Shostakovich Piano Quintet In G Minor Op. 57

[Exequiel Mondragon]

A suggestion from the Beethoven Quartet over dinner in 1938 led to the creation of the Piano Quintet. Originally, Shostakovich had conceived the work as a string quartet. However, according to Isaak Glikman, an arts critic and close friend, Shostakovich modified the instrumentation because he hoped that demand for his performances as pianist would result in increased opportunities for personal travel. According to the musicologist Richard Taruskin, Shostakovich modeled his Piano Quintet, including its key and use of Baroque musical forms, on Sergei Taneyev's. Over the years, a number of small alterations to the score were made, which are documented in the two recordings of the work that Shostakovich made with the Beethoven Quartet in 1940 and 1955.

The Piano Quintet's official premiere on November 23, 1940, at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory was an immediate public success. Encores at this and subsequent concerts became so commonplace, that it quickly became a source of jokes for wags who referred to the work as a five-movement work with seven movements. Occasionally, audiences demanded encores of the entire work. Performances of the Piano Quintet took up so much of Shostakovich's time between late 1940 and mid-1941 that he had only enough time to compose a single work during that period.

Shostakovich first attempted to compose a piano quintet during his student years. This earlier quintet was conceived in the early 1920s; by April 9, 1923, he completed its first movement and designated the work "op. 7".[1][2] A subsequent movement, subtitled "Fantastic Scherzo", was also planned, but the idea of a piano quintet was soon abandoned. Instead, he developed the "Fantastic Scherzo" into the Scherzo for piano and orchestra, which kept the projected quintet's op. 7 assignation, while the remaining music was repurposed in the Piano Trio No. 1.[1]

One of the most enduring professional and personal relationships Shostakovich had was that between him and the Beethoven Quartet. Of the composer's fifteen string quartets, the Beethoven Quartet premiered all but the first and last. Aside from the Piano Quintet, their members also participated in the premiere of the Piano Trio No. 2. Karina Balasanyan, a Russian musicologist, said that the closeness of their partnership, rare in music history, led the Beethoven Quartet to become "emissaries of [Shostakovich's] will".[4]

On December 26, 1933, during their tenth season in existence, the Beethoven Quartet programmed music by Shostakovich for the first time: a joint performance with the Glire Quartet of the Two Pieces for String Octet.[5] It was not until 1938, however, when they played the Moscow premiere of Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 1 that his music became a permanent part of their repertory.[6]

During a celebratory dinner in Moscow on November 16, 1938, that followed the local premiere of the String Quartet No. 1, the Beethoven Quartet suggested to Shostakovich the idea of composing a piano quintet.[6] A few months later in 1939, Shostakovich replied in the affirmative to the Beethoven Quartet's first violinist, Dmitri Tsyganov [ru]: "I will certainly write a quintet and I will play it with you".[1] Isaak Glikman, an arts critic and close friend of Shostakovich, related that the Piano Quintet had originally been planned as a string quartet, but that external considerations influenced the composer to alter the instrumentation:[1]

His explanation of the change [in instrumentation] was idiosyncratic, to say the least. According to him, his change of heart had not been dominated by artistic considerations at all, but purely practical concerns. "Do you want to know why I wrote a piano part into the quartet? I did it so that I could play it myself and have a reason to go on tour to different towns and places. So now ... the Beethoven Quartet, who get to go everywhere, will have to take me with them, and I will get my chance to see the world as well!" We both laughed. "You are not serious?", I said. Shostakovich replied: "Absolutely! You are a dyed-in-the-wool stay-at-home, but I am a dyed-in-the-wool wanderer!"[7]

Shostakovich's official biographer, Sofia Khentova, said that Shostakovich was also moved to compose the Piano Quintet out of his desire to enrich the field of chamber music with elements of symphonic music.[8]

Enthusiasm for the Piano Quintet notwithstanding, Shostakovich did not find the time to begin work on it until July 1940. He wrote to Vasily Shirinsky [ru], the Beethoven Quartet's second violinist, that he started work on his new composition on July 13. In a subsequent letter to Shirinsky dated August 6, Shostakovich reiterated that he was looking forward to playing the work with the Beethoven Quartet soon, even though he had never played as part of a quintet before.[9]

Sources agree on the timeframe of the composition, but not location. Gerard McBurney,[3] Laurel Fay,[10] Marina Raku, and Vera Zaitseva state that the Piano Quintet was begun in Shalovo (today part of the town of Luga) and completed in Leningrad.[1] Derek C. Hulme cited Moscow as the location of composition.[11] Khentova said that in July 1940, Shostakovich traveled from Gaspra in Crimea, where he completed his orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, to vacation in the village of Kellomki (present-day Komarovo). There, he rented a two-story cottage and settled in to work. With few residents and visitors, Shostakovich was able to compose the Piano Quintet in secluded surroundings without disturbances.[12] He completed the score on September 14, 1940, in Leningrad and a copy for performance and publication was immediately prepared.[13]

Shostakovich introduced the Beethoven Quartet to the Piano Quintet on September 17. He invited them, as well as the pianists Lev Oborin and Konstantin Igumnov, to listen to his playthrough of the work on the piano.[14]

Preparations for the Piano Quintet's official premiere began on October 22[14] at a practice room in the Moscow Conservatory. Tsyganov recalled Shostakovich's method of collaborative rehearsal: "First, he played his new piece on the piano from the score; then he distributed the various parts to us, always requesting strongly that we not begin rehearsing without him". Rehearsals typically began late at night, usually around 11:00 p.m., and lasted until the following morning.[15]

The musicologist Michael Mishra said that the structure of the Piano Quintet, with a pair of connected movements pivoting around a central scherzo, superficially resembled that of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5, although he noted that Shostakovich did not imitate its distribution of weight.[16] Richard Taruskin, another musicologist, posited that Shostakovich meant to "obviously" invoke the Piano Quintet of another Russian composer, Sergei Taneyev. He listed as evidence the fact that both quartets reference Baroque musical forms and share the same key. "Taneyev was the very model of an academic composer", he said, "and in emulating him via his Piano Quintet, Shostakovich was characterizing himself the same way, which as we know by now signaled a big change of direction".[17] Each movement, according to Khentova, develops internal emotions within an overall symphonic structure.[8]

Shostakovich's Piano Quintet opens with a "Prelude": a construction in ternary form that fuses neo-Baroque and Romantic elements.[15] The choice of title was not invoked out of convenience, but as a token of the composer's deep engagement with Baroque music. Mishra described the movement as "essentially a prolongation of the G tonic". He also likened the movement's close to a "grand cadential 'spinning out' of the sort frequently found at the end of a Bach prelude".[18]

This is succeeded without pause by the "Fugue", the first of four that Shostakovich composed in the 1940s.[18] Khentova characterized it as "philosophical",[8] while Fay wrote that its "polyphonic mastery [was] worthy of Bach".[10] A rising three-note figure that appeared in the closing measures of the "Prelude" resurges in the second measure of the "Fugue", making both movements an integrated unit that anticipates the 24 Preludes and Fugues. Both movements also forecast inflections that Shostakovich would later use in his Jewish-inspired works, such as the Piano Trio No. 2.[18] As the movement builds to a climax, Shostakovich abandons the fugal form in favor of homophonic textures that make a more immediate emotive impact. Recitatives for piano, then cello follow suit, before the fugue resumes in stretto.[19] Mishra wrote of the "Fugue":[20]

The "Scherzo", which has been described as a "fast lndler" and whose tempo establishes a loose relation to equivalent movements in the String Quartet No. 1 and Sixth Symphony, is the center of the Piano Quintet. Rhythms associated with Spanish dances, which feature regularly in Shostakovich's music, are incorporated into the trio.[20]

Evocations of Baroque music return in the "Intermezzo", which at first gives the impression of a passacaglia before diverging from the procedures used in that musical form. Nevertheless, the music makes allusions to Henry Purcell, the "Air" from Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, and Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite; the latter itself an homage to musical forms from the past.[21]

Contrasting sharply with the preceding movements is the lighter tone of the "Finale". Mishra said that although its coda does not strive for the transcendence that typifies the work as a whole, the "Finale" can be heard as the first of a type of ending movement that Shostakovich would explore in his later works, "where predominantly lightweight material becomes sublimated in the coda to achieve an enigmatic, but highly poignant sense of resignation".[22] Ian MacDonald, on the other hand, noted that emotionally and structurally the "Finale" was "as disjunctive as that of the Sixth Symphony".[23]

A number of small alterations were made to the score of the Piano Quintet in the years immediately following its premiere. Valentin Berlinsky recalled that he and his fellow Borodin Quartet members were admonished by Shostakovich for slowing down through a particular passage in the "Prelude" during a 1947 rehearsal of the Piano Quintet. When they protested that a ritenuto was indicated in that passage, he walked up to them, brandished a pen, and crossed out the marking from each one of their parts.[25]

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