String Quartet No.15 in E flat minor Op.144 (1974)

When a seriously ill composer in his 69th year writes a work in six movements all of which are headed Adagio or Adagio molto and all of which bear the key signature of E flat minor, there can be little room for doubt about the source of its inspiration. Like the fifteenth and last of his symphonies, the fifteenth and last of Shostakovich’s string quartets contemplates death but, unlike the symphony, it does it unambiguously and without any hint of irony or consolation. It is an extraordinarily courageous composition from every moral, aesthetic and technical point of view. The composer’s advice on performing the first movement was uncompromising: “Play it so that the flies drop dead in mid-air and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom.”

It is true that the opening Elegy, one of the longest of Shostakovich’s quartet movements, takes its time to work out the implications of its material and to examine the state of mind behind it. The argument is so intense, on the other hand, that no one is likely to leave the hall. At its unhurried pace, in its fugal texture and with its occasionally modal harmonies it has something of late Beethoven about it, but with echoes of Orthodox chant here and there. It is not all gloom, however. After a distinct change of key to C major, the first violin introduces a rising wide-spaced melody that is like a breath of fresh air amid the narrow intervals of the themes around it. Even when that new melody is brought within the prevailing E flat minor harmonies it retains its openness.

The Serenade, like all the other movements, follows without a break. The transition is made by way of fierce monotone crescendos which, together with aggressive multi-stopped pizzicato chords and erratic rhythms on the cello, ensure that the main theme has little chance to exercise its slow-waltz charm. A short Intermezzo, beginning with a passionate cadenza for first violin, leads into a beautifully but eerily scored Nocturne with a sustained melody on muted viola or cello against whispered undulating arpeggios on the other instruments.

If the Requiem function of the work is not clear by now the next movement puts it beyond doubt. The diagnostic dotted rhythm is introduced before the end of the Nocturne, on pizzicato violins, to effect a transition to the Funeral March, where it persists as the leading motif of a series of expressive soliloquies, beginning on the viola and finally dying out on the cello. Largely a matter of memory, the Epilogue intermittently recalls the passion of the Intermezzo and mingles it with recollections of the opening Elegy and progressively weaker echoes of the Funeral March.