Composing the Modern Subject

Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets present commentators with several paradoxes, each with its own invitingly easy explanation. Their status in the concert hall as representatives of the genre in the twentieth century has long since overtaken that of Bartók’s six quartets, but this prominence is scarcely reflected in the literature (presumably the fault of lazy musicologists). They deploy a musical language sometimes pigeonholed as ‘moderated modernism’, yet no analytical theory exists that can satisfactorily encompass it (presumably the same reason, compounded by excessive old-musicology faith in the explicatory power of theory in general). And they embrace a genre traditionally located at the abstract end of the aesthetic spectrum, but within a local context that scorned abstraction (so presumably they are really crypto-programmatic and the residue of abstraction can be explained away as a token of dissidence). Regarding the first point, Sarah Reichardt’s densely yet cogently argued study of four consecutive quartets composed between 1956 and 1964 constitutes a substantial redressing of the balance. Regarding the second, she has relatively little to say. Regarding the third, her achievement is in many ways ground-breaking.

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