Twelve years ago Friends of Chamber Music invited the Jerusalem Quartet to perform all fifteen of Shostakovich’s string quartets in a festival that included lectures, pre-concert talks, a panel discussion, and even a movie! After the last concert, some of us who had planned the series and had seen it through to completion noticed a kind of aura surrounding the departing concertgoers, as if they had taken part in a mystical experience. FOCM board member and this year’s Shostakovich Festival chair, Ulrich Hardt, remembers the experience and characterizes it as an overwhelming feeling of gratitude on the part of those who attended. So it’s not surprising that Pat Zagelow, FOCM’s Executive Director, started making hints about another one to the Jerusalem Quartet, and they responded enthusiastically. 

This Festival offers many of the same programs that it did before. All 15 concerts will take place between Saturday, March 15 and Friday, March 21 in the Lincoln Performance Hall of Portland State University. Shostakovich expert Dr. Terry Klefstad will present two lectures that are free and open to the public. The first, on Friday evening, March 14 is entitled “Public and Private: the Life of a Soviet Composer.” The second, on Saturday morning March 15, is “Music for the Drawer Versus Music for the Masses.” She will also present pre-concert talks on Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th. The film will be shown at PSU’s 5th Ave Cinema Sunday 16th. On Monday, March 17 from 7:00 – 8:00 pm there will be a Panel Discussion with the Quartet moderated by John Pitman, and an open rehearsal is scheduled for Tuesday the 18th, 6:00-7:00 pm. Questions about tickets, dates, and times should be directed to Friends of Chamber Music (tickets@FOCM.org).

One difference this year is that the Jerusalem has decided to play all of the quartets in chronological order, three for each performance over five days, whereas in the 2013 festival they mixed them up over a period of four days with only numbers 1 and 15 in their chronological places. Perhaps the Quartet will explain the change during their Panel Discussion on March 17th.

“It’s quirky, it’s modern but accessible, and it can mean many different things at the same time.”

ArtsWatch had the pleasure of a preview to the lectures about Shostakovich and his music in a recent interview with the Festival’s guest speaker. Terry Klefstad’s doctoral dissertation from the University of Texas focused on the American reception of Shostakovich’s music. She is now Professor of Music at Belmont University in Nashville, where she teaches music history and specializes in twentieth century music, including Shostakovich as well as American composers. She is a pianist by background and began a masters degree in performance, but carpal tunnel syndrome ended that aspect of her career. “The great loves of my life have always been reading, writing, and music,” she reports, “but when carpal tunnel happened I had to quit playing and I just went in the reading and writing direction.”

As a 20-year old student Klefstad was fortunate to sing in a touring choir that visited the Soviet Union, and she fell in love with Russian culture and music. Later she received inspiring classes from Shostakovich scholar Patrick McCreless, now at Yale, and a Russian music history survey with Carol Reynolds. But what drew her more than anything was the sound of his music: “It’s quirky, it’s modern but accessible, and it can mean many different things at the same time.”

Public versus Private

In her Saturday lecture, Klefstad will focus on the lens of of the public versus private music of Soviet composers. She will speak of Shostakovich’s quartets, some of which are “works for the drawer” which he set aside until the political environment loosened up enough that they could be performed. When asked if she viewed the quartets as a kind of diary, she responded that some people saw his quartets that way. “I think with any composer who has written a good body of quartets, you can learn a lot about their style and their growth as a composer by listening to their life.” To do this she prefers to look at the whole body of Shostakovich’s work, including symphonies and songs as well as quartets. “Maybe not a diary, because that would imply some secret confession, but possibly a memoir. Or a journey of his life as a composer — certainly you could say that.”

Klefstad believes that Shostakovich felt more freedom writing the quartets than with symphonies or opera because they were less public genres and the performances were smaller. The first quartet, which is much more cheerful than the others, was composed right after the scandal caused by Stalin’s reaction to his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, so Klefstad imagines Shostakovich saying, “Oh, this is about spring and it’s light and happy.” But the atmosphere of most of the following quartets was considerably darker. 

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Coded Messages?

When asked about the possibility of Shostakovich writing in code, Klefstad brought up the well known example of his use of his own initials in the eighth quartet, one of her favorites: DSCH, the Germanized form of his name — the D for Dmitri; S being E flat, what the Germans call “Es;” C; and H, or what the Germans refer to as B natural. She points to this theme “popping up” first in the 10th symphony, and hints of it in earlier quartets. But this theme recurs are all through Quartet No. 8. 

Once again Klefstad doubts that he was a secret dissident: “I don’t think so because nobody could be a dissident in the Soviet Union and survive. I see him more as a voice of conflict, and fear, and sorrow – all that he had to deal with during his life as a Soviet composer.” While he needed to stay true to his creative soul and find his voice as a composer, at the same time he had to deal with the all the restrictions. As she points out, “The government actually said you must compose in the socialist realist style, and then they were vague about what that was.” 

Yet another frustration during that time was that to get anything performed Shostakovich needed to get it approved by the Composers Union, which in its earlier years functioned as a tool of the government to control artistic expression. 

Personal Element

There was often a personal relationship between the quartets and his friends and family. Klefstad notes that Shostakovich dedicated almost all of his quartets to someone. His second quartet is dedicated to his friend Shebalin; the seventh quartet to his wife, Nina; the ninth to his third wife Irina; and one each to the four members of the Beethoven Quartet. 

Quartet No. 8 is probably the best known of all the quartets, and in certain respects the most controversial. It was composed after a trip to Dresden where Shostakovich was intending to work on the score for the film Five Days and Five Nights. Evidently Shostakovich was greatly moved by the devastation of the city, which had not been rebuilt even though his visit occurred more than a decade after the end of the war. According to the quartet’s score, it is dedicated “to the victims of fascism and the war.” However, some interpret that to mean all victims of fascism (including Soviet fascism), and some believe, especially since his initials are so prominent in the quartet, that he was dedicating the quartet to himself. 

Post-Tonal but not Atonal

Klefstad shed some light on the question of Shostakovich’s “wrong-note harmonies.” Since he was forced to write tonal music, he seemed to have found a way around it. “There are cadences,” she explained, “there is resolution, there is consonance, there is dissonance, and resolution and consonance again. But there are all these quirky little dissonances that happen, and his melodies are very angular and leaping. I struggle with this when I talk to my students. It’s post-tonal, but it’s not atonal. It’s this 20th century style – a lot of composers did it, like Stravinsky, Barber, and Rorem. Copland not so much, but you can hear it in some of his wilder stuff.”

She points out that the Soviet government in the 1920s was busy trying to organize, collectivizing farms and building factories, so Soviet composers had a lot more freedom and Shostakovich was able to experiment. The result was that some of his music was quite atonal, his opera The Nose being a good example. She believes that if Shostakovich had been allowed complete compositional freedom, his music would probably sound very different from what we know today. “That’s my personal opinion,” she says, “and there’s no way we’ll ever know, but I think he would have gone more into the atonal, serial direction if it had not been considered formalist in the Soviet Union. Honestly,” she admits, “I’m kind of grateful he didn’t because I love the music that he came up with. It’s one of the great paradoxes, right? That censorship and oppression resulted in this music that everybody loves.”

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Personality Quirks

Shostakovich is well known for some of his personality quirks, like his biting wit and his chain-smoking (he died of lung cancer, officially). But Klefstad mentioned that he loved football (soccer to us) so much that he rearranged his travels so that he would be in a certain city at the time of a particular game. She has recordings of some of his speeches and describes his voice as nervous and high-pitched. She also spoke of his intense love of his children, about whom he was very protective. “In their small Soviet apartment,” she says, “he was famously able to compose in the middle of chaos. The kids would be running around yelling and screaming, and he would be in the corner writing.”

As for his penchant for irony, Klefstad said, “Well, there’s a whole book about it!” (Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich by Esti Sheinberg).

Shostakovich Today?

When asked what she thought Shostakovich would think about today’s world, both in Russia and the U.S., Klefstad said he would most likely be quiet, at least politically. But she thinks he would be really interested in all the electronic music and the harmonic advances. “I can see him geeking out with other composers.” And also, “He had a wicked sense of humor, so he would probably make some sort of joke about what’s going on.” But as for politics, he would just say, “Listen to my music.” 

Bleakness and Beauty

Twelve years ago, after the last movement of Quartet No. 15 and the end of the Festival, some of us who had experienced the complete program departed in a kind of daze, as if we’d had a kind of spiritual experience. 

With respect to the possibility of Shostakovich himself as “spiritual,” Klefstad answered that she has no doubt about Shostakovich being an atheist. “One thing I experience in his music is that there’s no hope. He was definitely not religious in any way. I just hear bleakness.” 

However, she suggests that there can be something very intimate and personal about a composer’s late quartets. “By the time a composer gets to that time of life they don’t have to struggle anymore to get notes down. They can create whatever is in their heads.” The late Beethoven quartets have the same effect on her as those of the late Shostakovich. “Those textures and harmonies are definitely not orchestral in approach.” This quieter, more personal aspect is perhaps what we were responding to.

But she goes on: “I mean there is still beauty in that, right? Life is chaotic and messy and dark, and yet you could still go out and have a drink with your friends. You can laugh and joke, and I think if Shostakovich offers anything positive it’s that. The darkness is part of the beauty of everything.”

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Dr. Terry Klefstad’s recently published book is Crooked River City: The Musical Life of Nashville’s William Pursell. University of Mississippi Press.