String Quartet No. 6 in G Major

After the fraught emotional dramas of String Quartets Nos 2-5, the Sixth Quartet (1956) brings a significant shift in tone—or at least that’s the prevailing impression. Some of this music seems to look back to the “childlike”, folk-inflected moods and scenes of the First Quartet. In fact, it’s subtler, more grown-up than that. It’s possible that the relative sense of peace and safety in the early days of Nikita Khrushchev’s post-Stalinist “thaw” left its mark on the music, but Shostakovich had also lost his first wife, Nina, mother of his children, and also his beloved and admired mother—and there were too many memories of other painful losses. If there is an autobiographical strand to this music, it’s a complicated one. The first, second and fourth movements seem to begin with smiles, and all four movements end with the same tender, if somewhat rueful cadence which ingeniously compresses the notes of Shostakovich’s musical signature—a four-note motif that spells his initials, D-S-C-H (D. Sch). In the first and second movements, Haydn-like wit soon enriches folksy simplicity, and there are moments of darker intensity. The Quartet’s heart however is the beautiful variation slow movement, sad but dignified, and hushed throughout. It’s when the variation theme returns at the height of the finale that sadness at last becomes cathartic. Peace is restored, but things are rarely straightforward with Shostakovich. The haunted, barbed humour of the Seventh Quartet is waiting in the wings.