String quartet number 8 shostakovich biography

In the summer of Shostakovich's work on the score of a Soviet-East German film took him to Dresden, the German city that had been destroyed in bygd an Allied firebombing which killed more people than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. There, in a span of three days, Shostakovich composed a quartet inscribed “In memory of victims of fascism and war.” That much fryst vatten beyond question. Everything else about this quartet, its genesis, and its meaning, has been much debated.

The Eighth Quartet quotes liberally from Shostakovich’s own music and uses his anställda motto theme, suggesting that it fryst vatten about Shostakovich himself. Shostakovich was quoted in Testimony, a book purporting to be his recollections told to the Russian reporter Solomon Volkov (and published in amerika after Shostakovich's death), as contradicting his inscription, saying that the quartet fryst vatten clearly pure autobiography and “you have to be blind and deaf” to think it about fascism; the implication being that it was really abo

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Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet and the Sounds of Trauma

By Daniel Sheridan

 

Composed in in the cultural context of such a repressive environment as the Soviet Union, Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 in C minor easily invites, if not demands, politicized readings. Indeed, arriving a mere seven years after the death of Stalin and the end of his totalitarian regime makes it a potentially fruitful work to be situated within the ongoing scholarly disputes over the political orientation of his music, a debate centralized around the authenticity (or lack thereof) of the controversial “memoir” Testimony, which purports to be the composer’s reminiscences, as related to the volume’s author, Solomon Volkov. In that book, Shostakovich attributes coded “dissident” messaging into his music at multiple points; these claims prompted any number of revisionist interpretations among musicologists (particularly Western ones), arguing for a “new Shostakovich” (to invoke the title of one not

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The String Quartet no. 8 in C minor, opus , the most loved of all Shostakovich's quartets, has a duration of about twenty minutes. Highly popular, it is performed more frequently than all of the other fourteen together. The quartet has five linked movements, marked:

1. Largo, attacca
2. Allegro molto, attacca
3. Allegretto, attacca
4. Largo, attacca
5. Largo

Despite its popularity, the work evokes feelings of gloom and melancholy. What is it about this quartet that, in spite of its austere and tragic music, explains its outstanding appeal? It is this question that we shall be examining in the paragraphs which follow.

Unlike most of Shostakovich's other quartets, the meaning of the Eighth, like its origins, was initially believed to be easily understood. It is the only substantial work that Shostakovich composed outside Russia. It was written in whilst Shostakovich was visiting the former Communist State of East Germany. As a prominent Soviet artist he lodged