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TALICH QUARTET
The
String Quartet no.8 in C minor, op.110
, is in five movements
following on without a break and providing several different
descriptions of the same macabre experience.
The firstmovement (
largo
) immediately presents the composer’smonogram (D. Es.
C. H. = D. E flat. C. B.), a ‘signature’ that he had already used in his Tenth Symphony.
This motif reappears insistently in the next two movements, and again, more
covertly, in the last.
The second movement is frenzied and wild in its violence. The two violins scream
the Jewish theme fromthe PianoTrio - a terrifying testimony to the ruined destinies
with which Shostakovich had always identified.
The third movement is a demonic Waltz, which spins relentlessly around the
composer’s theme, before sinking into a dejected silence - a veritable Dance of
Death!
The fourthmovement,
largo
, openswith three terrifying chords.The composer then
brings in the funeral motif fromthe revolutionary song alreadymentioned, which is
then transformed to evoke amotif fromhis opera
Lady Macbeth
, unperformed after
January 1936, when the Soviet newspaper
Pravda
condemned it for its explicitness
and dissonance, bringing the composer disgrace and public humiliation.
The quartet ends with amovement similar to the first largo - a fugue rounding off a
work in which the formal aspect id subsidiary to its simple emotional force.