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1934, he fell in love with a 20-year-old student named Yelena Konstantinovskaya. Though he and Nina had an open marriage, this was outside the bounds of their agreement. They divorced, but soon remarried after learning she was pregnant with their first child. “Remaining in Leningrad. Nina pregnant. Remarried,” he telegrammed a friend. In a more reflective letter, he confessed, “I have only now realized and fathomed what a remarkable woman she is.” During their brief divorce, he wrote the Cello Sonata to fulfill a request from Viktor Kubatsky, the principal cellist of the Bolshoi Theatre. Shostakovich began work on the piece in August 1934, and premiered it with Kubatsky on December 25.
Shostakovich felt that Soviet composers neglected chamber music in favor of orchestral music, and the Cello Sonata was partly an effort to counter that tendency. Stylistically, it is
a bit of an outlier for Shostakovich: classical in form, more subdued than much of his early output, but still without
the harrowing atmosphere of his later style. Critics divide on whether his affair and divorce are reflected in the piece: some think his passionate romance with Konstantinovskaya shines through, others are surprised he could write such whimsical, lyrical music at such a fraught moment in his life.
The first movement is in sonata form, modeled on older Romantic music. Still, there are surprises: tempos grind
to a halt at dramatic transitions, and in the end the original theme is transformed into a dirge. The second movement
is a raucous scherzo, making extensive use of glissando har- monics (here as a coloristic effect, quite unlike Gubaidulina’s later use as metaphor). The slow movement is dusky and resonant, with an endlessly unfurling cello line that grows more and more discomforted: if Shostakovich grieves for his marriage in this piece, it would be here. The brisk finale is filled with dense counterpoint which is repeatedly brought back to a rather rigid dance theme.
Later in life, Shostakovich accompanied his new favored cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, in a recording of the Sonata. (Rostropovich, who premiered both of Shostakovich’s cello concertos, was still a child when the Sonata was written.) In
another recording from 1962, Rostropovich plays it with their mutual friend, the composer Benjamin Britten, at the piano.
ALFRED SCHNITTKE (1934–1998) trans. YEVGENY SUDBIN (b. 1980) Tango from Life with an Idiot
Together with Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke was
a leading Soviet composer of the generation after Shostakovich. He was born in 1934 in Engels, Russia, to
a German-Jewish father and a Volga-German mother. Like Gubaidulina, he wrote film music, struggled in the Soviet system, received international attention in the last decade of the Cold War, and moved to Germany thereafter. He suffered from poor health after a series of strokes and died in Hamburg in 1998, at age 63.
Schnittke is known for his “polystylistic” idiom, epitomized by his 1977 Concerto Grosso No. 1, which he built from “formulae and forms of Baroque music; free chromaticism and micro-intervals; and banal popular music which enters as if it were from the outside with a disruptive effect.”
The tango we hear today first appeared as some of that intentionally “banal popular music” in the Rondo move- ment of the Concerto Grosso. Schnittke later adapted it
as an intermezzo for his 1992 opera Life with an Idiot, a grotesque comic sendup of the Soviet Union in which a man and his wife are forced to choose an “idiot” from an asylum to take into their home. The opera was premiered in Amsterdam in 1992 by the Netherlands Opera and Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich.
The version performed on this concert was arranged for piano trio by Yevgeny Sudbin, who comments, “it’s reminiscent of a forlorn, dystopian world where everyone has lost their sanity.”
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The Music at Tippet Rise