November
1943 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Tchaikovsky,
and, despite the difficulties and privations caused by the War, the
Soviet authorities determined to observe the event in grand style
in Moscow. One of the country's leading critics and musicologists,
and one of Dmitri Shostakovich's dearest friends, Ivan Sollertinsky,
was invited to address the musicians assembled for the ceremony and,
via radio broadcast, a national audience. Sollertinsky stayed with
Shostakovich during his visit, and the two rejoiced over the westward
advance of the Red Army and the imminent lifting of the siege of Leningrad,
and commiserated over the Nazi atrocities that were being revealed
in the wake of the German retreat. Shostakovich tried to convince
Sollertinsky to settle in Moscow, and arranged for him to teach a
class at the Conservatory beginning in February 1944.
When the
friends parted, they thought their separation would be brief, but
Sollertinsky, suffering from a heart condition exacerbated by illness
and the strains of the War, died on February 11, just five days after
he had given an introductory speech for a performance of Shostakovich's
Eighth Symphony in Novosibirsk. "I cannot express in words all the
grief I felt when I received the news of the death of Ivan Ivanovich,"
Shostakovich wrote to Sollertinsky's widow. "Ivan Ivanovich was my
closest friend. I owe all my education to him. It will be unbelievably
hard for me to live without him... His passing is a bitter blow for
me."
As a memorial
to Sollertinsky, Shostakovich turned to the piano trio, a musical
genre which had noble precedents as the bearer of deep grief: Tchaikovsky
wrote such a work at the passing of Nikolai Rubinstein, director of
the Moscow Conservatory and one of his most important mentors; and
Rachmaninoff, in turn, composed a trio "in memory of a great artist"
upon the death of Tchaikovsky. Shostakovich's Trio was completed quickly
that spring and followed immediately by the composition of the String
Quartet No. 2, the first significant works he had undertaken since
finishing the Eighth Symphony a full year before.
The Piano
Trio No. 2 (he suppressed his first work in the form, written when
he was seventeen, as a student exercise unfit for public dissemination)
is one of Shostakovich's most brilliant formal inventions and one
of his most deeply felt creations. The Trio consists of the Classical
four movements, the last two played without pause: sonata-allegro
with introduction, scherzo, largo and finale.
The working-out of this plan, however, is accomplished with a rare
craftsmanship and ingenuity that casts the old forms in a distinctly
contemporary idiom.
The Trio
begins with a slow introduction in fugal style based on a theme whistled
eerily in the high, glassy harmonics of the cello. The violin, muted,
and then the piano take up this mournful chant, which, transformed
into a quicker tempo, becomes the main theme of the movement. As is
characteristic of many of Shostakovich's works, the subsidiary theme,
a terse, downward, scalar motive in simple rhythms bandied among the
three participants, grows directly from the preceding material. A
vigorous discussion of the themes ensues before a compact recapitulation
and a dying coda bring the movement to a close.
The second
movement is a sardonic scherzo whose central section is occupied by
a folkish ditty embellished with plucky grace notes from the violin.
The tragic
third movement is a stark, modern realization of the passacaglia,
the ancient form built above a recurring series of chords which Shostakovich
also employed in his Eighth Symphony and yet again in his magnificent
Violin concerto No. 1 of 1948.
The finale
is closest in its structural type to a rondo into which are incorporated
reminiscences of the themes from the opening movement and the passacaglia.
The thematic profile of this closing movement is strongly influenced
by the quirky melodic leadings and fiery rhythms of Jewish music,
an ethnic group whose persecutions during those years affected Shostakovich
deeply for the rest of his life -- the stunning Symphony No. 13 ("Babi
Yar") of 1962 commemorated the Nazi massacre of some 70,000 Jews near
Kiev in 1941.
Though
Shostakovich provided no explicit program for his Piano Trio No. 2,
the circumstance and time of the work's creation marked it indelibly
with a strong emotional progression, which D. Rabinovich in his 1959
biography of the composer expressed in the following terms: "The first
movement begins with a short lyrical 'landscape' introduction, slow
moving, with a tinge of light sadness or, perhaps, elegiac thoughtfulness....
The whole movement leaves the impression of a calm and clear poetic
picture of everyday, specifically Russian life that is not marred
by any dramatic conflict. The energetically bubbling second movement,
the scherzo, with its dance rhythms, conveys a turbulent joie
de vivre.... Quite different, even astounding in the suddenness
of its appearance, is the world of emotions and images evoked by the
third movement. This passacaglia, however, is only the introduction
to the sphere of tragedy which is unfolded in the finale. Never has
Shostakovich's fantasy created anything more awe-inspiring than this
(typically Jewish) dance music. In the automatism of its rhythm, in
the inevitability of its accents that fall all the time on the same
sounds, in the savage screech of the second theme there is something
deathly. In this 'revelry' there is the impudent, cynical saturnalia
of death.... The Trio is not descriptive, [but] it is a wrathful protest
against monstrous brute force. In the Trio, as in the Eighth Symphony,
Shostakovich appeals passionately to people and their conscience.
There is no ray of light in the Piano Trio.... [but] the composer
reminds us of death for the sake of life. He appeals to his listeners
not to submit to death but to fight against it."
-- Richard E. Rodda
Links of Interest: Shostakovich
basic repertoire list on Classical
Net
Shostakovich
biography
The
DSCH Journal
Shostakovich
Resource Directory
Shostakovich
image gallery at artofrussia
magazine
