Shostakovich: The String Quartets

In 2000, the Emerson Quartet released a complete cycle of Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets, recorded live at the Aspen Music Festival. Critically acclaimed, the album proved something of a milestone in their career which, the Emersons’ co-violinist and founder member Eugene Drucker recalls, was something of a relief given the considerable work they’d put into preparing and rehearsing. “We always tried to prepare diligently for our recordings,” he tells Apple Music Classical, “but knowing that the Shostakovich cycle would be based on live concert performances, we worked even harder to be ready for the challenges of the music and the intense situation.” Shostakovich’s string quartets, and his music in general, were greatly affected by the historical and biographical contexts in which the Soviet Russian composer lived. Yet Drucker emphasizes that the music speaks immediately to even new listeners. “Shostakovich communicates so directly that it may not be necessary to know a lot about the historical background and his personal circumstances to be moved and fascinated upon a first or second hearing,” he says. “However, an understanding of the personal and historical context from which these masterpieces sprang could greatly enhance the already powerful effect that they have.” Does Shostakovich’s cycle fall into distinct periods like the Beethoven quartets? “I tend to think of them as an enormous body of continually evolving works in Shostakovich’s unique compositional voice rather than as groups,” Drucker replies, “though we often performed the last three quartets in one program. Once, at the Tanglewood Festival, we performed the last five in one concert. And when presenting the entire cycle in five concerts, we always played them in slightly modified chronological order, trying to tell the composer’s life story, so to speak, through his string quartets.” And the highlights of the cycle? “The Eighth Quartet stands out,” says Drucker, “due to its autobiographical atmosphere, through frequent references to his earlier works and its use of a musical signature based on Shostakovich’s initials in German musical notation, DSCH, as a recurrent motif.” As Drucker explains, Shostakovich wrote the Eighth as a kind of epitaph while battling with almost suicidal thoughts, having in a moment of weakness allowed himself to be persuaded to join the Communist Party. Yet ultimately, it is a creative triumph, a single span of music that includes, as well as moments of pungency and violence, an episode of consoling, heartfelt lyricism. Shostakovich, with characteristic ambiguity, dedicated it to “the victims of totalitarianism.” There is, indeed, a great variety of moods to be found in Shostakovich’s quartets. Drucker also cites the last four—Nos 12-15—which include “experimentation with 12-tone material, which Shostakovich probably would not have dared to attempt while Stalin was alive, because accusations of writing ‘formalist’ music could have had deadly consequences.” But, as Drucker points out, Shostakovich dared to risk Stalin’s displeasure by his pointed inclusion of Jewish folk music in his Second and Fourth Quartets, composed respectively in 1944 and 1949 (though the latter was not performed until after Stalin’s death in 1953). What are the greatest challenges in performing this cycle? “Almost all the quartets demand physical stamina,” says Drucker, “but that’s not the greatest challenge. Many of the fast movements require a great deal of instrumental virtuosity—breakneck speed, hair-trigger ensemble playing, and accuracy of intonation; the slow movements demand intense concentration and emotional involvement from musicians and listeners alike.” This is particularly true of Shostakovich’s final quartet, the 15th, which perhaps presents the greatest challenge to performers. As Drucker explains, “it was written during one of his final illnesses, and has a despondently valedictory feeling, with its succession of six slow, bleak movements. Its inexorably unfolding, slow-moving drama depends on the creation of a mournful atmosphere that the players must sustain for 35 minutes without losing the audience’s attention.”