DSCH Journal © all rights reserved
DSCH Journal
... each new edition of the Journal will include an on-line version of one of its articles, in PDF format, free of charge
Form, Motive and Musical Process in Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Quartet
Samuel Hogarth
Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Thirteenth Quartet, op. 138, in the summer of 1970,
between stays at a Siberian clinic where he was being treated for a serious illness.
Since the previous year, when he wrote his Fourteenth Symphony, op. 135, Shostakovich
had been preoccupied with the theme of death, and various features of the Thirteenth
Quartet suggest that this was still the case even in the light of the renewed optimism
he felt after his first spell of treatment. The bleak outer sections seem to suggest
a lonely and hopeless protagonist; the middle section has been described as macabre,
and the technique – nowhere else to be found in Shostakovich’s output – of tapping
with the bow on the body of the violin, used during the middle section and again
in the ghostly coda, has been likened to ‘the bony summons of death as it appeared
to the mediaeval imagination’.
In this investigation I propose to examine the musical processes at work in the quartet, and thus to elucidate their dramatic implications. My approach is fundamentally analytical, and I acknowledge David Fanning’s work as a model. I hope to show that, while extramusical interpretations of the quartet are unavoidable (and I will not attempt to steer clear of them), they are underpinned by a rigorous and tightly-woven musical structure.
The quartet is in Bb minor, in general a dark key for Shostakovich. Roseberry has noted this with reference to his Thirteenth Symphony, which uses poems by Yevtushenko to examine the persecution of Jews in Soviet Russia. He also describes the Bb minor of the Tenth Symphony as ‘death-dealing’.
From a M. St. dissertation, University of Oxford (2005)
Read the full paper here