How are we to understand the third movement of the Sixth Quartet?
Try the following experiment. Listen to the YouTube recording above and imagine that a loved-one has died. The coffin is being carried solemnly step by step to the grave and you are part of the cortège. You follow the procession mechanically but suddenly your heart breaks (at 3' 31'') and you feel the bitter loss that this death has caused.
Is that a convincing explanation of this movement?
Now listen to the piece again but forget any idea of morbidity. You are on your honeymoon in a beautiful coastal resort. The last few years have been extremely taxing but now, with your head on the lap of your beloved, you gaze at the open sky and are overcome with a feeling of peaceful contentment. Thanks to the beloved your life has become orderly, tranquil and serene. Suddenly your heart opens (at 3' 31'') and you are engulfed by sentimental happiness.
Such diverging but plausible ways to interpret the movement might indicate that there is no extra-musical significance hidden within it: it is just a piece of beautiful absolute music. Maybe that is all that it is, but if there is any hidden meaning then the short passage starting at 3' 31'' might become very significant.
The String Quartet no. 6 in G major, opus 101, was composed between the 7th and 31st August 1956.
Several events happened in the time between the completion of the Fifth Quartet in November 1953 and that of the Sixth Quartet in 1956. Stalin, whose policies had persecuted Shostakovich in 1936 and 1948, had died on the 5th March 19531. On the 9th March Shostakovich's 'official' grief for the loss of the leader was published on page 3 of 'Izvestiya'. Politically things then seemed to thaw. Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his 'cult of personality' to a closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in the early morning of the 25th February 1956. Following this 'secret' speech prisoners in Stalin's labour camps began to be released.
But tragedy also occurred. Shostakovich's wife, Nina, had suddenly been hospitalised on December 3rd 1954 in Yerevan in Armenia. Shostakovich, who was attending a concert in Moscow, rushed to her side but when he reached her she was in a coma. She died on December 5th, 1954. Family grief was soon followed by another death. In November 1955 Shostakovich's loving mother also died.
In late July 1956 Shostakovich (now 49) suddenly married Margarita Kainova, a thirty-two year-old Komsomol activist and instructor2. The partnership surprised his friends and indeed was not to prove a success and ended in 1959 with a divorce3, but when the Sixth Quartet was written the couple were on honeymoon in Komarovo, a Russian town to the north of St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland.
G major is a key which, at least in the baroque age, tended to be happy and benedictory; indeed, despite the recent tumultuous events, Shostakovich's Sixth Quartet seems, at least at first sight, to be surprisingly carefree and relaxed. It is reminiscent of his First Quartet not only in being simple in form and melodic in nature but also in showing no indications of the world Shostakovich had recently experienced. For the first time since writing his opus 93, his Tenth Symphony, in 1953 Shostakovich declared himself satisfied with something he had composed4.
The quartet, which lasts approximately 25 minutes, has four movements marked:
- Allegretto,
- Moderato con molto,
- Lento, attacca
- Lento - Allegretto
The first movement, in the sonata form (whose second subject quotes an identical section in the third quartet) is mainly in common time. It finishes with an impressive 40 bar coda which culminates in recalling the bass motif already heard bars 11-13. This cadence in G major reoccurs at the end of each movement although in the second it is transposed into E flat.
The perky and lively mood is continued into the beginning of the second movement. Then a more thoughtful and airy theme is introduced and the two moods, the thoughtful and the perky, intertwine for the rest of the waltz-like movement.
The heart of the quartet lies in the B flat minor. Here a passacaglia, whose base theme is repeated seven times, replaces the airy mood with one of greater solemnity. This is another example of the controlled passacaglia loved by Shostakovich but instead of displaying the First Violin Concerto's5 pent-up passion the passacaglia of the Sixth Quartet has the feeling of resigned contentment. It is as if Shostakovich after so many deaths and grief had finally found peace in his marriage to an attractive and younger woman. The final movement continues directly on from the end of the third and, whilst referring to the theme of the passacaglia and echoing its solemnity, manages to reintroduce the vitality of the first movement.
For many the result is a work which, whilst maintaining the counterpoint of previous quartets, effuses a mood reminiscent of the lyric simplicity and romanticism of the First Quartet rather than attempting profundity.
However this view is not accepted by many musicologists: for them it contains elements which contradict any sense of inner peace. Most apparent is the mournful cadence which comes at end of each movement. Its repetition seems to indicate an intended irony. This might be a self-irony because one of its elements in the cadence is the simultaneous playing of the notes DSCH Indeed D's and E flats (S's) occur frequently throughout the work and their effect is undermine the certainty of the harmonic structure. Judith Kuhn calls these elements 'disturbing'6.
The third movement, the Lento, is written in B flat minor "a dark key, favoured by dark Russian composers in the romantic period."7 On close inspection it too contains a disturbing feature. Between the fifth and sixth repeation of the theme [rehearsal number 59 on the score or starting at 3'31" in the YouTube example displayed above] Shostakovich shortly quotes a melody from the middle movement, the adagio, of Prokofiev's Second Quartet written fourteen years earlier in 1942 during the German invasion of Russia8. It is the first theme in this movement and Prokofiev has it played on the cello, but in Shostakovich's arrangement it is played on the first violin which soars graciously above the other instruments. Shostakovich's quotation is as brief as it is beautiful but its darker associations were known to him. Prokofiev's quartet was based on folk-tunes, a standard ploy used by composers to fulfil the requirements of socialist realism. The melody selected by Shostakovich from this collection was based on a Kabardian love song, 'Synilyaklik Zhir'9. But to whom is this love song referring? To his second wife with whom he is now on honeymoon? Or to his first wife, Nina, whom Shostakovich would have been only too aware had died in the Caucasus?
Prokofiev died on the 5th March 1953. It is the date of one of the most famous deaths in twentieth-century history but not because of Prokofiev: it was the day that Stalin died10. Any Soviet music-lover would know that Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day. Could it be that by quoting Prokofiev in a slow dirge-like movement Shostakovich was recalling not only Prokofiev's death but also that of Stalin and the deaths of the countless persons, including some of Shostakovich's closest friends, who had been murdered on Stalin's orders?
Listened to in this way Shostakovich's Lento ceases to express any resigned contentment but is seen to be a lament. A lament for his dead fellow-composer; for his murdered friends; for his first wife and perhaps, considering the signature in the closing cadence, for himself. It is a harbinger of the Eighth Quartet.
The work was premièred on 7th October 1956 at the Glinka Concert Hall in Leningrad by the Beethoven Quartet (Dmitri Tsyganov, Vasili Shirinsky, Vadim Borisovsky and Sergei Shirinsky). The autographed manuscript is preserved in Moscow at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). The quartet has no dedication although Shostakovich had told his friends that he intended to dedicate it to himself - in honour of his fiftieth birthday11.
