Shostakovich’s Sixth Quartet is perhaps the lightest in tone of any of his quartets since the First Quartet of 1938. It was written while the composer was honeymooning with his second wife, Margarita Kainova (the marriage ended in divorce 3 years later). Throughout this 4-movement work there is a playfulness, a quality underlined, according to the composer’s official Soviet biographer, by the resemblance of the opening notes to a catchy children’s song that he wrote for his 1949 movie-score ‘The Fall of Berlin’:
‘What a lovely day, the earth is in flower!
The flowers are springing up and so am I!’
The lively first movement is in D major and this is followed by a triple-time dance movement in E flat (Es in German notation). By this means the first two movements spell out Shostakovich’s initials, D S. This apparently obscure connection is reinforced by the fact that three of the four movements end with a cadence (closing harmony) which passes through a four-note chord which spells out the composer’s famous cipher, DSCH (D, E flat, C, B natural). And there are many other equally playful and whimsical references of this kind in this score. All of this suggests that this attractive work was intended to have something of the character of a light-hearted self-portrait of the composer.
Note by Gerard McBurney
