Moreover, some of the quartet has no apparent autobiographical connection (for example, the dramatic appearance of a “Jewish” theme in the middle movement seems a reference to the Holocaust). Testimony has been derided for being more Volkov's version of what he thought Westerners wanted to read than Shostakovich's own words, and demonstrated to be at least partially fraudulent. If the disguise were so transparent as to fool only the blind and deaf, it would scarcely have served its purpose. Shostakovich was quoted in Testimony, a book purporting to be his recollections told to the Russian journalist Solomon Volkov (and published in America after Shostakovich's death), as contradicting his inscription, saying that the quartet is clearly pure autobiography and “you have to be blind and deaf” to think it about fascism the implication being that it was really about the composer's own struggles against Stalinist totalitarianism, disguised to avoid official retribution.īut there are reasons to doubt this description as well. The Eighth Quartet quotes liberally from Shostakovich’s own music and uses his personal motto theme, suggesting that it is about Shostakovich himself. Everything else about this quartet, its genesis, and its meaning, has been much debated. There, in a span of three days, Shostakovich composed a quartet inscribed “In memory of victims of fascism and war.” That much is beyond question. In the summer of 1960 Shostakovich's work on the score of a Soviet-East German film took him to Dresden, the German city that had been destroyed in 1945 by an Allied firebombing which killed more people than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Shostakovich string quartet 8 parts pdf