Alfred Schnittke

Among later Soviet composers, Alfred Schnittke may have been the one to try the hardest to reconcile Russian traditions with European modernism. From this hybridity rose a body of work that was fundamentally polystylistic and later also became cosmopolitan and concerned with accessibility — whence his remarkable popularity. Resolutely turning against avant-garde rationalism, speculation, and unbridled experimentation, Schnittke took a different path. His music paradoxically combines ironic and humorous detachment with spirituality or even mysticism, and reclaims mimesis and expression.

Classicism

Schnittke discovered the Austro-German musical tradition over the years 1945 to 1948, when his family lived in Vienna. This early encounter with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert — prior to his familiarity with the great Russian composers — shaped the way in which he learned music. In his vision of music history, whose “multi-dimensionality” he consistently emphasized,¹ his central reference point remained a certain conception of Classicism. His distinctive relationship to the past and tradition, which he imagined as “a world of ever-present ghosts,” helps explain the mixture of periods and genres referenced in Schnittke’s music from very early on.²

His first major composition, a Concerto for Accordion and Orchestra (1948-1949, lost), marks the real beginning of his musical career, contemporaneous with his family’s return to the USSR, where they settled near Moscow. There, he heard the premieres of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1952 Symphony-Concerto for cello and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony and First Violin Concerto. Inspired by these works, he wrote his first orchestral piece, a Poème for Piano and Orchestra (1953), also heavily influenced by Sergei Rachmaninov. Around the same time, he wrote his first piano and chamber works. At the Moscow Conservatory, where he met Edison Denisov and Sofia Gubaidulina, he completed a commissioned choral work, the Three Choruses (1954-1955), marked by the academic style typical of official Soviet commissions. His graduation piece, however — the oratorio Nagasaki (1958) for mezzo-soprano, mixed choir, and orchestra — took a different turn. Drawing openly on nineteenth-century Russian models and tonal language (enhanced by tonal licenses in the vein of Shostakovich, whose support helped get the piece attention abroad), Nagasaki drew criticism from the authorities, who had intended it as a vehicle for anti-imperialist propaganda.

Schnittke then immersed himself in the Conservatoire folksong archives and undertook a field trip to Kyrgyzstan in preparation for his cantata Songs of War and Peace (1959, premiered 1960) for soprano, mixed choir, and orchestra. For the work, he selected Central Asian songs that were highly chromatic. Watched by the regime, he went on to compose Poem about Space (1961), celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s space flight, and he joined the Composers’ Union. The Union subsequently commissioned operas from him (The Eleventh Commandment in 1962 and African Ballad in 1963) while remaining wary of his modernist tendencies.

During same period, Schnittke began to write music for the screen, working on animated, fictional, and documentary films as well as television projects. Often written on commission, these scores were generally received with positive reactions. Between 1962 (Igor Talankin’s Introduction to Life) and 1993 (Yuri Kara’s The Master and Margarita), Schnittke composed more than seventy film scores. This prolific output was made possible in large part by his regular collaborations with the directors Andrei Smirnov (A Little Joke, 1966; Belorussian Station, 1971; Autumn, 1975), Andrei Khrzhanovsky (The Glass Harmonica, 1968; The Butterfly, 1972; My Memories Bring Me Back to You, 1977; I Am with You Again, 1981), Larisa Shepitko (You and Me, 1972; The Ascent, 1976), and Elem Klimov (The Adventures of a Dentist, 1965; Sport, Sport, Sport, 1971; Larissa, a 1980 documentary in homage to the prematurely deceased Shepitko; Farewell, 1983). This body of work established Schnittke firmly within the Soviet cultural scene.

He saw film scoring as a laboratory for the rest of his composing: “From the outset, my work in certain films was experimental,” he noted. “One day I would write something, the next day listen to the orchestra play it, not like it, change it on the spot, although I might have tried out a certain device, an orchestral technique, or something else. In this respect, I gained a great deal from the cinema.”³

Notably, the heterogeneous structure of the music for Mikhail Romm’s documentary The World Today (released posthumously in two parts, 1972 and 1974) informed the conception of Schnittke’s First Symphony, while his score for Klimov’s Agony (also released in two parts, 1974/1981) supplied material for the tango in his Concerto Grosso No. 1.

The Avant-Garde and Back Again

In the early 1960s, Schnittke took an interest in both dodecaphony and musical collage. Besides the mainstays of the Germanic tradition (especially Bach and Mahler, the latter discovered via Shostakovich), he was studying the Second Viennese School, Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and the big names of the “generation of 1925” such as György Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono. During a visit to Moscow in 1963, Nono indeed criticized Schnittke for his mixture of styles and naïve use of serialism, prompting him to adopt a more self-critical approach and to study the work of Anton Webern.⁴ Like Shostakovich with serialism a few years earlier, Schnittke, behind the Iron Curtain, absorbed postwar modernism at a certain delay.

Schnittke also shared Shostakovich’s reticence toward aspects of serialism that seemed overly automated or systematic. In works such as the First Violin Sonata (1963, transcribed in 1968 for an accompaniment of harpsichord and strings as Sonata for Violin and Chamber Orchestra), the First String Quartet (1966), and the Concerto for Violin and Chamber Orchestra No. 2 (1966), his use of the technique is free and quasi-tonal. In general, he was more interested in understanding and adapting a technique than in applying it strictly.

The Turn to Polystylism: Prose and Drama

Toward the end of the 1960s, Schnittke came to be absorbed in the question of how a work unfolds dramatically, a process he likened to narrative or prose, as opposed to poetry. For his orchestral piece Pianissimo, premiered at the Donaueschingen Festival on 19 October 1968, he used Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. The story does not serve as a model or program, but rather as the basis for a micropolyphonic narrative that gradually converges into a unison, before dissolving into a chaotic outburst of sound that vividly evokes the horrific world of Kafka’s novella.

This preoccupation with narrative led to a decisive turn toward polystylism, notably coinciding with The Glass Harmonica (1968), the first of Schnittke’s many collaborations with the animated-film director Khrzhanovsky. Within the stylistic menagerie of that score, the B-A-C-H monogram⁵ serves as a unifying factor, as it does in the instrumental Serenade and the Violin Sonata No. 2 “Quasi una sonata” of the same year. Alongside its remarkable array of stylistic references, the latter work also incorporates elements of indeterminacy, including unspecified clusters and glissandi.

But the manifesto work of polystylism arrived in 1972, after four years during which Schnittke devoted himself assiduously to writing music for feature films, documentaries, and cartoons.⁶ Premiered in Gorky (today’s Nizhny Novgorod) on 9 February 1974, the Symphony No. 1, hailed as insolite (out of the ordinary) and insolente by one French critic,⁷ is a collage of contrasting materials and atmospheres, much of it derived from music for Romm’s The World Today, a sweeping panorama of twentieth-century history. With detached, self-reflective commentary on musical creation and its performance in concert, the symphony is an intertextual kaleidoscope of quotations from Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Johann Strauss, Grieg, and Haydn and allusions to plainsong, foxtrot, military marches, Baroque dances, and jazz. It begins and ends in a chaotic din, the musicians leave in the fashion of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, and the conductor goes on conducting alone.⁸ Sometimes described by Schnittke as a non-symphony or anti-symphony, the liminal Symphony No. 1 was an attempt to realize an aspiration he had articulated in a well-known article published in 1971: “My lifelong task would be to bridge the gap between serious music and music for entertainment, even if I broke my neck in the process.”⁹ This attempt at synthesis, which Schnittke saw as anticipated by Mahler, Charles Ives, and Stravinsky in such works as the Symphony in C and Agon, helped him to express what he saw as the “philosophical idea of continuity” characteristic of musical postmodernism. Like its close cousin the Third Symphony (1980), the First Symphony partakes of several genres at once, embraces antagonistic traditions, and develops a pluralistic language. Schnittke applies principles of organization and non-organization, such as collective improvisation and the sieve of Eratosthenes, creating a way out of both dodecaphony and tonality alike, even as he continues to draw on both.

Schnittke was well aware of the potential downfall of polystylism: a constant succession of contrasts, a tissue of quotations, juxtapositions, and overlapping episodes, could easily end up sounding merely haphazard or chaotic. Yet “in spite of all the complications and possible dangers of the polystylistic method,” he maintained, “its merits are now obvious. It widens the range of expressive possibilities, it allows for the integration of ‘low’ and ‘high’ styles, of the ‘banal’ and the ‘recherché’ — that is, it creates a wider musical world and a general democratization of style.”¹⁰ This is why he embraced the irony and humor that can arise from putting opposites in confrontation.

Distancing and parody also characterize Schnittke’s series of works based on existing fragments or unfinished compositions. A prime example is the various versions of Moz-Art,¹¹ which interweave newly composed music with fragments from Mozart’s unfinished pantomime Pantalon und Colombine, K. 446 (which itself pays tribute to commedia dell’arte in its stage directions). Similarly, the second movement of the Fifth Symphony (1988, also called Concerto Grosso No. 4) grows out of sketches of a piano quartet by Mahler. Around this same time (1975-1977), Schnittke explored a wide range of musical idioms through transcription. He arranged two of Shostakovich’s piano preludes, op. 2, and Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (harshly criticized by Pravda at its Parisian premiere in 1979). He also wrote cadenzas, including for several of Mozart’s piano and bassoon concertos and for the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

Hidden Symbolism

Certain works from these years show Schnittke gaining a tendency to write from stylistic codes and patterns. The Credo from the Requiem (1975) for soloists, mixed chorus, and ensemble refers clearly to plainsong, but accompanied by an instrumental ensemble featuring electric guitar, bass, and drum set, as though inventing a modern ritual. Similarly, Schnittke’s Piano Quintet (1972-1976) was originally written as an instrumental requiem for his mother, who had passed away suddenly in September 1972. When he later reworked it as In Memoriam (1977-1978), an orchestral homage to the recently deceased Shostakovich, he confirmed the original work’s purpose as music of mourning. Its composite material includes a recurrent motif of two semitones, tonally unrelated triads, dodecaphonic lines, and microtonal micropolyphony against a background of allusions to the Baroque (the B-A-C-H motif, passacaglia bass lines, lamenting chromaticism) and the Classical period (the Viennese waltz).

Within a similar framework, Schnittke conceived his series of Concerti Grossi, inaugurated in 1976-1977 with a work for two violins, harpsichord, prepared piano, and strings. The others are No. 2 for violin, cello, and orchestra (1981-1982); No. 3 for two violins, harpsichord, and strings (1985, for Bach’s tricentenary); No. 4 for violin, oboe, and orchestra (1988); No. 5 for violin and orchestra with offstage piano (1991); and No. 6 for violin, piano, and strings (1993). In all of them, Baroque or Classical allusions compete against modernist elements. Just as the Symphony No. 1 was both an “anti-symphony” and a symphony about the symphony, the Concerto Grosso No. 1 is a commentary on the idea of the concerto grosso, a parody enacted through a set of formulas: figures that go in circles, free use of chromaticism and micro-intervals, popular music coming out of nowhere. Schnittke was looking for a style both heterogeneous and unified, eclectic and coherent. He maintains the ripieno–concertino opposition (the two solo violins have very virtuosic parts), as well as eighteenth-century terms and formulas (rondo, toccata, etc.). At the same time, he introduces alien fragments, often through insertion or collage: a nostalgic atonal serenade (“Corelli made in the USSR,” in his words), or his “grandmother’s favorite tango” (on the harpsichord in the fifth movement).¹²

The Call of Spirituality

In 1979 Schnittke started to take an interest in esoteric traditions such as anthroposophy and the Kabbalah. The latter, in particular, related to his fascination with the Faust legend, which found its first major expression in his catalog in the cantata Seid Nüchtern und Wachet... (Be Sober and Vigilant, 1982-1983), sometimes called the Faust Cantata. This preparatory study was ultimately incorporated into the opera Historia von D. Johann Fausten, written 1991-1994, and parts of it also turn up in the Sixth Symphony of 1992.

Schnittke was increasingly concerned to achieve structural unity within a world still rich in references and quotations. This ambition, already apparent in the First Cello Sonata (1978) and Four Hymns (1974-1979) for cello and ensemble, manifests especially in the String Quartets Nos. 2 (1980) and 3 (1983). These pieces incorporate quotations and preexisting material into Schnittke’s own style, not merely presenting them but assimilating them and exploiting them thematically. The Third Quartet opens with three quotations (identified as such in the score) from distant historical moments: a couple of phrase endings from Orlando di Lassus’s Stabat Mater from 1585; the theme of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge from 1825, here in pizzicato; and the DSCH motif (D–E-flat–C–B), Shostakovich’s musical signature, heard most famously in his Eighth String Quartet from 1960. These borrowings become generative cells for the whole work, subjected to development and variation, reappearing in numerous guises. The eclecticism plays with contrast, surprise, and clever interweaving of motifs from starkly different eras — all within a traditional sonata form.

After converting to Catholicism in 1982, Schnittke wrote a series of choral works with religious content. His Symphony No. 2 “St. Florian” (1980), an homage to Anton Bruckner, follows the Catholic mass ordinary in its six movements. The Symphony No. 4 (1983) is a stylization of ritual music from the three main branches of Christianity and their common root, synagogue chant. The Concerto for Mixed Choir (1984–1985) sets the tenth-century Book of Lamentations by Gregory of Narek, in Russian translation, while also evoking the nineteenth-century Orthodox musical tradition. The texts of the Penitential Psalms, premiered on 26 December 1988 to celebrate the millennium of Christianity in Russia, come from an anonymous late sixteenth-century collection of writings that express both the mystical fervor of faith and the trials endured by the penitent (solitude, poverty, awareness of mortality, and fear of the Last Judgment and of eternal damnation).

Drama in the Late Style

After his first stroke interrupted his work in 1985, Schnittke gradually resumed writing, starting with the Cello Concerto No. 1, completed in 1986. Despite his declining health, he continued to receive and fulfill an impressive number of commissions, completing more than fifty works in the last thirteen years of his life. Though keeping one foot in Mahlerian post-Romanticism (especially in the last two symphonies, No. 8 of 1994 and the unfinished No. 9 of 1997-1998), his writing grew more austere and transparent, recalling traits of Shostakovich’s late style, including ubiquitous fourths, note-against-note diaphony, chromatic solo passages, low registers, and slow tempos. His final chamber works, such as the Second Cello Sonata and the Third Violin Sonata (both from 1994), use a stripped-down, almost ghostly language, alternating between sarcasm and a detached, even disillusioned perspective. Schnittke described it as a “realm of shadows” in which he no longer perceived the “crystalline structure” of things, but only their “incessantly shifting, unstable forms.”¹³

In the mid-1980s Schnittke completed two major stage works. The first was the ballet Esquisses (1985), written for Nikolai Gogol’s 175th anniversary. Its multi-layered plot draws on several of the writer’s famous stories, including The Portrait, The Nose, and The Overcoat. The score incorporates movements from Schnittke’s 1980 Gogol Suite; and the opening and closing march was created jointly with Denisov, Gubaidulina, and Gennady Rozhdestvensky.

His second ballet, Peer Gynt (1986), was premiered in Hamburg in 1989 in a production with choreography by John Neumeier. Here, Schnittke transposed Henrik Ibsen’s play into a contemporary setting, the better to showcase, once again, his polystylistic flair. References range from the piano lounge to Hollywood to famous ballets by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. He parodied Grieg too, and flouted Ibsen by reconciling Peer Gynt and Solveig in a long and surprising epilogue accompanied by a wordless choir on tape. By the end, he had decided that the ballet itself was only a prelude to this final “circle,” subtitled “Beyond the World.”¹⁴ Via the Mephistophelian figure of Bøyg, Schnittke also draws a connection from Peer Gynt to Faust — two characters he described as “enigmatic.”

The most important products of Schnittke’s late period are undoubtedly the dramatic works from the early 1990s, including the opera Historia von D. Johann Fausten (another commission from the Hamburg Staatsoper, where it premiered in June 1995). The work is based on Johann Spies’s 1587 book and was described by Schnittke as a “negative passion.” In this opera, Schnittke presents his vision of the Faust legend as a moralistic, universal message about the primacy of spirit over life and death. He expresses this vision through his characteristic mix of musical styles, abandoning both chronological order and the usual hierarchy between “high” and “low” genres. Quotations from Stravinsky and Wagner, along with echoes of Renaissance music, jostle against waltzes, tangos, and rock — drawing even on advice from his son Andrei for writing for the electric guitar.

The long gestation of Historia von D. Johann Fausten, begun in 1983, with unmet objectives to finish in 1987 and 1990, reflects in part Schnittke’s declining health. At the same time, he was also engaged in other large projects, including Life with an Idiot (1990-1991, premiered in 1992 in Amsterdam) and Gesualdo (1994, premiered in May 1995 in Vienna).

In their violence and eroticism, these operas recall Shostakovich’s The Nose and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, while pushing further into the realm of the provocative, ironic, and absurd. The protagonist of Life with an Idiot, Vova, is a mute rapist and murderer who resembles Vladimir Lenin. The opera offers a bleak picture of Soviet society, reinforced by quotations from revolutionary and folk songs, delivered in a lethargic manner, as if their popular function were fading with the USSR’s collapse in December 1991, a few weeks before the opera’s premiere.

Gesualdo, too, is about a murderer. It explicitly references late sixteenth-century music both in its chromatic language (recalling the eccentric polyphony of the titular character) and in its use of forms such as the madrigal, caccia, recitative, and aria.

Conclusion

Schnittke’s polystylistic syncretism stems from the irreducible presence of distinct traditions within his work, as well as from their exaggeration. Religious rituals, Russian and Western musical traditions, popular music, self-quotation, and unrestrained intertextuality come together in a parodic universe that restores the emotional dimension of musical experience to the center of aesthetics.

Schnittke’s postmodernism embraced a diversity of styles and periods, though he certainly had a special affinity for Mahler and Shostakovich. At the same time, his work is driven by a constant tension between opposing forces: appearance and truth, past and present, near and far, banal and sophisticated, human and divine, pagan and religious.¹⁵

Rather than attempting to reconcile these opposing elements, Schnittke presented them side by side, using their confrontation as a dramatic force, whether in his stage works or his instrumental music. This perspective, manifested across Schnittke’s aesthetics, ethics, and politics, allowed him to offer a sharply insightful view of music’s place in history and of the conditions of musical creation in the twentieth century.

^{1. Quoted in Alexander Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke, London, Phaidon, 1996, p. 32. ↩}

^{2. Ibid. ↩}

^{3. Alfred Schnittke, “On Film and Film Music (1972, 1984, 1989),” trans. John Goodliffe, in Alexander Ivashkin (ed.), A Schnittke Reader, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 51. ↩}

^{4. See Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke, p. 85. ↩}

^{5. Schnittke used monograms frequently, even more than Shostakovich. To cite only three examples, the Viola Concerto (1985) takes its main motif from the name of the dedicatee (the viola player Yuri Bashmet), as does the solo cello work Klingende Buchstaben (Sounding Letters, 1988, dedicated to the cellist Alexander Ivashkin) and the Violin Concerto No. 4 (1984, dedicated to Gidon Kremer). The latter also incorporates the names of Arvo Pärt, Gubaidulina, Denisov, and Schnittke himself. ↩}

^{6. Numerous works from this period, such as the Suite in the Old Style (1971-1972) for violin and piano, derive directly from these film scores. ↩}

^{7. Frans Lemaire, Le destin russe et la musique, Paris, Fayard, 2005, p. 450. ↩}

^{8. Similarly, in one passage of the finale of the Fourth Violin Concerto, the orchestra deliberately drowns out the violin soloist, who carries on with consummate virtuosity but no sound. ↩}

^{9. Alfred Schnittke, “On Concerto Grosso No. 1 (late 1970s),” trans. John Goodliffe, in Ivashkin (ed.), A Schnittke Reader, p. 45. ↩}

^{10. Idem, “Polystylistic Tendencies in Modern Music (c. 1971),” trans. John Goodliffe, in Ivashkin (ed.), A Schnittke Reader, 90. ↩}

^{11. Respectively for flute, clarinet, three violins, viola, cello, bass, organ, and percussion (1976); for two violins (1976); for six instruments (1980); for two violins and ensemble (this one, titled Moz-Art à la Haydn [1977], is the most famous and frequently performed); and for eight flutes and harp (Moz-Art à la Mozart, 1990). ↩}

^{12. Schnittke wrote many tangos: in the First Symphony (1972), the scores for the films Agony (1974/1981) and The Master and Margarita (1991-1994), the Polyphonic Tango* (1979) for winds, brass, percussion, piano, and strings, the opera Life with an Idiot (1991), etc. ↩}

^{13. Quoted by Seth Brodsky at https://www.allmusic.com/composition/peer-gynt-ballet-in-3-acts-mc0002447897 (accessed December 2016). ↩}

^{14. Schnittke discussed this work (and the epilogue) with Alexander Ivashkin in A Schnittke Reader, p. 34-37. A version for cello and piano (and pre-recorded chorus) was realized in 1993. ↩}

^{15. These binary pairs are elaborated especially by Seth Brodsky in the opening of his commentary on Klingende Buchstaben for solo cello, at https://www.allmusic.com/composition/sounding-letters-klingende-buchstaben-for-cello-solo-mc0002377024 (accessed December 2016). ↩}