Viola Sonata Op.147 (1975)

Shostakovich and his music were haunted by death for at least the last six years of his llife. The 14th and 15th Symphonies, the 15th String Quartet and the Michelangelo Suite are all eloquent testimony to that. Strangely, however, in his very last work, the Viola Sonata, which he started in the knowledge that he had very little time left, and which he completed only a month before he died, the proximity of death is less apparent. Anyone unaware of the circumstances of the composition of the 15th Quartet would have little trouble in working out what it is about, given iits six movemetns in E flat minor all of them headed Adagio or Adagio molto. The same person would be baffled by the Viola Sonata. The only clue that it was written by a composer of failing strength is the extreme economy of the writing, a characteristic shared by Britten’s last works. In Shostakovich’s case it is, in fact, the direct result of his difficulty in holding and controlling his pen.

On the day he completed the Viola Sonata Shostakovich called Fyodor Druzhinin, the violist to whom the work is dedicated, to outline what he called the “programme” of the work: “The first movement is a novella, the second a scherzo, and the Finale is an adagio in memory of Beethoven, but don’t let that inhibit you. The music is bright, bright and clear.”

While the scherzo and the Beethoven-memorial elements are clear enough from the music itself, the “novella” aspect of the first movement is not. One could, however, postulate a kind of narrative from the interaction of three main thematic protagonists. There are just two to begin with. The first is the harmonically frank, rhythmically straightforward theme plucked on the (mainly) open strings of the viola. The second, presented high above it on the first entry of the piano, is a legato line moving in sinuously chromatic intervals and syncopated rhythms. The transformations of these two ideas, passing freely from one instrument to the other, occupy the attention until the entry, about a third of the way through, of a more agitated theme on the viola characterised by its prominent triplet figures. This forms the basis of a dramatic episode featuring emphatic chords and glissandi on the viola and a shrill counterpoint on the piano. Even when the piano activity dies away in a low rumble and the first two protagonists return the disturbing influence of the triplet theme remains ­– but only until the viola integrates it with the others in an eloquent soliloquy just before the end of the movement.

The Allegretto is based largely on material from Shostakovich’s unfinished opera The Gamblers – presumably as a prudent exercise in recycling rather than, as with so many of Shostakovich’s self-quotations, for symbolic reasons. However that may be, it is an entertaining, often grotesque scherzo, occasionally reminiscent in its deliberately primitive viola scoring of Stravinsky’s writing for violin in The Soldier’s Tale, and embracing at its centre a balalaika imitation in prodigious multi-stopped pizzicato chords. Even so, as the viola demonstrates in a short but expressive unaccompanied passage a little later, the place of this movement within the wider context of the work has not been forgotten.

No one is likely to miss the Beethoven-memorial element in the closing Adagio, where the piano makes its first entry with an allusion to the famous broken chords of “Moonlight” Sonata and the viola adds a three-note motif above them. The movement begins, however, with a viola solo, its descending fourths recalling the expressive solo passage in the scherzo. The whole of the finale is an unfailingly spontaneous contemplation of these two elegiac thoughts, the personal introspection and the outward tribute to the composer Shostakovich admired above all others. As in the first movement, the disparate material is integrated in a viola soliloquy. It might not be “bright, bright and clear” throughout but, as Druzhinin remarked, it is “not morbid and should not be regarded as a funeral march.” And in the C major of the closing bars, a resolution anticipated at the end of both the Moderato and the Allegretto, the work does achieve a luminous kind of reconciliation.