Dmitri Shostakovich (arr. by Mark A. Popkin)
String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110, inscribed “In memory of victims of fascism and war”, was composed by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) in 1960. For almost 30 years, Shostakovich was being accused of “formalism” and considered to be “an artist alienated from the people” by critics from the highest echelons of power in the Soviet Union, but in the Western world he has since become one of the most important figures in 20th-century music. The political liberalization of the mid-1950s also changed Shostakovich’s situation: on 9 April 1960, he was elected secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, and in September of the same year he was accepted as a candidate of the Communist Party. In the summer months between these two dates he stayed in Dresden and in a sanatorium in Saxon Switzerland, where he worked on music for the film Five Days, Five Nights. The film takes place in the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden at the end of the war. The impressions of the destruction of Dresden evoked in Shostakovich his own wartime memories of the devastated Leningrad, and so in a span of three days he composed String Quartet No. 8 to express grief over all the unnecessary victims of the war’s fury. It became a personal statement at this particular point in Shostakovich’s career. The String Quartet No. 8 opens with the acronym for the first four letters of Shostakovich’s name in German transliteration (DSCH – D, E flat, C, B natural; in German musical notation D, Es, C, H) that is repeatedly heard throughout the whole composition. String Quartet No. 8 consists of quotes from works by other composers as well as Shostakovich’s own music, such as the modified theme of his First Symphony, the second theme of his Fifth Symphony, or the theme of the final movement of his Piano Trio No. 2, derived from klezmer music as one of the distinctive elements of Shostakovich’s inspiration. The Scherzo is one of his typical grotesques in the rhythm of a demonic waltz, and the trio introduces another self-quote, this time from his Cello Concerto. String Quartet No. 8 also quotes revolutionary songs and Katerina Izmailova’s exclamations from Act 4 of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the performance of which in 1935 marked the beginning of Shostakovich’s politicized artistic struggle. The last two slow movements are among the most serious in Shostakovich’s oeuvre. The funeral march motif returns, and the piece closes with a fugue. String Quartet No. 8 was first performed on 2 October 1960 in Leningrad by the Beethoven Quartet, an ensemble with which the composer collaborated from 1940 until the end of his life. It was arranged by American bassoonist Mark Anthony Popkin (1929–2011), who also scored other pieces for string quintet, for example, Antonín Dvořák’s String Serenade, Op. 22.
