Shostakovitch

Shostakovich's chamber music in particular has enjoyed great esteem. These days, some go so far as to rank it above the symphonies, and yet Shostakovich came seriously to chamber music somewhat after he had established his position as one of the two best Soviet composers. His first string quartet appeared in 1935 (<em>ie</em>, after the Third Symphony), the Piano Quintet in 1940, and the Piano Trio #2 in 1944. An earlier piano trio, written in 1923, comes nowhere near the intensity of its younger brother. In purely musical terms and leaving aside for the moment the considerable emotion in these works, Shostakovich's chamber music seems "about" finding a sharper vocabulary of musical images, figures, and gestures than the composer permitted himself in the early symphonies and, indeed, allowed into the symphonic work only from about the first violin concerto on. Shostakovich seems to have followed two different paths &ndash; one representing the public rhetoric and a striving for the epic or the theatric, the other more inward, even psychological. Eventually, these two paths meet, with profound result, in the masterpieces of his late period.

 

Many composers have discovered that the combination of piano, violin and cello is notoriously difficult to balance, and have struggled with the problem of giving full scope to each instrument without drowning the cello in its lower register, or letting the piano dominate the ensemble. Shostakovich, who had a perfect ear for instrumental textures, enjoyed confronting such challenges and composed two true piano trios at the beginning and middle of his career, and one piano trio with soprano (the Alexander Blok Romances) at the end. The three could hardly be more different in sound, texture and general effect.

 

 

The C minor Piano Trio was only published after Shostakovich's death. He began it in August 1923 in the Crimea, where he was convalescing, and completed it soon afterwards in Petrograd. He dedicated the piece (which he also called Poème) to Tatyana Glivenko, an early love. It was first performed by the composer and two of his friends in December: Shostakovich's younger sister recalled that they practised in a cinema and their sessions often doubled as an accompaniment to silent films. We can only imagine what the audience thought. The Trio comes from the time when Shostakovich was just seventeen, clearly the most brilliant student at the Petrograd Conservatory, and beginning to collect ideas for the symphony which three years later would bring him widespread attention in Russia and eventually international fame. It was a period when he was experimenting with a number of different musical approaches and in this work he was obviously determined to avoid any reference to a nineteenth-century piano trio sound. Shostakovich was a child of the revolution (however ironically he may have viewed it) and wanted to compose original music for an original society. The Trio is a compact work in a single movement, but containing a wide variety of tempos and musical characters in its well-crafted span.

 

 

Early in 1967, Shostakovich was asked by the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya to write them a ‘vocalise’ they could perform together. He responded by setting Alexander Blok’s beautiful early love-poem, ‘Ophelia’s Song’. In a sudden rush of creativity over the next 3 days (and fired, he said, by a stiff shot of brandy), he then immediately set another early Blok poem for voice and piano for himself to perform with Vishnevskaya and then another for violin and voice to draw in a third friend, David Oistrakh.  In the third and fourth songs he combined cello and piano, then violin and piano, in the sixth the violin and cello together and only in the final seventh song, a hymn to music, is the soprano at last accompanied by the complete piano trio. 

 

The result is an extraordinarily intense sequence: sweet and deeply personal meditations about love, intimacy, friendship and the power of art, all surrounded and threatened by prophetic intimations of disaster and the darkness of the night (nearly every poem is a nocturne). This most unusual work is one of Shostakovich’s greatest tributes to some of the closest musical friendships of his life.

 

 

Various explanations of the inspiration for the second piano trio have been proposed, and one reason for the many explanations is, of course, the incredible power of the trio: something this intense must mean <em>something</em>. Upon first hearing the work, it can easily strike as a Dance of Death, not surprising given Shostakovich's early and deep study of Mahler. The introduction to the work &ndash; a bare-bones line on high cello harmonics &ndash; exhibits striking affinity with the final number of the <em>Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen</em>, at the words "Hat mir niemand Ade gesagt" ("No one has said goodby to me"), although Shostakovich very quickly adds the inflections of Russian folk song. Given the date of composition, several writers have suggested that Shostakovich wrote the work in response to reports of the Nazi death camps. However, a long-time friend of the composer had died shortly before Shostakovich began writing the trio. Perhaps the trio is partly a "saying goodby" to a friend. Nevertheless, the music overwhelms any such reductive explanation.

 

The first movement engages in violent mood swings, from opening despair to an almost athletic joy to pure fury. Shostakovich brings the latter two into even sharper opposition in the following Scherzo. The triple-time rhythm pounds relentlessly. The scherzo trio, which normally brings some kind of rhetorical relief, dances just as manically. To that extent, the movement might almost be described as a scherzo without trio. The slow third movement is a chaconne. Like Brahms in the Fourth Symphony finale, Shostakovich uses a sequence of chords as the background to a set of variations. His basic harmonic progression moves from Bb-minor to B-minor &ndash; a feat in itself &ndash; in a way that really doesn't allow a listener to get his bearings. When the composer adds melody lines, however, the progression begins to make more sense. This runs counter to the composer's usual symphonic practice, where "recitative" melody makes little sense without its harmonic underpinnings. The movement doesn't rise to very high passions and consequently serves as a kind of bitter relief. But it's like looking over a battlefield, fighting ended, numb at the slaughter. In the finale, the trio becomes a klezmer band, in an idiom that owes much to Prokofieff's Quintet. Themes from earlier movements reappear, transformed in the fun-house mirror of Shostakovich's klezmer. The movement becomes progressively angrier, until the opening theme of the entire work breaks the tension in an imitative passage for all instruments. The klezmer begins again until it hits one last surprise: the chords of the chaconne, against which the strings eventually are reduced to the strumming of mandolins and guitars. Given the original context of those chords, the work should end in a blank of despair, but the effect really comes off as more of a resolution of grief.