#70
Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, for violin, cello and piano, Op. 67
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich
1944
1944. Well, for classical music, that's actually pretty recent.
Shostakovich, one of the major composers of the 20th century, was a Russian composer and pianist.
His music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque, and ambivalent tonality; Shostakovich was also heavily influenced by the neo-classical style pioneered by Igor
Stravinsky, and (especially in his symphonies) by the late Romanticism of Gustav
Mahler. He was also heavily influenced by the brutal communist regime running the
USSR at the time: He was born in 1906 in St. Petersburg, one year after the Revolution of 1905 began there, spreading rapidly into the provinces.
In 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, the Imperial government renamed St. Petersburg Petrograd, and in 1917, during the February Revolution, Nicholas II abdicated, ending the Russian monarchy.
In the winter of 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir
Lenin, stormed the Winter Palace in an event known thereafter as the October Revolution, which led to the end of the post-Tsarist provisional government, the transfer of all political power to the Soviets, and the rise of the Communist Party.
On 26 January 1924, five days after Lenin's death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad.
In 1927 the
Soviet Union was established.
In 1934 began the
Great Purge (aka the Great Terror), where Stalin executed 40,000 or more (some estimates are as high as 1.2 million) a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of wealthy landlords and the Red Army leadership, with widespread police surveillance, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, imprisonment, and arbitrary executions, lasting through 1938 (Nevertheless, the practice of mass arrest and exile continued until Stalin's death in 1953.).
And in 1939 Germany and the USSR invaded Poland, dividing up the spoils, and the following year the USSR occupied and illegally annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and started mass deportations shortly after that. They also annexed a portion of Romania.
Everything changed in 1941 when Hitler abruptly broke the non-aggression pact and invaded the USSR.
Even before the Stalinist anti-Semitic campaigns in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Shostakovich showed an interest in Jewish themes. He was intrigued by Jewish music's "ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations". The Fourth movement of this Piano Trio in E minor is an excellent example of him deliberately including Jewish themes.
This is a wartime work (the death camps of Majdanek and Treblinka had recently been discovered in the wake of the Nazis' retreat from the eastern front), and its macabre aspects surely evoke the extremes of joy and bitterness that must have been juxtaposed in daily life at such a time.
World War II resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, with almost no country left unscathed. The Soviet Union was especially devastated due to the mass destruction of the industrial base that it had built up in the 1930s. The USSR also experienced a major famine in 1946-48 due to war devastation that cost an estimated 1 to 1.5 million lives as well as secondary population losses due to reduced fertility.
Anyway, enough history.
The trio consists of four movements, with a complete performance running 25 to 27 minutes.
I. Andante
II. Allegro con brio
III. Largo
IV. Allegretto
The opening
Andante is highly dissonant, and begins with an extremely difficult passage in the cello, using all harmonics. The rest of the movement continues with canonic material, but then develops into a sonata form, requiring incredible amounts of technical prowess from all three instruments.
The 2nd movement, an
Allegro con brio, is a frenzied dance that never really settles down.
The slow movement,
Largo, the violin and cello trade off dark, slow, and somber melodic lines against a repeated background of piano chords. It fades into the last movement with hardly a break.
The final movement,
Allegretto, is often considered a
"Dance of Death" (danse macabre) movement; staccato repeated notes begin, which introduces a Jewish-style melody, and revisits the thematic content of the previous three movements. It ends in a tortured and almost inaudible E major chord.
So, here's the thing . . . this 4th movement really brings out emotions and passions in people you'd not expect. For instance here's part of an analysis by
Mimi Lee, from a review for
B3LLA back in 2012:
The fourth movement begins when you hear the violin begin "plucking" a sinister (and recognizable) theme, which seems to represent a shifty-eyed, and untrustworthy sheister of a character. Although Shostakovich was not Jewish, it is in this work (and only this movement really) that he first uses Jewish folk music as the subject.
Now, how he got his point across regarding what was happening to the people of Russia (perhaps especially those that were Jewish) thus far in his life without using their folk music is beyond us.
However, seeing what he does in this movement when he actually casts the oppressed subject as the main character, may help us understand why he didn't use it in every piece. Suffice it to say, it is painful to witness.
For example, in one particularly powerfully gruesome scene it sounds as though this 'Jewish melody' is literally ripping the hair out of it's scalp, while music symbolizing dictator communism pounds mercilessly away in the background, faceless, heartless and lethal.
It is this blood-splattered section in particular that makes this trio without a doubt the most intense piece of music in our repertoire and perhaps in all of the chamber music repertoire ever written.
As the music finally subsides, accepting it's fate, the last words of the piece are given to that sadistic, sheister character that has antagonized this entire finale. It is perhaps a depressing way to leave the audience, but by giving the last laugh to the oppressive powers, Shostakovich seems to send a clear message:
Nobody won that war. We now look back on it in history, but we can only do so because we are here and alive; and with regard to each and every innocent life that was lost, and those who had to bury their loved one's body, it was really Stalin, Hitler and evil who won.
Shostakovich seems to be reminding us of that here- and painfully so... perhaps in desperate hope that we living in the future will never allow ourselves to become so near-sighted that we hand 'ignorance' and 'fear' the reigns of our world ever again.
The first performance in 1944 was for a long time the last; almost at once it was forbidden to perform the Trio. Even now, seventy years after its completion, the work evokes tragedy and sorrow through artistic means. Just before the recapitulation in the last movement, there is a hint of the opening fugato, and the final hushed coda combines the passacaglia chords in the piano with broken statements of the movement's main theme in the violin and cello-and the rest is silence.
If you only have time for one movement, listen to the last. It starts at 18:07
Dmitri Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67
