Dmitri Shostakovich - String Quartet No 5, Op. 92 (1952)

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (25 September 1906 – 9 August 1975) was a Soviet composer and pianist, and a prominent figure of 20th-century music

String Quartet No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 92 (1952)
Dedicated to the Beethoven Quartet who premiered it in Leningrad, November 1953

1. Allegro non troppo (0:00)
2. Andante - Andantino - Andante - Andantino - Andante (10:56)
3. Moderato - Allegretto - Andante (20:21)

Fitzwilliam Quartet
Excuses for the poor quality of the sheet music scan. This is a re-upload from my old channel which didn't make things better. (I have no better scan as yet)

The work grows from a five note motif: C, D, E flat, B and C sharp, which contains the four pitch-classes of the composer's musical monogram: DSCH (E flat being S and B being H in German). This motif appears in a number of his other string quartets, including the Eighth, as well as his Tenth Symphony.

Shostakovich wrote his Fifth String Quartet in the fall of 1952, but it remained in manuscript, unperformed, for over a year—and for very good reasons. Not only were these some of the darkest years of the Cold War, they were also the paranoid final years of Stalin’s repressive regime. Four years earlier, at the 1948 Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers, Stalin’s thought-control police had unleashed a killing attack on leading Soviet composers that left artistic expression in Russia moribund. Accused of writing music that “dwells too much on the dark and fearful aspects of reality,” Shostakovich had been forced to read a humiliating apology and to promise to amend his ways. On the surface, he seemed to do that, composing a series of patriotic cantatas and film scores crafted specifically to please Soviet officialdom. The “real” Shostakovich went underground: over the next few years he continued to write the music he wanted to, but he kept it in his desk, waiting for more favorable times. Those times seemed to come with the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953, and it was in this slightly liberalized atmosphere that Shostakovich chose to bring out his suppressed works. The Fifth String Quartet was premiered in Moscow on November 13, 1953, by the Beethoven Quartet.

The Fifth Quartet is one of Shostakovich’s darkest. It is a big work (its three interconnected movements last a half hour) and a dramatic one. An unusual level of violence runs through this quartet: the development sections of the outer movements are long and abrasive, the music speaks a surprisingly dissonant language, and it finally reaches an ambivalent conclusion that resolves none of its tensions. Shostakovich was probably wise to hold this music back—this quartet could not possibly have been accepted during this bleak period. It is not simply a direct violation of the canons of Socialist Realism—it is a somber work even by the standard of his own music.