Music for Silenced Voices

My 36 highlights

• If audiences in general are fondest of the Eighth Quartet, musicians, musicologists, and professional Shostakovich admirers, to the extent they can be forced to choose a favorite at all among the quartets, tend to lean toward the Twelfth. The

• The contrast between the tone of his letters to Glikman, which report constant progress under the doctor’s care, and Glikman’s own observations, which suggest no improvement at all, is heartbreaking.

• At a concert in New York he heard the Juilliard Quartet perform Béla Bartók’s First, Fourth, and Sixth Quartets, and though he professed to dislike the Fourth, he expressed substantial enthusiasm for the Sixth. One cannot necessarily say that the experience of hearing Bartók’s music was a direct cause, any more than the phone call from Stalin or all the miseries of the preceding year were. But it is demonstrably the case that soon after he got back from America, Shostakovich began work on his own Fourth Quartet.

• Vasily Gross-man’s Life and Fate

• “There’s a sense in Shostakovich of a suspension of time,” observes the Emerson Quartet violinist Philip Setzer, and he connects this with the fact that “a lot of Shostakovich’s suffering, his form of ‘imprisonment,’ was waiting.”

• under a regime that prescribed “optimistic” and “positive” as the only acceptable modes, it took a certain courage to write as pessimistically as Shostakovich did in the Thirteenth Quartet.

• two of the most significant works Shostakovich wrote between the Zhdanov Decree of 1948 and Stalin’s death in 1953, the Fourth and Fifth Quartets, were never performed in public during that time, though they were repeatedly heard at “rehearsals” attended by a small number of colleagues, students, and friends.

• If the full orchestra can be seen as a mass society in which the performers risk losing their individuality, while the solo recital represents an essentially narcissistic arrangement, then the string quartet might be viewed as an ideal society in which the musicians look to each other for guidance.

• In distinct contrast to the three quartets that preceded it, the Quartet No. 14 in F-sharp Major displays some of that rare quality of happiness. It is a mingled, rueful, Shostakovichian kind of happiness, so it doesn’t sound unmitigatedly joyful or mindlessly content, but it does sound warm and alive.

• There Shostakovich confesses to this friend and former student that he unfortunately sees a great deal of himself in Dr. Andrei Yefimich Ragin, the cowardly, pathetic figure at the heart of Chekhov’s novella Ward No. 6.

• The Tenth Quartet is at once Shostakovich’s harshest string quartet and his friendliest.

• The Quartet No. 11 in F Minor is the quietest, most broken, most passively depressive quartet Shostakovich ever wrote.

• His sister, brother-in-law, and mother-in-law had all been arrested or exiled (or both) by the spring of 1937, and he himself had been questioned and nearly arrested—the only thing preventing his detention being the sudden arrest of his interrogator.

• For the rest of his life, he and Irina celebrated July 20, the date he had completed the Thirteenth, as an important anniversary.

• Laurel Fay, in her scrupulously fair and accurate biography of the composer, has included a photograph of Shostakovich and Margarita that was taken in Paris in 1958. Because there is virtually no information about Kainova other than the catty remarks left to us by Shostakovich’s associates, Fay hazards no theories about the marriage and its successes or failures: she is not the kind of writer who allows herself to indulge in guesswork or half-truths

• Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, one of Shostakovich’s favorite pieces of music.

• But he finally broke his long silence, just as he had done in 1938, by writing a string quartet. The Quartet No. 6 in G Major, composed in the summer of 1956 and first performed in October of that year, shortly after Shostakovich’s very public fiftieth-birthday celebration, is perhaps the hardest to read of all the quartets. This is not because it is especially difficult or dissonant or clouded with sorrow. On the contrary, what obscures our view of this quartet is its apparent—I would say its actual—lightness. Here, at what might be seen as the darkest period in Shostakovich’s personal life, we get something that occasionally approaches cheer.

• He knew, at any rate, that the end was drawing near, for in the spring of 1974, when Mstislav Rostropovich showed him a letter he had written to Brezhnev, asking permission to emigrate with his family, Shostakovich began weeping and said, “In whose hands are you leaving me to die?” With Shostakovich too ill to move, Irina went alone to the airport in May of 1974 to see Rostropovich off

• The Second Piano Trio and the Second Quartet were premiered at the same Leningrad concert on November 14, 1944.

• Wives and mothers of male geniuses are not expected to get along:

• It didn’t turn out particularly well. But, you know, it’s hard to compose well. One has to know how.”

• Taneyev Quartet, which played the world premiere of the Quartet No. 15 in Leningrad

• In a beautiful and unusually personal passage from his essay “Marginalia on Mahler,” Theodor Adorno comments that he never fully appreciated the Kindertotenlieder until “the first time in my life when someone I loved died.”

• In a period like the one Shostakovich lived through, the right to feel and express sadness takes on a political dimension.

• “Neither Shostakovich nor Sollertinsky was, in the good Russian tradition, an anti-Semite,” Kurt Sanderling has drily observed.

• Writing to Glikman about the two doctors—a surgeon and a neurologist—who examined him during one of his hospital stays in the fall of 1966, he displayed in full his old sense of Gogolian irony. “They both pronounced themselves extremely satisfied with my hands and my legs,” he announced. “At the end of the day, the fact that I cannot play the piano and can only walk upstairs with the greatest of difficulty is of no importance at all. After all, nobody is obliged to play the piano, and one can live perfectly well without going upstairs. The best thing to do is sit at home and not mess about with stairs, or for that matter slippery pavements.”

• In speaking about Shostakovich’s quartets, I have sometimes borrowed from the languages of literary and art criticism, both of which have a stronger tradition of impressionistic response than one usually finds in academic music criticism

• At the December 1970 premiere in Leningrad, the audience members rose to their feet when the brief quartet ended and remained standing until it was played again. And in the spring of 1971, when Benjamin Britten—along with Peter Pears, Elizabeth Wilson, and Susan Phipps—heard the Thirteenth in a private performance held at Shostakovich’s apartment, he too asked to hear it repeated. Then, according to Fyodor Druzhinin (who had just played the viola part to much acclaim), “Britten, moved and shaken after hearing the Thirteenth Quartet, kissed Shostakovich’s hand.”

• This symphony with songs had two obvious ancestors: Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, which Shostakovich had been listening to just before he went into the hospital, and Mahler’s Song of the Earth, which he had loved for his entire adult life. But there was also a third influence in the mix—that is, Britten’s War Requiem, a work Shostakovich first heard in 1963. “I have been sent a recording of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem,” he wrote to Glikman in August of that year. “I am playing it and am thrilled with the greatness of this work, which I place on a level with Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and other great works of the human spirit. Hearing the War Requiem somehow cheers me up, makes me even more full of the joys of life.” That “somehow” gives away the fact that Shostakovich is entirely serious here, even while he is also mocking his own dour incapacity for unmitigated joyfulness.

• Shostakovich himself told the violinist Dmitri Tsyganov, to whom he dedicated the Twelfth Quartet on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, that he thought it had turned out “splendidly,” and that it was really more like a symphony than a chamber work.

• By 1946 Dmitri Shostakovich had no reason to believe that light and beauty would triumph, and I do not hear any such assertion in the complicated shifts and ambiguities of the Quartet in F Major.

• Whether it was due to the experience of writing Twenty-four Preludes or the prior experience that apparently gave rise to them—that is, Shostakovich’s 1950 visit to Leipzig during the two hundredth anniversary of Bach’s death, and his consequent reimmersion in the forty-eight preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier—something of Bach’s complicated and profound influence can be felt in the Fifth Quartet.

• I was prepared to listen to something that reflected, rather than alleviated, my own anxiety, and I was willing to learn from an artist who had lived through difficult times, both personally and politically.

• this was the quartet that most visibly moved Shostakovich when he listened to it twenty years later, as the Beethovens were rehearsing the whole cycle for several new performances

• Since the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953 (the same day, sadly, that brought the death of Prokofiev, who thus never knew the terror had ended),

• “The Galosh,” for instance (perhaps Zoshchenko’s most famous story, and certainly one of his best),