String Quartet No. 15 in E-Flat Minor

When Shostakovich began his Quartet No. 15, in 1974, he was still talking of plans for a successor. But by the time it came to be premiered he had come to realize that it would be his last. “I had some joy in writing it,” he told a close friend, yet at every stage the music is haunted by a sense of the nearness of death. Formally the quartet is highly unusual: six linked slow movements, all in the traditionally dark key of E-flat minor. But even “slow” is hardly the word for music that doesn’t really seem to move at all. The first movement “Elegy” is hushed throughout, and its chant-like theme, calmly passed amongst the four instruments, has something of the character of a religious meditation. But then a series of agonized shrieks introduce a grotesque, skeletal “Serenade,” leading to the equally bizarre “Intermezzo,” manic on the surface, utterly still in the background. The tender lyrical abstraction of the “Nocturne” then yields to the heart of the work, the “Funeral March,” based on a starkly simple, very slow march rhythm. After this comes the “Epilogue,” in which echoes of other movements drift in an out of each other like slowly fading memories, then the life force itself seems gradually to fade away, in a strangely peaceful desolation. If this sounds depressing, for many listeners that isn’t the ultimate effect. Something beyond resignation seems to be achieved here—an enigmatic transcendence perhaps? Whatever, it is intensely, uniquely beautiful.