The Sandstone Blog
Alfred Schnittke
A hugely enthusiastic audience listened to Alfred Schnittke’s oratorio ‘Nagasaki’ at the London proms a few nights ago. If they were of a list ticking turn of mind, as many formal music critics seem to be when it comes to Schnittke, they might have noted the many composer influences within the piece, Bartok, Stravinsky, Prokofiev to name a few. At twenty four Schnittke had already begun the system that would be labelled polystylism. The composer would later describe the piece as naïve, but that was reference as much to the State approved text as to his arrangements. He would be cautious with texts ever after.
My first exposure to Schnittke’s work was about twelve years ago when I took a flyer on a recording of the Fourth Symphony. I must have listened eight or nine times before it opened out. A single movement about three quarters of an hour in duration, and very much a single unit, it is nourished by music from the traditions of Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christianity, and from Judaism. This is to say it is nourished by the religious and spiritual traditions he grew up surrounded by but not participating in. Resources assembled include a full symphony orchestra augmented with piano, celesta and harpsichord, full choir with tenor and countertenor soloists.
Soon I was collecting recordings of Schnittke’s music wherever I could lay hands on them until, a few years later I attended a stunning performance of the Fourth at Glasgow Concert Hall where the performers easily outnumbered the audience.
The full body of Schnittke’s work is massive and includes nine symphonies (and another numbered 0), six concerti grossi, four concertos for violin, three for piano, one of them for four hands, two for cello and three for viola, several huge choir pieces including ‘Minnesang’, the score of which runs across several sheets. Of more intimate music there are four string quartets and a huge list of other chamber music, much of it for cello and/or piano. He scored many Russian films.
Alfred Schnittke’s life is now over, his dates are 1934 – 1998. His sense of identity, it seems clear, was confused and this last point, I think, was an important factor in both the life and the work. His father was Estonian-German-Jewish (or at least of Jewish background). His mother was Volga German - Catholic (or at least of Catholic background). It does not seem remotely possible that there was no family loss to the Holocaust on his father’s side, or severe compromise on his mother’s.
Both parents were atheist so baby Alfred was neither baptised nor formally entered into any faith system, nor raised, nor educated, within such a community. Although a musical prodigy he was not exposed to the great European tradition of Classical music until his father served as a journalist in Vienna for two years. There he heard Wagner, Beethoven and Strauss for the first time, then came the explosion.
In 1953 he entered the Moscow Conservatoire as a student, finally leaving in 1972 having continued in the institution for ten years as a lecturer. In 1961 he married Irina, a young pianist who, if pictures taken in later life are anything to go by, must have been quite a honey. He also befriended a brilliant cellist named Alexander Ivashkin. These two relationships proved to be permanent and would sustain him through years that would be testing in ways he could never have guessed.
While at the Conservatoire Alfred Schnittke worked on many compositions and gradually fell out of any good favour he might have held with the Soviet authorities. His compositions at that time were deeply spiritual as he worked his way through a certain amount of religious confusion into a Catholicism that he somehow managed to reconcile with a continuing Orthodox confession. On the surface it looks like the confusion continued, but there are perhaps other ways to look at it. Alfred Schnittke’s instincts were integrative.
From then and for many years into the future his calls and mail were monitored and most of his work was suppressed. In a post-glasnost interview he described his name as having been ‘undesirable for some, and odious for others’.
Two years after Schnittke left the Conservatoire, and displaying no small amount of courage, Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the Russian State Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance of the First Symphony, an immensely theatrical agglomeration of borrowings and parodies from all kinds of predecessor music. It was chaotic, anarchic, and wild, and not only made his reputation but placed him in a position of leadership.
The following year he composed his Requiem, superficially to decorate a drama with suitable new music, but in fact an explicitly Catholic work which he intended to close with the Ave Maria. Instead he was obliged to instruct the choir to simply hum the tune. Conductors now have their choice of ending.
None of this was going to improve his standing in Brezhnev’s Russia and my heart, and profound admiration go out to an artist who, under these circumstances can say, ‘composing is always a moral act, always independent of the composer’s intentions’. The sub-texts are obvious, aside from the suppression of the self, independence from the State is imperative. In 1980 he was banned from travelling outwith Russia. In these years he made his living by writing scores for films.
At the same time he composed according to that difficult moral compass, as multifarious with social ideas and religious traditions as he was with musical styles. The strain especially, I suspect, of writing the Fourth Symphony while making a living by other composition was simply too much and the following year he suffered his first stroke. He descended into a coma and, at one point, was pronounced clinically dead. By some miracle he survived and, even more amazingly, produced more than half of his lifetime’s work in the mere thirteen years that were remaining to him.
Between 1985 and 1998 there would be five strokes in all, each event debilitating him still further, eventually taking his life. The stroke in 1994 left him unable to speak and at some point he lost the use of his right arm. The losses went on until he lay helpless in bed with only a slight movement in his left arm. Under these circumstances he sketched out the essentials of his Ninth Symphony which Irina eventually allowed another Russian composer, Alexander Raskatov, to interpret and complete.
Also under these circumstances the borrowing, or polystylism, continued. When he had recovered enough, in 1985, to return home and resume work he found his notes for the First Cello Concerto on his desk. He had forgotten they existed but went on to complete what, for me, is the most moving of his works. The final movement (largo) he said came to him as a gift. ‘Suddenly I was given this finale from somewhere, and I have just written it down’. If you listen carefully you can hear an ambulance siren mimicked in the orchestration, or so I believe. Much earlier he had mimicked his two tone doorbell in the Concerto for Piano and Strings, so it’s not a daft idea.
About this point the work changed direction with significance that I am sure has not yet been fully understood. From the massive scale and fullness of the first five symphonies (Five is also a Concerto Grosso for violin, oboe, harpsichord and orchestra, imagine the complexity) he stripped the soundscape of his symphonies down to relatively few instruments with significant solo parts. Less tuneful than anything that had gone before they are as bleak as a wind-swept island.
When I first heard Six and Seven, I admit, they were mysteries to me, more deeply so even than the Fourth. Time and repeated listening have changed that. What is different is that the element of allegory is missing. Six and Seven exist for themselves, true to themselves (and the musics they draw on) alone, and not to a religious, national or ideological narrative. Eight is more accessible, but is probably my least favourite, since it does seem to retreat into an almost childish sub-Christian metaphor with doom laden, giant, fateful steps eventually turning into a harp accompanied ascent to heaven. I hope I have misinterpreted it.
In 1991 he and Irina moved to Hamburg and it was there that he died. Alexander Ivashkin and Irina, between them, received many dedications to the compositions and were true to the end. To this day they are the principal flame carriers but, I would say, the flame is now beginning to spread more than a little itself, albeit against the windy complaints of many technical music critics.
Alfred Schnittke did not merely borrow and buckle together, nor did he make any attempt to hammer disparate cultural elements into some kind of new total-culture or ‘way’. Instead he built pristine, beautiful sound objects using the materials that history had bequeathed him. To put it another way, he worked with the materials to hand, as all great artists must. At this point, it is I who turn to allegory.
By these means his early symphonies were like the new Europe that he must have hoped was coming, the Europe where the many elements of his parents’ backgrounds, and his own, could live together without war or pogrom, or totalitarian pressure; various, without the pretence that all things can be one thing but that many new ‘one things’ can be created. The first five symphonies give us examples of how it can be done in the field of music at least.
The remaining symphonies record an altogether different and more personal journey as does much of the chamber music. It is the journey that begins at the outskirts of formal religion when striving for the forever-just-out-of-reach ends. Alfred Schnittke had reason to think in these ways. He had lived through Russia’s cultural constraint and inwardness into a new and more open relationship with the West, travelling widely across Europe and to America before he was finally incapacitated.
Perhaps it was fortunate that the work ended when it did, before the rise of extreme nationalism in Russia, before the open marriage of State and gangsterism, before the ascendancy of its present vile government and murderous FSB, before the re-annexing of independent nations. No, Schnittke’s opponent was something else altogether, the mind control that exists in all of life’s disciplines, not least the religious, the relentless drive of the machine into uniformity.
In a 1982 interview with the American author Harlow Robinson he said this: ‘Purism is a dangerous thing. It is an arrogant opposition to the natural pluralism of the world. Everything exists under the sun, and to deny that in music is wrong.’ As in music so in all things.
You might care to visit these web sites:-
Alfred Schnittke Archive, University of London: http://bit.ly/12YRkC
The Schirmer page on Alfred Schnittke: http://bit.ly/Rl0oc
The Naxos page on Alfred Schnittke: http://bit.ly/2UCaBz
Boosey & Hawkes Snapshot: http://bit.ly/3Y76pn
BBC Report on Schnittke’s death: http://bit.ly/leIiL
Alexander Ivashkin: http://www.alexanderivashkin.com