String Quartet No. 5 in B-Flat Major

Like the First Violin Concerto and the 10th Symphony, Shostakovich’s Fifth Quartet (1953) shows how crisis can lead a creative mind to concentrate its thoughts as never before. Stalin had died by the time Shostakovich began this quartet, but the atmosphere politically was still highly charged. Hypersensitive and vulnerable as ever, the Fifth Quartet also shows how the composer found the strength to survive. The first movement is at once a formidable display of neo-Bachian counterpoint and a white-water ride of emotional discharge; yet one can also sense the delight of a master craftsman in making so much from the few tiny scraps of motif presented at the beginning. An exquisite, elegiac slow movement emerges from the first. Most of the time it speaks in whispers, as though even in this most private utterance Shostakovich must be on watch for eavesdroppers. Disconcertingly, the finale sets off (again without a break) as a pleasant, complacent waltz-tune, but this too builds to an angry, massively scored climax, and the ending is all eerie stillness. Tempting as it is to interpret this in terms of the then-current situation in Russia, the intense chant-like theme at the climaxes of the outer movements points to something more personal. It’s a quotation from the Clarinet Trio by Shostakovich’s pupil Galina Ustvolskaya, with whom he was in love, and who rejected him—a reminder that Shostakovich was so much more than just a political commentator.