Cetera desunt: Sonnet for String Quartet (String Quartet No.3) (2006)

Adagio pesante:

Dicis et non es (You speak but you are not).

Adagio tragico:

Sic ego non sine te…    (With or without you…)

Allegro scuro:

Dicis et non facis (You speak and do no act)

Andante recitativo:

Nec tecum vivere possum… (Life is impossible…)

Allegro aggressivo scuro

Adventus asinus, pulcher et fortissimus (The ass is coming full of glory)

Adagio molto intensivo, ad lib

Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace prepare for war)

Adagio sognando:

Non omnia moriar (Not all of me will die)

Adagio religioso

Cetera desunt (The rest is missing)

When Lera Auerbach’s third and latest string quartet – Cetera desunt, Sonnet for String Quartet – was issued on CD she provided her own liner notes. Or, rather, she didn’t. “When I was younger I enjoyed writing programme notes for my music,” she writes. “But I no longer like writing about my music. Even being interviewed about it becomes an inner burden.” So we are on our own – except, you might think, for the Latin tags (from various sources) attached to each of the eight movements. In fact, they add little to our understanding of the work. The most helpful indications are the Italian tempo directions.

Certainly, the Adagio pesante heading of the first movement gives a good idea of how the music sounds. What it does not explain or even hint at is its obsession with Shostakovich’s musical monogram DSCH (which results from the German transliteration D. SCHostakovich of his name) or D E flat C B when translated into English notation. That four-note theme is very prominent even if distorted, along with a violently aggressive rhythmic figure, in the Adagio pesante and it persists through the eight movements, though rather less obviously in later ones until it resurfaces in the Adagio religioso at the end.

One could even say that the work is dedicated, in a real if unofficial sense, to Shostakovich, with whom Auerbach has frequently been associated since she defected from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1991. In spite of her enormous success as a composer, pianist and poet in the last 20 years, she seems reluctant to sever her links with a composer who, though he died when she was two years old, is still such a dominant figure in Russian music. Or perhaps she resents that dominance. It is difficult to tell from this Adagio pesante, which treats DSCH as purposefully as Schnittke (another significant Russian influence) in his Third String Quartet and which struggles valiantly to carry it through heavily dissonant odds to the closing bars.

As its tempo heading suggests, the Adagio tragico is a less aggressive, more expressive piece. A briefly eloquent cello introduces the DSCH motif which is then developed with increasing passion through the darker colours of the first half of the movement to an urgent climax of trills, underpinned at one point with a pizzicato reminder of the insistent rhythmic figure from the Adagio pesante. It ends with the characteristically disembodied sound of sul ponticello violins over a sonorously plucked viola.   

The short Allegro scuro (scuro means “dark”) is driven throughout by a scratchy viola ostinato which persecutes panic-stricken material in a variety of colours, not least resounding pizzicati but also emphatic glissando wails and a central scramble leading to a quick exit. In contrast, the Andante recitativo is melodiously reflective, beginning with a comparatively extended soliloquy on the viola, which instrument has the most to regret even though it is a violin that makes the clearest reference to the DSCH motif at this stage. The Latin tag completes the quotation from Ovid attached to the Adagio tragico, which is an actually helpful hint of the emotional relationship between the two movements.

Similarly, the fifth movement is related to the third. The Latin Adventus asinus, pulcher et fortissimus is a reference to the medieval Festum Asinorum or Feast of the Ass. It says less about the music, however, than the tempo heading Allegro aggressivo scuro, which is matched by violent rhythms expressed in heavily double-stopped textures, fierce pizzicati, and hastily bowed fugitive figuration on violin and cello. The drama is sustained in the Adagio molto intensivo, which begins with aggressively swelling dissonances, includes a faint chorale in sul ponticello colouring and nears its end by way of a remarkably impassioned cello solo.

The Adagio sognando begins dreamily, as the tempo heading requires, with mainly violin melody but then involves the whole ensemble until a prolonged sigh on the cello leads to a short pause and finally a curtailed pizzicato reminder of DSCH in the last bars. That motif is definitively restored in the closing Andante religioso but only after a preliminary chorale recalling that of the Adagio molto intensivo and a series of solo recitatives. DSCH is recalled just once on the cello before the quartet sound attenuates and dies out.