Piano Quintet

Abstract

The Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok were the first pieces Shostakovich wrote after his first heart attack in late May 29, 1966. According Venyamin Basner, one of his friends and a fellow composer, Shostakovich claimed to have had the idea for the songs while still in the hospital but had a great deal of difficulty in actually composing them and feared that his heart attack had paralyzed him creatively. That autumn, according to Basner's anecdote, Shostakovich said that the actual impetus to finish the works came out of a bottle of brandy:

"Three days ago, Irina Antonova (his wife) left the house. I was alone. I opened a cupboard, and, lo and behold, there on the bottom shelf was a half a bottle of brandy. She had hidden all the drink in the house but by chance I discovered this bottle. And, you know, I had this sudden urge to drink, which I couldn't resist, so I had a glass. And, you know, it was so good that I sat down and everything came to me at once, and I finished the work in three days."

The actual impetus for the songs came from cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and soprano Galina Vishnevskaya who asked for some vocalises to perform together. Shostakovich expanded the accompaniment to the size of a piano trio, with violinist David Oistrakh and pianist Sviatoslav Richter. In the final version of the cycle, the seven songs are accompanied first by solo instruments—cello, piano, and violin—then duos—piano and cello (always double-stopped), violin and piano, and muted violin and cello—and then all three instruments together only in the last song.

The symbolist poet Alexander Blok (1880 - 1921) was a great favorite of fin-de-siècle aesthetes. Like the poetry, Shostakovich's musical setting is one of his most intimate and personal, spare and austere, with the smallest gestures carrying the greatest weight. Each song is exquisitely beautiful and profoundly felt, communicating to the listener the subtlest nuance of Shostakovich's art. Along with the Six Romances on Texts by Japanese Poets (1928 - 1932) and Six Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva (1973), the Blok Songs are among the most beautiful pieces he ever composed.