They certainly are among his most powerfully affecting works, Fergus. Written at a time when he knew his time was rapdly running out and when even the physical effort to hold a pen in his hand caused him immense discomfort, these works represent a personal struggle which serve to remind us of this great composer's indomitable resolve to bear creative witness to the emotions running deep within him. This is reminiscent of Beethoven's final years when, as his own health was rapidly deteriorating, he set down his greatest works. I remember Schubert writing in his diary after attending the premiere of one of the late Beethoven quartets (possibly Op. 131) and commenting that he could not possibly see where music could go after this.fergus wrote:Are Shostakovich's last two string quartets his best works?mcq wrote: And then I listened to the Prazak Quartet's recent recording of the final two Shostakovich quartets. In short, these are remarkable performances that are informed with a passionate urgency and a restless spirituality. In particular, the final quartet receives one of its greatest readings. Its mesmerising power is derived not from dynamic extremes or violent outbursts but from a profound sense of one's own mortality, a desperately anguished wish to articulate a dying man's final creative vision. There is a chilling horror here in the uncompromising spareness of Shostakovich's musical vision that makes for deeply uncomfortable listening. An immensely powerful disc which is very highly recommended.
You make a very compelling case for these performances Paul.
Shostakovich's final quartet offers us one of those answers, as does Britten's final solo cello suite, both of which are concerned with one's own mortality and ask very frightening questions about the imminence of death and how we can ever truly conceive of this as a reality ("the peace that passes understanding"). With regard to Britten's final suite, it is notable that it is the only one of the cello suites that Mstislav Rostropovich failed to record. When asked about this later in life, he said that he "never got round to it" (or words to that effect), but it is more likely that Rostropovich, a close friend of Britten, had fully absorbed the emotional ramifications of the score and could not bring himself to perform it in public.
The opening movement of Shostakovich's final quartet occupies a landscape of emotional stasis. There is little sense of exposition or forward momentum, which is perhaps representative of the composer's final state of mind as he contemplates the uncertainty of his future. The atmosphere is one of unremitting gloom and the bleakest of despair. In the succeeding movements, I hear serenity tempered by melancholy as the composer contemplates past happy memories (to recall Dante, "There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy") which is then followed by fear, anger, disgust, weariness and a final blankness of mind (which should not be confused with resignation or acceptance). There is something here in this music that all three composers in their final years, after long and extended meditations on the reality of death and one's personal conception of it, have come to recognise about the transitory nature of life and how it flees from us with inexorable momentum. I am reminded here of T.S. Eliot's great line from The Waste Land - "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" - and perhaps it is this fear that is the final truth that these composers stumble on and also the realisation that all that will survive of them is the music that they will leave behind. That is why they struggled to set down their last thoughts (despite the pain and suffering that this caused them) which collectively represent a final triumph in their life that will have lasting resonance for succeeding generations. To take a final line from Eliot's Waste Land, "These fragments I have shored against my ruin".
