String
Quartet No.4 in D major, op.83
- Allegretto
- Andantino
- Allegretto
- Finale-Allegretto
Looking
at the score, the Fourth Quartet appears a relatively simple and
straight-forward work: three apparently light Allegretto
movements and an Andantino
slow movement. Indeed, the Quartet starts with a kind of mock
innocence, its bare fifths and crudely simple harmonic language
suggesting something pastoral – reflecting, perhaps, Socialist
Realist art's typical celebration of rural Russia and her folk
traditions. Yet increasingly sour notes are sounded, suggesting all
is not well with this studied simplicity. After this relatively
brief Allegretto
follows a beautiful slow movement – gentle and almost consoling at
first in character, but curdling as it touches a deeper expressive
vein; the first violin rises in keen lament, drawing its colleagues
into a higher tessitura, before the music subsides into noble
resignation. The next movement is a furtive scherzo, its nervous
bustling and scampering suggesting the preparation of a major event.
This leads without a break into the finale where, heralded with the
pomp of resonant pizzicato chords, a theme of a patently Jewish
character takes centre stage. Shostakovich had already made use of
Jewish themes in several previous works including his Second Quartet.
But using such a theme in 1949 was controversial in Stalinist Russia,
since among official circles anti-Semitism was on the rise and was to
reach its culmination in the so-called Doctor's Plot. Shostakovich,
as a close friend of the Jewish refugee composer Moisey Weinberg, was
aware of this rising tide, and as a gesture of empathy with this
persecuted minority, created several works – including the First
Violin Concerto, and most overtly in the song cycle From Jewish
Poetry – in which he made quotation or allusion to their music,
once explaining: “Jews were tormented for so long that they learned
to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.”
Note
by Daniel Jaffe
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