The Rhetoric of Reference; or, Shostakovich's Ghost Quartet
Introduction
It's typical that Wayne Booth titled his autobiography My Many Selves: he loved to point out that he was not a consistent person—at least not in any superficial way. Of course, all those selves had many common features; when I hear others talking about him, therefore, I can always recognize the Wayne I knew. But the recognition is always blurred, even haunted, by the vague presence of one or more of his other selves. James Redfield, for instance, mentions their conversations about religion—with me, religion rarely came up.1 Rather, with the Wayne I knew, music tended to be uppermost. I remember the first time he called on me in class. "What would Aristotle have to say about the Lenox Quartet's performance of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge?" he asked, challenging a review I had, with the sophomoric self-confidence of the college sophomore I in fact was, written for the Chicago Maroon.2 And music remained central as our friendship developed. Especially in later years, our conversations were more apt to start with talk about what he had been playing or how his practicing had gone or what I'd been listening to than with talk about literature. And he always supported my efforts to apply narrative theory to music. So the [End Page 239] decision to anchor this article in Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet is a way of dedicating this paper to Wayne the cellist, more specifically Wayne the string quartet player—even though, as should be obvious, the way I think about things is profoundly influenced by Wayne the narrative theorist.
Exposition: Theme I
If you include recordings of the numerous (misguided) transcriptions, there are, as of early 2007, nearly as many available recordings of the Shostakovich Eighth as there are of the Ravel, and far more than there are, say, of any of the Bartók Quartets. Its popularity is surprising, given its basic mood. Wayne called it "perhaps the gloomiest, most despairing composition I know" (Booth Love 169); and while you might quibble with the superlative, the general characterization is indisputable. This is not the sort of music you would expect audiences to clamor for.
The Eighth was written in 1960, when increasing pressure was being put on Shostakovich to join the Communist Party. He had gone to Dresden to work with Leo Arnshtam on Five Days—Five Nights, a film about the Soviet rescue of Dresden's art treasures after the war in the wake of the allied fire-bombing. As Laurel Fay puts it, "He viewed the graphic film footage, toured the ruins of the devastated city, and then repaired to the tranquility of Gohrisch, in 'Saxon Switzerland.' Instead of scoring the film, however, in a white heat he wrote a new string quartet, his Eighth, completing it on 14 July 1960" (Fay 217).
Officially, the quartet—"In Memory of the Victims of Fascism and War"—commemorated the devastation of the city. But because of its extensive self-quotation—and because of its extensive use of the DSCH (D E-flat C B)3 motif drawn from the letters of his name in standard German spelling—even Soviet critics like Keldysh, despite pressure to place the work in terms of objective history rather than subjective psychology, recognized an "autobiographical" strain from its first performance. Bernard Stevens expresses the critical consensus: "It is perhaps his most personal statement" (Stevens 157). True, when the music was brand new, the self-reference could be read as a sign that he sided with victims, rather than a sign that he saw himself as a victim.4 But as time has passed, nearly everyone has come to agree that, regardless of its position on German atrocities,5 the work expresses (or also expresses) Shostakovich's sense that he was personally oppressed, especially given its prominent use of the popular song, "Exhausted by Grievous Bondage." As the composer himself described "this ideologically...
