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Not unlike Prokofiev (who, forbidden by his doctors to work, stationed visiting friends at his hospital door to warn of approaching nurses), Shostakovich continued to compose during his treatment, and wrote the Second Cello Concerto for Rostropovich during his stay. Though he followed the prescribed regimen meticulously, the cough got worse, as did other ailments plaguing him at the time, not least a trembling of his hands that made playing piano difficult. He left the sanatorium in mid-May, stopping in Moscow and Volgograd before returning to Leningrad. Though his medical problems persisted, he refused to lighten his hectic schedule, and he agreed to participate in a 60th birthday concert in Leningrad on May 28th at which he would not only premiere the 11th Quartet, but also serve as piano accompanist for bass Evgeny Nesterenko in the first performances of the deadpan Preface to the Complete Edition of My Works and a Brief Reflection Apropos of This Preface and the Five Romances on Texts from Krokodil Magazine. Though Shostakovich, weakened by his recent medical problems, was apprehensive at playing in public for the first time in two years and Nesterenko missed several of his entrances, the event was a brilliant success—the 11th Quartet had to be encored.

The hall was stiflingly hot that evening, however, and Shostakovich was nearly worn out by the time he had extracted himself from the throng of well-wishers. Around midnight, back at his hotel, he fell ill. He was admitted to Sverdlov Hospital, a facility reserved for privileged patients, and a heart attack was diagnosed the following morning. He remained at Sverdlov for two months and then spent several weeks at a sanatorium outside Leningrad before being placed on a strict regime and sent home. Though he lived for another nine years, and stubbornly continued composing and attending to his many commitments, his health never returned. The 60th birthday concert in Leningrad was Shostakovich’s last public appearance as a performer.

The String Quartet No. 11 was dedicated to the memory of Vassily Shirinsky, violinist of the Beethoven String Quartet, the ensemble that premiered all of Shostakovich’s quartets from the Second onwards. Unlike most dedications, however, this one, to a recently deceased friend and colleague, is not incidental to the work but essential to its expressive content. Shostakovich, then losing both his health and his friends of many years, came to consider death closely, trying to find a way to distill his feelings into music. “Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling,” he said. “The irony lies in the fact that under the influence of that fear, people create poetry, prose and music; that is, they try to strengthen their ties with the living and increase their influence upon them.”

Some of his late compositions deal directly with the subject—the 14th Symphony of 1969 is a song cycle of eleven poems by four authors dealing with death—but most are ambiguous, allowing each listener to draw individual inferences from the music. Ian McDonald, for one, in The New Shostakovich, said that the Quartet No. 11 “adopts a style of artless naivete, somewhere between that of child and clown.” A fair estimation, perhaps, of the Scherzo (literally, a “joke”), the skittering Etude and the ticking Humoresque considered out of their context, but the brutal Recitative and the keening Elegy cast these movements in a different light, turning their wit sardonic and their naivete nihilistic. Framing these five internal movements are an Introduction, which presents themes treated throughout the Quartet—principally an arching strain initiated by a lone violin and a folkish, small-interval cello tune—and a Conclusion, which summarizes the work’s thematic material but does not resolve its expressive ambiguity. The Quartet does not so much end as simply stop, seemingly enervated, holding on to nothing but the thin strand of a single high violin note marked “morendo”—“dying away.”

On November 9, 1822, Prince Nikolas Galitzin, a devotee of Beethoven’s music and an amateur cellist, wrote from St. Petersburg asking Beethoven for “one, two or three quartets for which labor I will be glad to pay you whatever amount you think proper.” Beethoven was elated by the commission, and he replied immediately to accept it and set the fee of 50 ducats for each quartet, a high price, but readily accepted by Galitzin. The music, however, took somewhat longer. The Ninth Symphony was completed in February 1824, but Beethoven, exhausted, was unable to begin Galitzin’s first quartet until May. “I am really impatient to have a new quartet of yours,” badgered Galitzin. “Nevertheless, I beg you not to mind and to be guided in this only by your inspiration and the disposition of your mind.” A flurry of correspondence passed between St. Petersburg and Vienna after the E-flat Quartet was started in May, but Beethoven could not be hurried in this project, and the score was not finished until February of the following year. In the meantime, Beethoven, pressed for money, had convinced Galitzin to transfer the payment of 50 ducats for the first quartet to a subscription for the new Missa Solemnis. In appreciation, Beethoven gave his patron the honor of sponsoring the first performance of the Missa Solemnis, and it was duly premiered in St. Petersburg on April 7, 1824.

The premiere of the E-flat Quartet was given in Vienna on March 6, 1825 by the ensemble of Ignaz Schuppanzigh, a champion of Beethoven’s works in earlier years and the first musician in Austria to undertake public string quartet concerts. Schuppanzigh had been in Russia for some time and only returned to Vienna at the end of April 1823, when he resumed his series of concerts, which once again became major events in the city’s musical life. He convinced Beethoven to allow his group to give the Quartet’s first performance, but the score was finished later than expected, and the parts for this work, in an extraordinary new and difficult chamber music style, reached the performers only two weeks before the scheduled concert on March 6, 1825. Beethoven made each of the quartet members sign a pledge that he would give his best in presenting the work, and they worked hard, indeed, to prepare the piece. Still, reported Sir Julius Benedict, “Schuppanzigh and his companions were scarcely equal to this occasion; as they did not seem to understand the music themselves, they failed entirely to impart its meaning to the audience. The general impression was most unsatisfactory.” Beethoven, who was not at the concert, learned of the debacle from his brother Johann, and offered the next performance to Josef Böhm and his quartet. They were coached by the composer, now stone deaf (he was guided by their fingers and bow movements), and the presentation was so successful at Böhm’s March 26th performance that it had to be repeated nine times during the following weeks.

“In these last works,” wrote Melvin Berger in his Guide to Chamber Music, “Beethoven leaves the realm of personal self-expression and enters the domain of the universal—plumbing the full depths of the human soul and psyche.... In a sense, it is music that transcends music, that even transcends human feelings and thoughts, to achieve a spiritual level above all worldly concerns.” The series of the five late quartets and the Grosse Fuge were Beethoven’s final musical thoughts, and they were the only important works that occupied him during his last four years. They are the ultimate distillation of his art. The conventions of traditional musical expression are swept away by a concentration on the most fundamental, the most absolutely essential elements of the creation of tonal art. Contrast, lyricism, texture, motivic growth—every facet of composition is not just brought under magisterial technical control, but heightened to a level that nearly defies traditional analysis and description. This music, like the deepest, most powerful emotions, passes beyond mere words to touch the noblest threads of our feelings and humanity.

The opening movement of the Op. 127 Quartet erects a distinctive sonata structure upon two sharply differentiated thematic elements: a series of bold, proclamatory chords and a sunny, flowing melody of vernal freshness. The bold chords return both for expressive contrast and as a formal marker to indicate the arrival at the development and the recapitulation (Beethoven had much earlier tried a similar experiment in the well-known “Pathétique” Sonata, Op. 13 of 1799), with the intervening sections devoted to a lithe working-out, almost a fantasia, of the flowing motive. Beethoven’s mastery of variation technique, one of the touchstones of his fullest creative maturity, is seen nowhere better than in the Quartet’s Adagio, a sublime movement built upon a spacious, arching theme, which progresses from a state of hymnal introspection through its animated central paragraphs to a close of rapt transcendence. The third movement achieves a remarkable balance of playfulness and rigorous thematic development, with a sleek, spectral central trio providing the perfect foil. The finale is a compact sonata structure built from a naively melodious main theme and a marching second subject. The Quartet culminates in a luminous transformation of the finale’s principal theme.