String Quartet No. 12 in D-Flat Major

Many of Shostakovich’s quartets convey a sense of journeying into the inner regions of the mind, and the 12th (1968) does so in particularly dramatic and intense terms. Dedicated to the leader of the Beethoven Quartet, Dmitri Tsiganov, it is fiercely exacting in the demands it places on all four players. It also contains some of Shostakovich’s most harshly modernist writing; yet alongside this can be found music of unusually “old-fashioned” tonal-melodic clarity and expressive directness. The juxtapositions can seem incongruous, at first—the quartet begins with a Schoenbergian atonal “tone row” that slides effortlessly into a warm, ardent D-flat major. Yet the extremes are integrated ingeniously, and a sense of a unifying emotional narrative emerges as strongly as in Shostakovich’s most popular symphonies. What, precisely, that narrative might be is harder to say. There is a sense of a mind under extreme pressure, as the music battles to hold the line in the face of an array of onslaughts. But is that pressure from outside (i.e. political), or from deep within? After the subdued unease of the relatively short first movement, the wide-ranging second suggests near-hysterical anxiety and deathly calm, the latter punctuated by anguished, Hamlet-like soliloquies. A kind of resolution emerges as the music returns to D-flat major, sustained through a fusillade of atonal assaults, at first from Tsiganov’s first violin. At the end the quartet seems torn between frenzied despair and a dogged determination to survive.