Dmitri Shostakovich in 1944
The final concert of our Summermusic 2025 series will be performed
Saturday night at 7:30 at Harrisburg’s Market Square Presbyterian
Church by the Mendelssohn Piano Trio which consists of Market Square
Concerts co-directors Peter Sirotin and Ya-Ting Chang, and cellist
Fiona Thompson. The program begins with Shostakovich’s Piano Trio
No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67 and concludes with Beethoven’s last piano
trio, known as The “Archduke” Trio (you can read about Beethoven’s trio in this previous post).
Each of this summer’s concerts explore what inspired the music on the program. “Love & Loss” explored pieces by Max Bruch, written for his son who was about to start a career as a clarinetist, and Johannes Brahms, whose Horn Trio was written in memory of his mother. “Places & People” introduced us to the friends and locations behind Franz Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet and Antonín Dvořák’s 2nd String Quintet. In Saturday’s final program, we explore more dramatic events, with Shostakovich expressing his grief over the loss of his closest friend during the darkest days of WWII in his Piano Trio No. 2; and Beethoven creating one of his most life-affirming compositions, the “Archduke” Piano Trio, while facing a complete loss of his hearing.
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In January, 1944, Shostakovich, who had composed his first string quartet in 1938 and then his famous Piano Quintet in 1940, wrote to an interviewer that “chamber music demands from a composer supreme command of technique and profound thought. It would be misleading if I didn’t tell you that very often behind the glamour of orchestral sound the composer conceals his paucity of thought. The rich timbre at the disposal of the modern symphony orchestra is out of reach for small chamber ensembles. I repeat, while it is still possible to listen to thin thoughts concealed behind rich and colorful orchestration, such thoughts would be simply unbearable in a chamber work. From this it would be wrong to conclude that I like chamber music better than symphonies. No, I really enjoy both good symphonies and good chamber music. What I cannot stand is bad music, regardless of whether it has been written for a symphony or a quartet.”
Whatever may have been the genesis of the Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, he was apparently sketching something already in July. He mentioned in October he was working on a piano trio based on Russian folk songs, and, on December 8th, wrote to his friend, the critic Isaac Glikman, “at the moment I am writing a Trio for piano, violin and cello.”
He was in Moscow at the time and almost done with the first movement – which so far included no Russian folk songs – when he received the news that his closest friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, had died at the age of 41.
Shostakovich & Sollertinsky in 1942 at the time of the Novosibirsk performance of his new 7th Symphony, the "Leningrad" Symphony
Usually described
as “a Soviet polymath,” Sollertinsky could speak over 20
languages, specialized in the fields of linguistics, literature,
theater, history, and philology, but was best known as a music critic
and musicologist.
Years later, Shostakovich recalled meeting his friend in 1927, “at the house of a Leningrad musician... During our conversation it emerged that I didn’t know a single foreign language and Sollertinsky couldn’t play the piano. That’s how it came about that the very next day Sollertinsky gave me my first German lesson and I gave him his first piano lesson. These lessons, incidentally, very soon came to an end. The end was pathetic: I didn’t learn any German and Sollertinsky was unable to play the piano, but since then and up to the last moment of Sollertinsky’s marvellous life we were great friends.”
At the time of the Nazi invasion in 1941, Sollertinsky was evacuated from Leningrad along with the Philharmonic to Novosibirsk (Sollertinsky was then the orchestra’s artistic director). After making plans to leave Novosibirsk in February 1944 and return to Moscow to resume working, Sollertinsky spoke at the orchestra’s February 5th performance in Novosibirsk of Shostakovich’s recently premiered 8th Symphony, then died in his sleep a few nights later.
On February 13th, Shostakovich wrote to Glikman, a mutual friend, “Ivan died on February 11th, 1944. We shall never see him again. There are no words that can express my grief which is eating away at my whole being. May our love for him and our faith in his great talent and phenomenal love for the art, to which he devoted his magnificent life - music - serve to immortalize his memory. Ivan is no more. It is very difficult to come to terms with this. My friend, don’t forget me and write to me. I have a request: wherever you can, get hold of some vodka and on March 11th at 7 p.m. Moscow time let’s drink (you in Tashkent and I in Moscow) a glass and by doing so mark the month that will have passed since Sollertinsky’s death.”
On February 15th, 1944, according to the date on the manuscript, Shostakovich finished the first movement of the Trio but then stopped working on it for some time: illness, on the one hand; the “deep psychological trauma” over the death of his friend, on the other. Returning to the “House of Creativity and Rest” at Ivanovo, a government-run artists’ colony where he’d worked on his 8th Symphony the previous summer, he did not resume work on the trio until late-July. The second movement was dated August 3rd; the entire trio, August 13th, 1944. Almost immediately he began work on his 2nd String Quartet, the piano sketch dated September 2nd. The score of the completed quartet was dated September 20th.
Recently graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, composer Mikhail Meyerovich described his visit to Ivanovo during August and September, 1944. Keep in mind this was during a particularly brutal war – beyond just the Nazi siege of Leningrad – and Meyerovich mentioned how Ivanovo was “very popular [with composers] during the war as it had its own farm and the food was good and plentiful.” Shostakovich, who was about to turn 38 that September, “was not too fond of the other composers of his own age, and he spent most of his time with me and my friend, his former pupil… We were the youngest composers there,” Meyerovich later recalled. Shostakovich would suggest they play four-hand piano duets and take long walks together. “He would play billiards, now he played football. He insisted we join him in a game of football; he played with passion, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the game. Once I inadvertently knocked his glasses off his nose. I was embarrassed, but he said, ‘That’s all right. That’s what the game is about.’”
When he found time to compose was a mystery to them. “He had just finished his famous piano trio and was working on his 2nd String Quartet. I wondered when he did the actual composing. The trio took him a month. The quartet was written in under four weeks before my very eyes. But nobody saw him at the desk or at the piano. ...He would play football and fool around with his friends, then he would suddenly disappear. After forty minutes or so, he would turn up again. ‘How are you doing? Let me kick the ball.’ Then we would have dinner and drink some wine and take a walk, and he would be the life and soul of the party. Every now and then he would disappear for a while and then join us again. Towards the end of my stay, he disappeared altogether. We didn’t see him for a week. Then he turned up, unshaven and looking exhausted. He said to me and [my friend,] ‘Let’s go to an empty cabin with a piano in it.’ He played us his 2nd Quartet. He had only just completed it, as the score had that very day’s date on it. He played somewhat haltingly, as if sight-reading.”
In the midst of working on the quartet, he wrote to his friend and fellow-composer Vissarion Shebalin, “I am concerned about the lightning speed with which I am composing. It’s no good, I feel sure. One should not compose with this kind of speed. ...I am composing with infernal speed and cannot stop… It is tiring, not very pleasant and when it’s over I have no confidence that the time has been spent usefully. I can’t shake off this bad habit though and I am composing much too fast as before.”
While there are no similar eye-witness accounts about the time he was composing the trio, chances are pretty good, since that was only a month earlier, the “process” was essentially the same.
The Piano Trio was
premiered on November 14th, 1944, with Shostakovich at the
piano, and with two members of the Beethoven Quartet. The 2nd
String Quartet was also premiered on that concert with the complete
Beethoven Quartet. The “original cast” of the premiere
subsequently recorded the trio in 1946; the following year,
Shostakovich and David Oistrakh, with Czech cellist Miloš Sádlo,
recorded it in Prague. Oistrakh said, “Without meaning to boast, I
believe that this recording of the trio is the best of all that I
have heard.”
Shostakovich & members of the Beethoven Quartet playing the world premiere of the Piano Trio No. 2 in 1944
The trio is in four movements. The opening starts with an austere, slow fugue, a simple and rather eerie melody made more eerie by being played on the cello using “artificial harmonics,” the high-pitched, ethereal sound in the instrument’s uppermost register. The violin enters, then, in its lowest register, creating a unique sonority by reversing the roles. Also typical of Shostakovich, the piano part often consists of a single line with wide-octave doublings. When the tempo changes to Moderato, we’re in a kind of neo-classical vein, not without violent contrasts. According to Sollertinsky’s sister, the scherzo, similar to that of the Piano Quintet, was “an amazingly exact portrait” of her brother, whom she said Shostakovich “understood like no one else.”
The slow movement is a mournful passacaglia, a vague sequence of eight chords repeating in the piano, ending with an “unstable” diminished chord. Over this, the strings play dirge-like canons. It’s interesting to realize the 8th Symphony of the previous year also includes a passacaglia as its mournful slow movement. In 1975, the piano trio’s passacaglia would be played at Shostakovich’s public funeral service.
This unresolved diminished chord continues directly into the finale, described as a “Dance of Death,” inspired by the composer having read newspaper accounts of the Red Army’s liberation of Nazi death camps in Poland, particularly Treblinka, and telling a friend he was particularly horrified by reports Nazi guards made their victims dig their own graves, then dance beside them before they were executed.
This movement is the first time Shostakovich used Jewish music as a source-material for his own works. “The distinguishing feature of Jewish music is the ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations," Shostakovich told a friend. "Why does a man strike up a jolly song? Because he feels sad at heart.” This sort of black humor – “laughter through tears” – struck a deep chord in Shostakovich.
The folk-like dance tune begins the finale, whispered, then answered by an impassioned tune full of klezmer-like “intonations.” As the intensity builds, it’s impossible not to imagine, whatever its programmatic implications, this music “must mean something,” and no doubt something horrific.
Like other material from earlier movements, the passacaglia chords then return near the end of the finale: it is only there that that final unstable diminished chord resolves to a quiet – perhaps hopeful? – series of repeated E major chords. If not a triumph over tragedy, perhaps – and again Shostakovich has said nothing specific about this, one way or another – it is at least the awareness we have survived.
While no one could ever complain their performance is “underplayed,” Martha Argerich, Gidon Kremer, and Mischa Maisky recorded Shostakovich’s trio in Tokyo in 1998:
Shostakovich would later use this “dance of death” theme in the shattering climax of his String Quartet No. 8, a clearly autobiographical work full of quotes from several of his earlier works. Written in 1960 shortly after he was forced to (finally) join the Communist Party (the fact that he had not yet become a card-carrying member would surprise many of us), the work is, on the surface, dedicated to the victims of Fascism and War, and written while he’d been working on a film score in Dresden, a city destroyed at the end of World War II by the allied bombings. But it was also a time when Shostakovich was in deep despair, and, as he told a close friend after returning to Moscow, on the verge of suicide. In his usual joking fashion, he introduced the work by telling Glickman, “when I die it’s hardly likely someone will write a quartet dedicated in my memory. So I decided to write it myself.” At the climax of the quartet, he quotes the “dance of death” theme from the trio’s finale but interweaves it with his own “musical signature,” the famous DSCH motive, his “initials” spelled out in German pitches, D–E-flat–C–B-natural. The implication couldn’t be more autobiographical than that...
– Dick Strawser
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