string quartet no. 8 (shostakovich)

The String Quartet No. 8 by Dmitri Shostakovich was written during 3 days (July 12- 14) in 1960. It is in the key of C minor. The piece was written shortly after two traumatic events: the composer's diagnosis with myelitis, and his joining the Communist Party. According to the score, it is dedicated "to the victims of fascism and war"; his son, Maxim, interprets this as a reference to the victims of all totalitarianism, while his daughter Galina says that he dedicated it to himself, and that the published dedication was imposed by the authorities. Shostakovich's friend, Lev Lebedinsky, said that Shostakovich thought of the work as his epitaph and that he planned to commit suicide around this time. The work is one of his most private; he described it as "an ideologically deficient quartet nobody needs." The work was written in Dresden, where Shostakovich was to write music for the film Five Days, Five Nights, a joint Cold War propaganda project by Russian and East German filmmakers. The quartet, extremely compact and focused, is in five interconnected movements and lasts twenty minutes:

Largo
Allegro molto
Allegretto
Largo
Largo

The first movement opens with the DSCH motif which was Shostakovich's musical signature. The work is filled with quotes of other pieces by Shostakovich: the first movement quotes his Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 5; the second movement uses a Jewish theme first used by Shostakovich in his Piano Trio No. 2; the third movement quotes the Cello Concerto No. 1; and the fourth movement quotes the 19th century revolutionary song "Tormented by Grevious Bondage" and Shostakovich's opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

String Quartet No. 8 (Shostakovich)

Further reading