String
Quartet No.7 in F# minor, op.108
1.
Allegretto2. Lento
3. Allegro
4. Allegretto
Quartet
no.7 was composed in 1960 and is headed 'In memory of Nina
Shostakovich', his first wife who had died six years earlier. It is
certainly not a programmatic work or even a portrait of Nina, but it
does draw strategically on musical techniques associated with sadness
and memory.
Each
of Shostakovich's quartets is placed in a different key and,
apparently, Shostakovich once said that he was aiming to write a
quartet in each of the twenty-four keys. F sharp minor for the
seventh quartet may have been prompted by the composer's awareness of
the association of the key in the Classical Period with melancholy
and longing, as in Haydn's Farewell
symphony and the slow movements of Mozart's A major piano concerto
(K488) and Beethoven's
Hammerklavier
sonata.
The
starting point for the quartet is highly typical of the composer, a
deliberately paired down simplicity of texture and of structure. The
first movement presents two themes (one in the violin, the other in
the cello) with two very different supporting accompanying patterns.
The two themes are then repeated with new sonorities, pizzicato and
triple time for the first theme and with mutes for the second theme.
The music moves with a minimum break into the Lento, a ternary
structure in which the main theme of the outer sections is an
expressively elongated version of the very opening of the work and
the middle section is underpinned by an insistent rhythm associated
with funeral marches. Again the players are instructed to move on
immediately to the next movement, a moment of abrupt aggression that
initiates an Allegro of unremitting energy. The musical material
itself constantly alludes to the two earlier movements, but
simplicity of texture and harmony is now replaced by complex fugal
textures. The aggression unwinds as the Allegretto returns to a
stable F sharp minor before turning to the major key. One could
easily write 'the solace of the major key', and maybe that is what
Shostakovich had in mind.
(Note courtesy of Cardiff university)
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