String Quartet No. 9 (Shostakovich)
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Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 9 in E flat major (Op. 117) was composed in 1964 and premiered by the Beethoven Quartet. The Ninth Quartet was dedicated to his third wife, Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, a young musicologist whom he had married in 1962.
Shostakovich rarely changed or revised his works, but the Ninth Quartet is one of the rare exceptions. In Elizabeth Wilson's biography entitled "Shostakovich: A Life Remembered" she states: "Shostakovich finished the first version of the Ninth Quartet in the autumn of 1961. In a fit of depression, or, to quote his own words, 'in an attack of healthy self-criticism, I burnt it in the stove. This is the second such case in my creative practice. I once did a similar trick of burning my manuscripts, in 1926'."
It took Shostakovich three years to complete the "new" Ninth Quartet, which was completed on May 28, 1964, and premiered by the Beethoven Quartet in Moscow on November 20, 1964. The Beethoven Quartet had the exclusive rights to perform all of Shostakovich's String Quartets. Dimitri Tsyganov, the leader of the Beethoven Quartet, recalled that Shostakovich told him that the first Ninth Quartet was based on the "themes from childhood", and the newer Ninth Quartet was "completely different".
The piece has five movements, which are played without pause:
- Moderato con moto
- Adagio
- Allegretto
- Adagio
- Allegro
The first four movements last roughly four minutes each and the last movement is nearly twice as long as the first four.
The third, fourth and part of the fifth movements were used as musical accompaniment to Henri Oguike's piece Frontline.
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