Looking Death in the Face

Donald Macleod views Shostakovich through the prism of his string quartets. Today, the ailing composer's thoughts turn to death - in the 14th Symphony, the music for King Lear, and the 'downright strange' 13th Quartet.
In 1969, the muscular-wasting condition Shostakovich had been suffering from for a number of years was finally given a name: poliomyelitis. A stay in a Siberian clinic brought some relief, but from now till the end of his life, his time was increasingly punctuated by spells in hospital. It was during one of these spells that he composed his 14th Symphony, a song-cycle for soprano, baritone, strings and percussion on the subject of death - to underline the point, a senior party official, Pavel Apostolov, died during the première. The following year, Shostakovich wrote the music for Grigory Kosintsev's film of King Lear, material from which found its way into the 13th String Quartet - also completed during a hospital stay. It's a bleak, melancholy and unsettling work cast in a single, 20-minute arc, or as the composer described it to his colleagues in the Composers' Union, "a short, lyrical quartet with a joke middle" - the "joke middle" being a passage in which Shostakovich directs all but the first violin to strike the bellies of their instruments with the wood of their bows. What do these knocks signify? ... the irregular ticks of a malfunctioning clock? ... death knocking at the door? ... the final nailing-down of the coffin lid?...