Shostakovich: String Quartet No.15 in E Flat Minor Op.144 [1974]

FULL PRESENTATIONAL LIGHTING.

Hands folded, the composer is sitting at table addressing the audience as if he is a news commentator.

Fifteen is the Devil Card in the Tarot.

This in translation means: coercion.

The curtailment of one’s expression by another who maintains controls thusly.

I am leaving fifteen symphonies and fifteen quartets

Often nowadays I feel as though I’ve got fifteen fingers on each hand.

All numb and growing cold.

There is a sense of projection.

My voice will move out from here to far beyond my present reading.

Sometimes I’m thinking four dimensionally.

It’s disconcerting

But also wonderful.

And I’m leaving the echoes of all who’ve worked with me.

Either directly or in solidarity.

Anatoli Kuznetsov for instance.

CHANGE OF LIGHTING and facial expression.

Far in the future from where I sit today

A North American is writing poetic responses to my work.

He tells me, through the years between us, that Kuznetsov’s book

Babi Yar had a powerful effect upon him when he was a boy of ten years.

It is gratifying to hear this.

Think of Ukrainian collusion and Anti-Semitism.

Think of hierarchy and all the varieties of dissent.

Not everyone may act openly or, honestly now, flamboyantly.

We all must do what we can—that is the fabric of principle.

How often it is frayed and torn.

LIGHTING INTENSIFIES

He bares his teeth.

Khrennikov, like Zhdanov we were told, hated to have his teeth on edge.

That is, if Music got under their skin.

But look at what failed, in life to rile them!

No teeth on edge in the face of all the madness…

What was it my music called to mind for them?

LIGHTS and facial muscles RELAX A BIT.

I mustn’t allow these ideas,

these questions and contradictions

to cause me any more pain.

He makes a fist.

And yet I have a true conscience.

Points the fist at the audience as though it were a gun.

A Russian conscience have I.

Like that of Andrei Rublev, painter of ikons.

It’s why I stood with our poet Yevtushenko.

Hands over abdomen, fingers intertwined.

This much you may hear plainly.

I am silent as I write.

But I am never fully silent.

Takes a deep breath and lets it out in a shuddering sigh.

What is silence?

Particularly in my country?

I am silent.

Yet certainly not!

I will never be silent.

Surely you understand.

Such a condition is impossible.

Especially looking ahead.

I will never ever be silent.

Perhaps I should feel satisfied about that.

Troubled expression.

But how did this blood stay in my veins all of these years?

Under such circumstances?

While so many others known to me intimately

Or absolutely anonymous to my understanding

All of them taken and bled—slowly, or all too suddenly.

How odd is fate.

To have shuffled our deck.

In this way.

I cannot pretend to begin to understand.

Akhmatova said that after all of this

she didn’t ever want to come back.

Not even as a leaf.

LIGHTS BEGIN TO FADE WHILE TAKING ON A GOLDEN AUSTERITY.

Fifteen is the number of curtailment and coercion.

I will not be taken down into invisibility and oblivion.

Without that sure and uncompromised continuum.

We cannot know exactly now, but it is certain:

I will live tomorrow.

My

Strings

Will

Sound

Tomorrow

Goodbye for now

BLACKOUT.

© arwulf arwulf 2015