String Quartet No. 8 (Shostakovich)
The String Quartet in C minor op. 110 is Dmitri Dmitrijewitsch Shostakowitsch's 8th String Quartet . From Shostakovich's letters it is clear that this is his most autobiographical work. It is one of the most played string quartets today. It premiered on October 12, 1960 in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg .
The work was created in the same year in Gohrisch in the GDR . The trip was overshadowed by a serious spinal cord disease and by Shostakovich's reluctance to join the CPSU shortly before , which he had been asked to do because Moscow was planning to make him chairman of the USSR Composers' Union. Shostakovich was tormented by this step, so that instead of an actually planned work on a film music for a project financed by Mosfilm and DEFA about the bombing of Dresden in World War II, he created a darkly complex work with which he musically created personal memories of persecution, nagging and war reflected, drawing on various motifs from his own, earlier compositions, as well as motifs from works by other composers, for example from Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony , which is also strongly autobiographical . Above all, he selected compositions that expressed his tension with the Soviet regime in various ways, his first and eighth symphonies, the cello concerto No. 1 and the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, as well as his piano trio No. 2, which is based on Jewish melodies based. The string quartet also begins with a version of its musical signature DSCH .
The work, which was implicitly critical of the regime, was published, presumably under pressure from Moscow, with the addition “In memory of the victims of fascism and war”, which did not appear in Shostakovich's original manuscript. It is true that Shostakovich was shocked by the bombing of Dresden and expressed his solidarity with the population during his visit; that his composition was primarily created under this impression, however, turned out to be inaccurate after Shostakovich's letters to his close confidante Isaak Glikman , which were only published in the new millennium, became known. Shostakovich wrote:
- “... I [have] written a no-one useful and ideologically reprehensible quartet. I thought that should I ever die, hardly anyone would write a work dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write something like that myself. One could also write on its cover: 'Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this quartet'. ... "
In the final version, the seamlessly merging sentences were Largo - Allegro molto - Allegretto - Largo - Largo .
literature
- Isaak Glikmann (Ed.): Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman . Cornell University Press 2001, ISBN 0-8014-3979-5 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110 , homepage of the International Shostakovich Days
- ↑ Isaak Glikmann (Ed.): Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman . Cornell University Press 2001, pp. 90 ff.