a postlude than a finale. The leading motif is presented at long last in polyphonic texture, yet not even a trace of energy is liberated. Quite to the contrary: till the very end, the music goes on in an atmosphere of utter if calm tragedy.

Maciej Negrey