ABSTRACT
On more than one occasion, Dmitri Shostakovich recalled a love of chamber music that began when, at the age of seven or eight, he listened through the wall to his neighbours' chamber music sessions. By 1938, when he wrote the First Quartet, he had already written several chamber ensemble works. The First Quartet in C major emerged only a few months later, the composer's first major work after his Fifth Symphony. An important aspect of the Quartet's compositional history is the composer's decision to exchange its first and last movements. Early reviews of the First Quartet were extensive and positive. In March 1939, Yosif Rizhkin featured the First Quartet prominently in his Sovetskaya muzika review of the 1938 Dekada of Soviet music. Readers of the Entelis booklet and Kremlyov's review might begin to sense that the First Quartet is more subtle than the composer's public statements had made it seem.
