Dmitri Shostakovich - String Quartet No. 6, Op. 101 (1956)

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (Дми́трий Дми́триевич Шостако́вич, tr. Dmitriy Dmitrievich Shostakovich 25 September 1906 – 9 August 1975) was a Soviet composer and pianist, and a prominent figure of 20th-century music

String Quartet No. 6 in G major, Op. 101 (1956)

1. Allegretto (0:00)
2. Moderato con moto (7:13)
3. Lento (12:24)
4. Lento - Allegretto (19:10)

Fitzwilliam Quartet

Like No. 2, this quartet was written very quickly during a summer break, within three and a half weeks in August 1956, and like No. 4, it is relatively concise. It also makes a return to classical four-movement form, but with the scherzo – a waltz, as so often in Shostakovich – in second place. In another similarity with the Second Quartet, the first performance was given by the Beethoven Quartet, in Leningrad, when the score was still fresh, on October 7, 1956. For three years, Shostakovich had been concentrating on film music and songs; this was his first important première since the three that had come in the last months of 1953, those of his two preceding quartets and Tenth Symphony.

Shostakovich’s sudden re-marriage in the summer of 1956 caught even his closest friends by surprise. His first wife, the physicist Nina Varzar, had died suddenly in December 1954, and eighteen months later the shy composer impulsively proposed to a pretty young party official, Margarita Kainova. She just as impulsively accepted, and they were married in July 1956. Such a marriage seems fated to fail, and in fact this one did (they were divorced three years later), but the beginning was happy and Shostakovich took his bride on a honeymoon to Komarovo. It was there, during the first month of his new marriage, that he wrote his String Quartet No. 6, completing it on August 31. The first performance was given in St. Petersburg by the Beethoven Quartet on October 7, 1956, two weeks after Shostakovich turned fifty.

Along with the First, the Sixth is the most light-hearted of the cycle of Shostakovich quartets. Despite some moments of stridency in the development sections of its outer movements, this quartet has an almost divertimento-like character. It is melodic and relaxed, and while based on rigorous forms—sonata-form outer movements, scherzo, and passacaglia—the music does not depend on conflict and resolution. Beneath its genial surfaces, however, the Sixth is constructed with a remarkable degree of unity, a unity that grows out of its cyclic treatment of themes.