Shostakovich Quartets: Intimate Portraits, Part 2

Sofia Gubaidulina contemplates unfinished J S Bach as the Carduccis survey Shostakovich in triplicate across some two decades. Included is a quartet he cherished above all the others.

Mahler meets Prokofiev in the Quartet No 6, which Shostakovich started to sketch on honeymoon following his marriage to second wife Margarita Kainova. The 12th, composed after a spell of bad health signalled a decisive return of confidence, (‘it’s a symphony, a symphony’ he enthused). It’s inscribed to his devoted friend Dmitri Tsyganov, first violinist of the Beethoven Quartet. The Carduccis end with one of his greatest, and most famous quartets, No 8, which reduced Shostakovich himself to tears at its first rehearsal. While he officially dedicated it ‘to the victims of Fascism and the war’, in private he saw it as his own epitaph, writing ‘if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself.’