The six Op. 76 Quartets were written on commission from Count Joseph Erdödy, scion of the Viennese family who had encouraged Haydn’s work since at least 1776 and whose members became important patrons of Beethoven after his arrival in the capital in 1792. The Quartet in D major, Op. 76, No. 5 begins with an extraordinary move- ment — part sonata, part variations, part ternary — that shows Haydn still testing the boundaries of Classical forms in his later years. The movement is in three main divisions, plus an annex. The principal sections share the same theme, a handsome tune in gently swaying meter, which is played largely intact in the outer portions (with some embellishment on its return) but given a roiling, minor-key development-variation in the center. The annex, a large, dashing coda, contains an upbeat version of the main theme. The Largo is a wordless song of touching simplicity in three-part form (A–B–A) that is instructed to be played cantabile e mesto: “songfully and sad.” The Menuetto, whose theme borrows its arching shape from that of the preceding Largo, suggests a happy balance of courtly elegance and country rusticity. The finale is nothing less (nor more) than a bustling jeu d’esprit, a free-form fantasy of youthful exuberance which takes as its sport a jokey cadence that belongs at the end, but here comes at the beginning, and a quicksilver motive passed nimbly among all the participants.

Shostakovich saw the iron figure of Joseph Stalin behind the purge of 1948, as he was convinced it had been for an earlier one in 1936. After the 1936 debacle, Shostakovich responded with the Fifth Symphony, and kept composing through the years of World War II, even becoming an international figure representing the cour- age of the Soviet people with the lightning success of his Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad”) in 1941. The 1948 censure was, however, almost more than Shostakovich could bear. He determined that he would go along with the Party prerogative for pap, and withhold all of his substantial works until the time they would be given a fair hearing — when Stalin was dead. About the only music Shostakovich made public between 1948 and 1953 was that for films, most of which dealt with episodes in Soviet history (The Fall of Berlin, The Memorable Year 1919), and some patriotic vocal works (The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland and Song of the Forests, which won the 1949 Stalin Prize). The only significant works he released during that half-decade were the 24 Preludes and Fugues for Piano. The other compositions of the time — the First Violin Concerto, Songs on Jewish Folk Poetry, Fourth and Fifth String Quartets — were all withheld until later years. With the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953 (ironically, Prokofiev died on the same day), Shostakovich and all of the Soviet Union felt an oppressive burden lift. The thaw came gradually, but there did return to the country’s artistic life a more amenable attitude toward art, one that allowed significant works to again be produced and per- formed. Shostakovich, whose genius had been shackled by Stalin’s repressive artistic policies, set to work on the great Tenth Symphony, and composed steadily thereafter until his death two decades later.

The creations of Shostakovich’s later years are sharply divided into two seemingly antithetical streams, though each reveals a fundamental aspect of Shostakovich as man and artist. One series of works, including the Sym- phonies No. 11 (“The Year 1905,” extolling Lenin) and No. 12 (“1917”), cantatas, film music, patriotic marches and choruses, and instrumental scores in a popular vein (the Piano Concerto No. 2, for example), is for public consumption and the fulfillment of his duties as “People’s Artist of the U.S.S.R.,” a title conferred upon him in 1954. Paralleling these noisy, jingoistic entries is a large repertory of pieces that are both profound and personal: the magnificent and disturbing last symphonies (No. 13, “Babi Yar,” based on Yevtushenko’s searing poem about the German army’s massacre of 70,000 Jews near Kiev in September 1941; No. 14, settings of eleven texts dealing with death; and No. 15, one of the most stark and mov- ing orchestral documents of the 20th century), the First Violin Concerto, songs on verses of Alexander Blok and Michelangelo Buonarroti, and, perhaps most significant of all, the last ten of his fifteen string quartets. As had Beethoven, Shostakovich used the medium of the string quartet as the bearer of his most intimate and deep-seated feelings, a musical window into his soul. The wealth of thought and the clarity of expression in these quartets is nothing short of staggering, and as an oeuvre they are matched in the 20th century only by those of Béla Bartók. The Ninth Quartet was composed quickly during the early summer of 1964, one of the busiest periods of Shosta- kovich’s life. His 1932 opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, the work that provided the excuse for his condemnation

in 1936, was enjoying a fine international success in its 1956 revision, and he traveled to London and Zagreb to oversee productions in those cities at the turn of the new year. Also in the early months of 1964, he continued his teaching duties at the Leningrad Conservatory, attended music festivals in Gorky and Tashkent, completed the background score for a film of Hamlet, took care of some affairs for the Soviet Composers’ Union in Rostov-on- Don, met with Benjamin Britten during that composer’s visit to Moscow, and composed. Following the May Day celebrations in Moscow, Shostakovich spent a week at his dacha in Zhukovka, recovering from his travels, enjoying the time with his wife, Irina, and beginning the Quartet No. 9. He completed the work at the end of the month (after two more weeks away from home), and dedicated the score to his wife. The premiere was given in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on November 20, 1964 by the Beethoven Quartet, the ensemble that introduced most of Shostakovich’s quartets during their long musical alliance with him.

Vassily Shirinsky, first violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, wrote that the Ninth Quartet shows “grandeur, drama and a certain austerity.” The work’s five movements (fast–slow–fast–slow–fast) are unified by their sharing of thematic fragments and by their uninterrupted connection one with the next. The opening Moderato is based on two themes: a doleful, wandering motive introduced by the first violin above a murmuring figure that courses inces- santly throughout the movement; and a slightly grotesque little march from the cello. An octave-leap figure is spun from the march melody and combined with the principal themes for the balance of the movement. The succeeding Adagio, using a melody of curious modal leadings, is a poignant dialogue between the first violin and the viola. The following scherzo is constructed in symmetrical “arch” form: A–B–C–B–A. The central trio, enlisting a dance- like strain chided throughout by soft trills, is flanked by music of quick rhythms shared by all the instruments (and played without mutes). The opening and closing sections (muted) are based on a cheeky tune with a goodly number of nose-thumbing, intentional wrong notes.

The fourth movement is music of stone and ice, and creates a certain bleak beauty at which Shostakovich was unexcelled. The lower strings give out a frozen chorale in octaves and thirds while the first violin emits timid, undulating sighs. The violin then posits a melody that tries to soar upward only to collapse back almost imme- diately upon itself to be met by the angry snappings of the second violin in a horrific transformation of the chorale theme. The process is repeated by the viola, but, despite the hollow howls of the lower strings, the first violin sings a brief, mournful incantation in its highest register before, drained of energy and enthusiasm, it again gives itself up to sighs and silence. The finale is a vast sonata form (main theme in fast triple meter; subsidiary theme in duple) incorporating motives from the earlier movements.

The Quintet opens with a theme that is almost chaste in its purity and yet is, somehow, deeply introspective and immediately touching. As its initial punctuating arpeggios indicate, the clarinet’s role in the piece is not so much one of soloist in a miniature concerto (as is the wind instrument in the Horn Quintet, K. 407) as that of an equal partner to the string ensemble. The second theme, a limpid, sweetly chromatic melody such as could have been conceived by no other musician of the time, not even Joseph Haydn, is given first by the violin and then by the clarinet above a delicate syncopated string accompaniment. Areference to the suave main theme closes the exposition and serves as the gateway to the development section, which is largely concerned with permutations of the arpeggiated figures with which the clarinet made its entry in the opening measures. The recapitulation provides exquisite closure of the movement’s formal structure and emotional progres- sion. The Larghetto achieves a state of exalted sublimity that makes it the instrumental counterpart to Sarastro’s arias in The Magic Flute, which George Bernard Shaw once said were the only music fit to issue from the mouth of God. The Menuetto is fitted with two trios: the first, a somber minor-mode essay for strings alone, is perfectly balanced by the clarinet’s lilting, Ländler-like strains in the second. The variations-form finale is more subdued and pensive than virtuosic and flamboyant, and serves as a fitting conclusion to one of the most precious treasures in Mozart’s peerless musical legacy.