Four Monologues on Verses of Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin (R)

1 Fragment
2 What does my name mean to you?
3 In the depths of the Siberian mines
4 Farewell


In 1936 Shostakovich planned a series of twelve songs on Pushkin’s words. On that occasion he completed only four of them, the Four Romances op.46. He returned to the great poet in what turned out to be the final year of Stalin’s life. As in 1936, he chose unusual texts, freighted with personal significance, and suggesting themes of impending loss and destruction.


The first poem is Pushkin’s response to the anti-semitism he encountered during his years in Moldavia. It is a moving account of a Jewish family, fearful of persecution and the unknown threat that might strike at any time. Jewishness and anti-semitism were constant themes in Shostakovich’s mind, and he often used Jewish klezmer-music in his pieces. Here the musical inspiration is not klezmer but the sound of religious chant and of Christian church-bells (a sinister threat to the Jewish family in the poem). This is a song about persecution.


The second song is a love-poem addressed to a girl. Pushkin speculates on the fragile way our names might be preserved in the hearts of those who love us, especially when our own survival is in question. Shostakovich builds in suggestions of his own initials – DSCH – in the piano part. Then comes a grand and passionate declamation, on an operatic scale, a setting of Pushkin’s great hymn of loyalty to his friends who had been exiled to Siberia in the wake of the failed Decembrist Uprising. And Shostakovich ends with a bitter-sweet love-song of farewell, almost in the style of an early 19th century Russian composer like Glinka. The singer takes a last leave of his beloved, knowing that he will never see her again and beseeching her to cling to the memory of what had been between them.


Note by Gerard McBurney