String Quartet No.12

Dedication: “To Dmitrii Mikhailovich Tsyganov”
Duration: 26’

String Quartet No.12
in D-flat Major
op. 133

I. Moderato
II. Allegretto

   Shostakovich began composing the Twelfth String Quartet on 25 January 1968 (the date appears on the first page of the sketch) in Moscow and completed it on 11 March in Repino. Dedicated to Dmitri Mikhaylovich Tsyganov (1903-1992), the first violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, the work was timed to his sixty-fifth birthday. On the day Shostakovich completed the quartet, he wrote to the violinist: “My dear Mitya! Tomorrow is your birthday. I have just completed the quartet and I ask you to do me the honour of accepting this dedication.” On his return to Moscow on 21 March, the composer “phoned Tsyganov and told him something he rarely said about his compositions: ‘You know, I think it turned out really well. ...Tsyganov asked, ‘Is it a chamber piece?’— ‘No, no,’ Shostakovich interrupted. ‘It’s a symphony, a symphony...’”.
   The work consists of two movements, Moderato and Allegretto; the tempo changes repeatedly within each movement. It is Shostakovich’s only two-movement chamber instrumental cycle, if we do not count the early Prelude and Scherzo, Op. 11, for string octet (1924-1925). The first movement (which lasts for less than eight minutes) is an introduction, while the second (about twenty minutes long) is the main movement. The basic formal idea of the Twelfth Quartet can be defined as the creation and resolution of tension between the twelve-tone technique and tonality.
   In the sixties, Shostakovich’s searching went in a such direction: he strove to renew his musical language without sacrificing the fundamental features of his style. For Shostakovich, as for many other composers of his generation (including Lutosławski), language renewal primarily meant moving away from the major-minor harmonic system and developing atonality and twelve-tone writing or the so-called “dodecatonics”, defined by some theorists as a “system of [musical] thinking in terms of 12 autonomous pitch-classes”. Soviet “music ideologists” used to show a negative response to any manifestations of atonality, and in 1959 Shostakovich himself severely criticized dodecaphony in the orthodox Soviet spirit. However, as early as his Thirteenth Symphony (1962), he dabbled in this risky sphere, and one year before composing the Twelfth Quartet, he incorporated twelve-tone rows into one of his Romances on Poetry by Aleksander Blok (Op. 127).
   The Beethoven Quartet performed the premiere of the Twelfth Quartet with the following line-up: Dmitri Tsyganov, Nikolay Zabavnikov, Fedor Druzhinin and Sergey Shirinsky. According to Vadim Borisovsky’s diary, on 23 April 1968, Shostakovich played the new work for the first time for its future performers. Rehearsals went on until 14 June, when the quartet was performed at the Moscow House of Composers (in a letter to Isaak Glikman dated 15 June, Shostakovich wrote, “...it seemed to me that the quartet made an impression on those assembled”). On 14 September, the premiere proper was held in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, along with String Quartet No. 1 and Piano Quintet (with Tatyana Nikolayeva) in the programme. On 3 November 1968, the same ensemble performed the quartet at the Leningrad Union of Composers, and on 4 and 5 November, the work premiered at the Glinka Small Hall in Leningrad.
   The first studio recording of the quartet played by the same musicians was made by Melodiya on 20 November, and a recording with the Borodin Quartet was done on 25 December 1968. The first foreign recording in Hulme’s catalogue is a version by the British Fitzwilliam Quartet (1976, recorded on an LP by L’Oiseau-Lyre).
   The first editions were published by Muzyka, Nos. 6059 (score, 1969) and 6171 (parts, 1969), Hans Sikorski, Nos. 6226 (score, 1969) and 2164 (parts, 1969) and Boosey & Hawkes, Nos. 856 (score, 1970) and 19910 (parts, 1970). In 1976, the Leningrad branch of Muzyka Publishers released Aleksandr Dmitriyev’s arrangement of the Twelfth Quartet for piano four hands (No. 2026, in the same volume as Quartets Nos. 13 and 14, with a preface and comments by the author of the arrangement).