The String Quartet no. 4 in D major, opus 83, makes a brief return to the conventional four movement format. The movements are:

1. Allegretto,
2. Andantino,
3. Allegretto, attacca
4. Allegretto

Its duration is about 24 minutes. The Quartet is dedicated to the memory of Shostakovich's close friend Pyotr Vladimirovich Vil'yams (1902 - 1947). Vil'yams was a Russian stage designer and a painter noted for his portraits, one of which was of Shostakovich himself ¹. This dedication is missing on the first publication. In 1954 Shostakovich wrote it onto the score of the first violinist of the Beethoven String Quartet, Dmitri Tsyganov².

Shostakovich began composing the Fourth Quartet on his return from the USA in April 1949. It was completed on the 27 December of that year but like the Fourth Symphony, written more than a decade earlier, had its première deliberately delayed. Thirteen years earlier Shostakovich had decided not to have the Fourth Symphony performed following the condemnation of his opera 'Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District'. This opera was officially regarded as having failed to meet the requirements of Socialist Realism. Now Shostakovich felt that the Fourth Quartet would also be condemned although for different reasons. However unlike the symphony which had to wait 25 years before it received its première, the String Quartet received its première on 3 December 1953 in Moscow four years after its completion.

Shostakovich status as an internationally-recognised Soviet composer meant that he received considerable benefits from the State. But these benefits were dependant on conforming to the requirements of Soviet politics. The dilemma for any Soviet artist was to create works of originality whilst avoiding the charge of 'Formalism' or 'Art for Art's sake'. Additionally a work had to illustrate Socialist Realism. This meant not only being void of naturalism (which was one complaint against 'Lady Macbeth' in 1936) but also being up-lifting, heroic and aspiring to the high ideals of humanism of art (again elements not apparent in 'Lady Macbeth').

Since the composition of his Third Quartet in 1946, the Cold War had broken out between the victors of National Socialism. Both sides of the Iron Curtain³ demanded loyalty to their vision of eternal human happiness. In the Soviet Republic the old ghosts of Formalism and Socialist Realism were exhumed from the closet into which they had been discarded at the outbreak of the Second World War. Soviet art had to differentiate itself from that of the bourgeois West. Many of Shostakovich's works were thought by the authorities to display 'cynical, pernicious grotesquerie, the tone of relentless mockery and ridicule, emphasis on the ugliness and cruelty of life, the cold irony of stylisation"⁴. In particular Shostakovich's recent symphonies, the tragic Eighth and the almost flippant Ninth, were seen as extremely disappointing after the heroic Seventh. At the beginning of 1948 Shostakovich, along with some other prominent composers, was officially accused of 'Formalism'. Shostakovich made a contrite public apology, expressed his gratitude to the Party for condemning his errors, and pledged to write more accessible music. His words reflected his pragmatism but the music he was composing exactly at that time⁵, the passionately defiant Passacaglia of the First Violin Concerto, may have illustrated his truer feelings.

On 14 February 1948 a list of banned works was published. Shostakovich's Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, his First Piano Concerto and the Second Piano Sonata were some of the works 'on the index'. However the three string quartets as well the First, Second, Third, Fifth, and Seventh Symphonies and the Piano Quintet were not on the list. But in the press campaign against 'Formalism'⁶ Shostakovich's name had become synonymous with 'An enemy of the people' and only the brave were prepared to perform any of his works. A ban whether official or not meant loss of royalties and thus revenue. Shostakovich's financial situation became even worse in the autumn when he was dismissed as a professor from the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories.

Then in February 1949 his luck changed. Much to his shock and surprise he received a personal phone call from Stalin who informed him that he had been chosen as an official Soviet spokesman at the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace to be held in New York. During the conversation Shostakovich was able to convey the inconsistency of a composer representing a state whose music it had banned. On 16 March 1949 the order of the previous year banning the works of formalist composers was cancelled on Stalin's instructions.

The use of folk music was a standard recommendation by the Party to a composer wishing to fulfil the requirements of Socialist Realism and avoid the charge of 'Formalism'. Folk music had the virtues of being accessible, traditional and melodious. Shostakovich's interest in Jewish folk music had begun in 1943 when he was orchestrating Venyamin Fleishman's opera Rothschild's Violin. Native Jewish folk music had not been previously used by Russian composers and although the anti-Semitism was growing in the Soviet Union Shostakovich's attraction to the Jewish melos prevailed. The Piano Trio opus 67 with the very distinctive 'Jewish' fourth movement had won the Stalin prize (category two) in 1946 and neither it nor its companion, the Second Quartet, were on the list of banned works. So Shostakovich must have felt that composing a song-cycle entitled From Jewish Folk Poetry in August and October 1948 would validated his public promises to write politically acceptable music whilst retaining his artistic integrity.

But events were to overtake him just as they had done twelve years earlier with his opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District'. The intensification of the Cold War and the foundation of the state of Israel with the United States as its ally pushed Stalin into further brutality. With the appearance of an article in Pravda on 28 January 1949 advocating the extermination of the 'Rootless Cosmopolitan'⁷ a ferocious Jewish pogrom began which would only cease with Stalin's death. Under such circumstances performing From Jewish Folk Poetry was not realistic. Its suppression along with that of the Fourth Quartet was not because of Socialist Realism but because of the 'Jewish' content.

From Jewish Folk Poetry was written before the purge began and could now not be performed so why did Shostakovich write another 'Jewish' work, the Fourth Quartet, during this purge? Why did he compose music that he knew could not be performed? Was it to show solidarity with a persecuted minority or because like every artist he needed to write down the creative inspiration regardless of whether it could be performed?

Shostakovich's music at this time can be divided into two groups: music for public performances and music for private fulfillment. To the former belonged commissioned works like his oratorio 'The Song of the Forest', opus 81, composed in Komarovo on the Gulf of Finland in 1949, a sea-side town to which he returned frequently in his life. This was written to celebrate 'The Great Stalinist Plan for Remaking Nature', a fifteen-year project for planting trees to protect southern Central Asia from drought. The oratorio was so bland that it convinced Western listeners that Shostakovich was now burnt out but it was so appropriate for its purpose that the Soviet propaganda machine awarded him the Stalin Prize, First Grade⁸.

The Fourth Quartet belonged to the second group. It was 'written for the drawer' and only received its première on December 3rd 1953 in Moscow, nine months after Stalin's death⁹ and one month after the Fifth had first been performed. By that time things had slightly eased, at least temporarily. Beria, Stalin's head of the secret police, had been quickly executed and Khrushchev ascent to power had begun. Now after the harsh years of Stalinism a thaw could be felt which allowed works like the Fourth Quartet to be performed.

Shostakovich recognised that the times had changed but was cynical. He wrote to his young friend Edison Denisov¹⁰

Edik, the times are new but the informers are old.

From the start of the first movement there is a sense of the strange and exotic. The key of D major traditionally evokes power and glory. For 18th century composers this was a specially bright key because the trumpets of the time were tuned to D major. Yet the quartet commences with the four string instruments combining to produce a sound reminiscent of wailing bagpipes. The music, which is Eastern in flavour with a slight indication of hidden grief, first sharply rises into dissonant chaos but then subsides into a more gentle and harmonious world which anticipates the second movement . This next movement, in F minor, is more straightforward: a waltz explicitly wistful, sad and nostalgic which has a persistent two-note accompaniment and terminates in F major.

The third movement of the Fourth Quartet is not a scherzo but a dreamy allegretto in C minor gently reminiscent of the mechanical perpetual motion in other works of Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Along with the two proceeding movements, its tonal ambiguities prepare the way for the concluding movement into which it flows without a pause.

However the heart of the quartet, and one of the highlights of the whole cycle of quartets, is this remarkable fourth movement. Here the sadness of the second movement and the vitality of the third abruptly fuse to produce the violent, wailing and screaming tones of a danse macabre. The blatant use of Jewish motifs produces a finale full of breathtaking excitement and heart-rendering lamentation. The wailing violin combines with the pulsating foot-stomping rhythm to produce an unforgettable blend of elation and grotesque horror. Here, as in the second piano trio, is the image of death; of Jews being forced to dance on their own newly-dug graves at Treblinka. This is remarkable, nightmarish music: music only for those who cannot dream at night.

What was the aesthetic attraction of Jewish music for Shostakovich? Solomon Volkov quotes Shostakovich as saying¹¹:

This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my idea of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express their despair in dance music. All folk music is lovely, but I can say that the Jewish folk music is unique.

The autographed manuscript of the Fourth Quartet is kept at the Glinka Museum in Moscow.