Further Shostakovich-Related Quotations

Some material connected to my favorite opera never composed...

From Laurel Fay's Shostakovich: A Life:

In September 1972, Shostakovich finally became acquainted with the Leggenda Valacca (Angel's Serenade) by Gaetano Braga, a salon piece enormously popular around the turn of the century, the performance of which is specifically mentioned by Chekhov in "The Black Monk." Visiting with [Isaak] Glikman in Repino on 11 April 1973, Shostakovich told him that having undertaken to write an opera on Checkhov's story, he had had someone scout out the music for Braga's piece. He thought that it provided him with the kernel for his future opera. ... Whether he made any significant inroads on its composition before his death is unknown. What he did complete was the arrangement of Braga's "Serenade" for soprano, mezzo-soprano, violin (as specified in Chekhov's story), and piano.

Anton Chekhov's story follows the life of Kovrin, an unstable intellectual who is tormented alternatingly by the awareness of his own mediocrity and by visions of a supernatural monk who assures him of his greatness. The subject would have fit nicely with Shostakovich's ambiguous, conflicted, late-career meditations on art and mortality.

Fay goes on to connect Shostakovich's plans for a "Black Monk" opera to his fourteenth string quartet: "He drew attention to what he called his 'Italian' bit in the second movement, a ravishing, if uncharacteristically sentimental duet for cello and violin; its kinship to his arrangement of the Braga 'Serenade' is surely not accidental."

In 2001 I heard the Hagen Quartet play Shostakovich's 14th in concert (paired with the composer's gnomish 11th quartet; good program) and since then I've always been struck by that middle portion of the central Adagio movement: Sentimental, yet laced with acid, curdled at the edges. I believe at the time I concocted an analogy about looking at an old photograph through a warped glass frame.

Gaetano Braga's "Angel's Serenade" (not in Shostakovich's arrangement).

Three minutes from the 14th quartet's Adagio, as recorded by the Borodin Quartet:



The conclusion of "The Black Monk":

He called Tanya, called to the great garden with the gorgeous flowers sprinkled with dew, called to the park, the pines with their shaggy roots, the rye-field, his marvellous learning, his youth, courage, joy--called to life, which was so lovely. He saw on the floor near his face a great pool of blood, and was too weak to utter a word, but an unspeakable, infinite happiness flooded his whole being. Below, under the balcony, they were playing the serenade, and the black monk whispered to him that he was a genius, and that he was dying only because his frail human body had lost its balance and could no longer serve as the mortal garb of genius.

When Varvara Nikolaevna woke up and came out from behind the screen, Kovrin was dead, and a blissful smile was set upon his face.

I've also seen the concept for "The Black Monk" tentatively linked to Shostakovich's 15th symphony; I can't help but connect that work's weird, clicking/ murmuring finale with the end of the story above.