Download LMM - Artaria String Quartet 2015-16 Program II Politically Incorrect

Artaria Chamber Music Series 2015-16
Music in the Shadow of War
Program II: Politically Incorrect
Both composers of the Artaria’s second program were victims of the Stalinist regime that followed closely on the
heels of World War II (1939-1945) and brought further devastation to the conflict that affected over a hundred
million people in thirty countries including the eleven million who died in the Holocaust. That a so-called “Cold
War” of forty-six years should follow what has been defined as the deadliest conflict in history, is an unexplainable
irony that drove the creative instincts of Weinberg and Shostakovich to produce such works as we hear on this
program. It is music fraught with anger, resentment, and sorrow—and the bravery it took to compose.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919(1919-1996)
String Quartet No. 4 in EE-flat Major, Op. 20
Allegro comodo
Moderato assai
Largo marciale
Allegro moderato
ABOUT THE COMPOSER: Polish-born Mieczyslaw Weinberg graduated from the Warsaw
Conservatory but fled to the Soviet Union in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II. Most of the family he
left behind, including his parents and younger sister, died in the Holocaust. When World War II expanded
into Russia, Weinberg was evacuated to Tashkent in Central Asia where he married Natalia Vovsi, the
daughter of Solomon Mikhoels, a Soviet Jewish actor and the artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish
Theater, who served as chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II. In Tashkent, he
also met Dmitri Shostakovich who would greatly influence him. With the encouragement of Shostakovich,
Weinberg returned to Moscow in 1943 where, like Shostakovich and Prokofiev, he irritated the conservative
musical establishment. His father-in-law, Solomon Mikhoels, was assassinated in February of 1953 by the
order of Stalin, and shortly thereafter Weinberg was arrested on charges of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism.”
Fortunately he was saved by Stalin’s death the following month. He continued to live in Moscow where he
thrived as a composer and pianist and was championed by leading Russian performers and conductors. He
died in Moscow on January 3, 1996.
Weinberg’s works include twenty-two symphonies, seventeen string quartets, eight violin sonatas,
twenty-four preludes for cello, six cello sonatas, six piano sonatas, a piano trio and piano quintet, a trumpet
concerto, seven operas and numerous film scores. A revival of interest in his music came in 2010 and 2011
with the staging of his opera, The Passenger, by the Bregenz Festival and the English National Opera.
ABOUT THE WORK: Written in 1945, the String Quartet No. 4 reflects Weinberg’s reaction to
the ravages of World War II. It also reveals the influence of Shostakovich. Influence, however, should not
imply imitation. Weinberg has his own singular voice in this moving work in which the shadow of war
strongly lingers. The work is dedicated to the Bolshoi Theatre String Quartet which gave its first performance
on January 19, 1946 in Lesser Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. It was the first of Weinberg’s published
works that continue to grow in recognition today.
The first movement, Allegro comodo, with its poignant opening, has an underlying sadness, urgency,
and growing intensity. There is great equality among the parts and with each player given important moments.
A remarkable characteristic of the movement is the emotional effectiveness of relatively simple scale passages.
The forceful second movement, Moderato assai, smacks of a peasant dance but without a note of
merriment. It might remind us of the final movement of Shostakovich’s E Minor Piano Trio that paints the
tragic picture of Jewish concentration camp inmates who were forced to dig mass graves and dance on the
edges as they were shot to death. The plucking of strings (pizzicato) is used most effectively in the movement.
The third movement, Largo marciale, has an almost terrifying opening. The slow march indicated in
the movement marking is certainly a death march but one with shouts of protest. Weinberg’s use of
counterpoint here is most effective and adds much to this complex movement which ends with final cries and
a moving song.
A glimmer of hope comes in the final movement, Allegro moderato, but without disregard of past
sorrows. Such techniques such as rising arpeggios by the strings in unison and shifts between major and
minor tonalities give the movement an increasing tension. The work ends with a final gasp.
Artaria Chamber Music Series 2015-16
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906(1906-1975)
String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73
Allegretto
Moderato con moto
Allegro non troppo
Adagio
Moderato; Adagio
ABOUT THE COMPOSER: The many photographs of Shostakovich’s unsmiling face accurately depict the man,
his sensibilities, and his music, but that depiction is unendingly complex. Arguments continue even today on his political views
and on the compromises he may have made to sustain his creativity. The only thing certain is his position as a victim in the
Soviet regime’s attempt to control the arts and make them subservient to its political ideals. That many artists died in this
process is enough to confirm its devastating effect. Shostakovich had also been deeply affected by World War II and even
tried enlisting in the military but was turned down because of his bad eyesight. Shostakovich’s American biographer, Laurel
Fay, attests that he was deeply troubled by the conditions of the time including the restrictions imposed on artists. Despite
this, both Fay and scholar Richard Taruskin have contested the authenticity of Testimony, a 1979 publication by Solomon
Volkov purported to be Shostakovich’s memoirs in which he admitted to anti-government messages in his music.
With more and more certainty, the fifteen string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich are seen as monuments of the 20th
century literature and are ranked next to the six quartets of Béla Bartók. The quartets, however, differ so greatly from
Shostakovich’s symphonic output that one sometimes comes to them in a secondary fashion. Such adjectives as “mysterious,”
“fragmented,” “death-haunted,” and “confessional” have been applied to them, sometimes with a hint of the pejorative. Much
of this is explained by Shostakovich’s working and surviving in a totalitarian state where it was necessary to cloud meaning.
Behind that complex game, one finds, particularly in the string quartets, a tragic voice in mourning for the victims of tyranny.
One also finds a composer determined to write his music under any circumstances. Shostakovich’s string quartets punctuate
his tumultuous relationship with the Soviet regime. In 1936, Stalin had stormed out in protest from a performance of Lady
Macbeth of Mtsensk, and this was followed by the famous review in which the opera was described as “muddle instead of
music.” Pravda wrote ominously that Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk “is a leftist bedlam instead of human music” and that “this game
may end badly.” In 1948 the situation came to a head with Shostakovich and Prokofiev being accused of “formalist
perversions and anti-democratic tendencies in music, alien to the Soviet people and its artistic tastes.” Shostakovich was
publicly apologetic but from that point on turned inward to chamber music and to the completion of his fifteen quartets. Prior
to the 1948 condemnation, however, he had already begun that monumental task with his first three string quartets of 1938,
1944, and 1946. The remaining twelve quartets would come between 1949 and 1974, the year before his death.
There is always danger of artistic compromise when politics toys with art. Particularly in his chamber music,
Shostakovich solved the problem by retreating to the inner sanctum of his creative genius, which was more abstract and
therefore more impervious to political controversy. As the Nazis did not comprehend the irony of the performance of
Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time before five thousand prisoners in 1941, so did the Stalinists miss the impact of
Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets.
ABOUT THE WORK: The Third Quartet of 1946 is clearly a result of Shostakovich’s anger, resentment,
frustration, and ultimate sorrow about World War II. It is also one of his most sincere messages unclouded by any political
compromises. So, too, is it one of his longest quartets, culminating his use of five movements. Despite this certain grandness
of scale, the work has all the intimacy and complexity of the string quartet form. In his attempt to express the inexpressible—
as the Quartet suggests—Shostakovich pushes all four instruments to their limits. His use of counterpoint in the Third
Quartet is nothing short of miraculous.
Darkness pervades the Third Quartet from the playful opening statement of the first movement through the dark
humor of the second movement and the savage military march of the third movement. There is no relief in the Adagio of the
fourth movement, which serves as a cornerstone of the Quartet with its stately dance or passacaglia, aria, and funeral march.
The final movement hints at a return to the opening statement but turns instead to a restatement of the passacaglia theme of
the Adagio but this time with a triple forte. We are left hanging with the quiet but disturbing ending by the first violin on a
dissonant high E.
To the movements mentioned above, Shostakovich had added the subtitles “Calm awareness of the future
cataclysm;” “Rumblings of unrest and anticipation;” “The forces of war are unleashed;” “Homage to the dead;” and “The
eternal question.” Although these subtitles add much to the understanding of the music, Shostakovich removed them without
explanation. Shortly after its premiere in Moscow on December 16, 1946, the Third Quartet was withdrawn from public
performance.
© 2015 Lucy Miller Murray
Lucy Miller Murray is the author of Chamber Music: An Extensive Guide for Listeners published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2015.