The fifteen string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich rank, with the six of Béla Bartók, as the most important examples of that genre in the twentieth century. Among them, the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth form a special subset, with dedications to the composer’s first wife, Nina, for number seven (“In memoriam”), and his second wife, Irina, for number nine. The dedication of the Eighth Quartet, “to the victims of fascism and war,” seems a thinly disguised reference to Shostakovich himself, who inserts his musical “signature,” D-E-flat-C-B (in the German musical alphabet D, E-flat [Es], C, B natural [H]: D. SCHostakowitsch), at numerous points in the work.

The Seventh Quartet is the Shostakovich’s shortest, its three movements brimming with the composer’s trademark sardonic introversion. The key of F-sharp minor, traditionally associated with pain and loss (as in the Bach St. John Passion aria “Ach, mein Sinn” that reflects Peter’s remorse, or in Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony), marks a departure from the key cycle Shostakovich had established in his previous quartets, and seems fitting for a belated memorial to Nina Varzar, who had died unexpectedly in 1954. The opening Allegretto is characterized by a superficially casual yet nervous theme that spirals downward through various metrical transformations, answered by three short repeated notes. The slow middle movement unfolds over a second violin ostinato as a desolate reminder of loss. The fury of the fugal finale gradually abates as material from the first movement is reintroduced, including a tender, if somewhat grotesque, waltz, as if, wrote one perceptive commentator, “the ghost of Nina were dancing in Shostakovich’s memory.”

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The Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, long resident in Massachusetts, writes of the string quartet version of his Tenebrae as “a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it “from afar,” the music would probably offer a “beautiful” surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from the third of Couperin's Leçons de Tenèbres, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem.”

Each of the three Leçons Couperin published on texts drawn from the Lamentations of Jeremiah (he makes reference to six others, which are now unfortunately lost), intended for Holy Wednesday services at the Abbey de Longchamp, concludes with the admonition Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum (“Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God”).  Golijov’s appropriation of Couperin’s melodically compelling setting of this text at the closing measures of Tenebrae is readily audible. We programmed Tenebrae for this concert well over a year ago to reflect this Museum’s interest in Hispanic-American culture. It is sadly ironic that its unsung background text is now so very topical.

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The Austrian pianist and writer Alfred Brendel, a brilliantly perceptive thinker, once remarked: “Beethoven composes like an architect, Schubert like a sleepwalker. . . . In Beethoven’s music we never lose our bearings, we always know where we are; Schubert, on the other hand, puts us into a dream.” To few of Schubert’s works could this comparison be better applied than to the sprawling Quartet in G Major, D887, Schubert’s last and longest essay in the genre. Much analytical ink has been spilled trying to give definite form to the work’s near-continuous flirting with the relationship of major and minor, which seem to be treated as nearly equal, or at least interchangeable. From the very first bars of the opening movement, G major and G minor are heard in close juxtaposition, which is in itself rather surprising. But at the movement’s recapitulation, the order in which these sonorities are heard is reversed. Small wonder that the Leipzig publisher Probst gently refused to print some of Schubert’s later pieces, opining the “the public does not yet sufficiently and generally understand the peculiar, often ingenious, but perhaps from time to time rather curious procedures of your mind’s creativity.”

One quite satisfactory way to experience D887 might be to yield to Brendel’s analogy. Schubert himself left a short prose piece, much in the style of early German Romantics like Novalis, entitled “My Dream,” and dated 3 July 1822. Resist the temptation, despite its first-person narrative, to read into it any specific details of Schubert’s life. But mark well the statement “thus love and pain divided me.” It may hold a vital clue to understanding Schubert’s most enigmatic quartet.

My Dream

I was a brother of many brothers and sisters. Our father and our mother were good. I was devoted to them all with a deep love. Once, my father took us to a feast. There my brothers became very merry. I, however, was sad. Then my father approached me and commanded me to enjoy the delicious food. But I could not, wherefore my father, becoming angry, banished me from his sight. I turned my steps away and, my heart full of infinite love for those who disdained it, wandered into a distant land. For long years I felt torn between the greatest grief and the greatest love. Then the news of my mother's death reached me. I hastened to see her, and my father, softened by sorrow, did not hinder my entrance. Then I saw her corpse. Tears flowed from my eyes. I saw her lying there like the happy old past, in which, according to the deceased's wish, we were to live as she herself once had.

And we followed her corpse in sorrow and the coffin sank down. From that time on I again remained at home. Then my father took me once again in his favorite garden. He asked me if I liked it. But the garden was wholly repellent to me and I dared not say so. Then, flushing, he asked me a second time: did the garden please me? Trembling, I denied it. Then my father struck me and I fled. And for the second time I turned my steps away and, with a heart full of infinite love for those who disdained it, I again wandered into a distant land. For long, long years I sang songs. When I would sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I would sing of pain, it turned to love.

Thus love and pain divided me.

And once, I had news of a pious virgin who had just died. And around her tomb formed a circle in which many youths and old men perpetually walked as though in bliss. They spoke softly, so as not to wake the virgin.

Heavenly thoughts seemed forever to be showered upon the youths from the virgin's tomb, like fine sparks producing a soft rustling. I, too, longed to walk here. But only a miracle, people said, leads into this circle. Nevertheless, I went to the tomb, with slow steps and lowered gaze, filled with devotion and firm belief, and, before I was aware of it, I found myself in the circle, from which there arose a wondrously lovely sound; and I felt as though eternal bliss were compressed into a single moment. My father, too, I saw, reconciled and loving. He clasped me in his arms and wept. But not so much as I.

                                                                                                  —Kenneth Slowik