Almost the entire 5-movement piece is taken up with quotations from his earlier compositions from his First Symphony op.10 to his recent First Cello Concerto op.107, as well as frequent reference to his own initials – the 4-note motif DSCH (D, E flat, C, B natural) – and to a gloomy revolutionary song which begins ‘Tormented by grievous bondage’. To one friend he moodily observed that this quartet was essentially an obituary for himself and ‘You could even write on the first page “This work was written in memory of its composer”’. Unbeknownst even to his close friends at this time, Shostakovich had given in to pressure from Khrushchev’s government and agreed to join the Communist Party, something he had always resisted before and which, as he knew in advance, would be regarded as a betrayal by many of friends and colleagues. He composed it in three days flat, while staying in East Germany and preparing to write the score for a film about the bombing of Dresden, ‘Five days, five nights’. One of Shostakovich’s most troubling and unusual works is his Eighth Quartet.
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