Alfred Schnittke

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfred Garrievich Schnittke was born on the 24th of November 1934 in Engels, a city in the Volga German ASSR of the Russian SFSR, to parents who straddled two worlds. His father was Jewish, born in Frankfurt, and had moved to the Soviet Union in 1927. His mother was a Volga German. His paternal grandmother was a philologist and editor of German-language literature. Schnittke came from a family of words and translation, of people who lived between languages and cultures. That inheritance would shape everything.

  At twelve years old, he began his musical education not in Moscow but in Vienna, where his father had been posted. It was an encounter that rewired him permanently. He would later write: "I felt every moment there to be a link of the historical chain: all was multi-dimensional; the past represented a world of ever-present ghosts, and I was not a barbarian without any connections, but the conscious bearer of the task in my life." Mozart and Schubert became his reference points, not Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff.

  He went on to become one of the most performed and recorded composers of late 20th-century classical music. Musicologist Ivan Moody described him as a composer who was concerned "to depict the moral and spiritual struggles of contemporary man in depth and detail." But the path to that achievement ran through political suspicion, near-death, and a musical revolution that alarmed the Soviet state. What did Schnittke actually do to upset the authorities? What did it mean to write music in the Soviet Union while refusing to be a Soviet composer? And what happened to his final symphony, the one he could barely write at all?

• 2. The Vienna Revelation

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  In 1946, twelve-year-old Schnittke arrived in Vienna and heard something he could not unhear. His biographer Alexander Ivashkin wrote that it was in Vienna where Schnittke "fell in love with music which is part of life, part of history and culture, part of the past which is still alive." The city gave him, in Ivashkin's words, "a certain spiritual experience and discipline for his future professional activities."

  The reference point he took away was essentially Classical, rooted in Mozart and Schubert. But Ivashkin noted it was "never too blatant." Schnittke didn't simply imitate the Viennese masters. He absorbed their sense that music could carry the weight of history, that a piece of sound could be haunted by what came before it.

  The family returned to Moscow in 1948. Schnittke enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory, where his composition teachers included Evgeny Golubev and where he studied orchestration with Nikolai Rakov. By 1961 he had completed his graduate work in composition. He then taught at the Conservatory from 1962 to 1972. The institution gave him structure and colleagues. It also placed him directly under the gaze of Soviet cultural authorities, who would not always approve of the directions he chose to take.

• 3. Polystylism and the Break with Rules

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  After the Italian composer Luigi Nono visited the USSR, Schnittke took up serial technique, a rigorous method of organizing pitch that had dominated Western avant-garde music. He used it in works such as the Music for Piano and Chamber Orchestra of 1964. But he quickly grew dissatisfied. He called the approach the "puberty rites of serial self-denial."

  What he invented instead he called polystylism. The idea was to juxtapose and combine music from different styles, different eras, different traditions, placing them side by side or layering them on top of one another. He once stated his goal plainly: "to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my neck in doing so."

  His first concert work in the polystylistic mode was the second violin sonata, Quasi una sonata, composed in 1967-1968. Characteristically, elements of that sonata had already appeared in his score for the 1968 animation short The Glass Harmonica, a film by Aleksandr Askoldov. His film work was a laboratory. For Askoldov's Commissar, he combined European, ethnic Russian, and Jewish musical patterns, weaving three distinct traditions into a single score. Over roughly thirty years, he produced nearly seventy film scores in total, earning his living through that work after leaving the Conservatory in 1972.

  The polystylistic technique reached a kind of summit in the First Symphony, composed between 1969 and 1972. That work proved too much for Soviet authorities. The Composers' Union effectively banned it. When Schnittke abstained from a Composers' Union vote in 1980, he was banned from travelling outside the USSR.

• 4. Faith, Grief, and the Piano Quintet

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  Schnittke's mother, Maria Iosifovna Schnittke, died in 1972. In response, he began work on the Piano Quintet, writing it in her memory. The piece took years; he completed it in 1976. He later orchestrated it and gave it the title In Memoriam.

  During the composition of the Quintet, something else began to shift. He started seeking solace in Catholicism. On the 18th of June 1983, he converted. His beliefs in predestination and mysticism, already deeply held, began to mark his music more explicitly.

  The 1980s brought a wave of works with spiritual and Christian themes. The Faust Cantata appeared in 1983; he later incorporated it into his opera Historia von D. Johann Fausten. The Concerto for Mixed Chorus was completed in 1984-1985, and the Penitential Psalms followed in 1988. Both were unaccompanied choral works. The Fourth Symphony of 1984 also contained Christian allusions, as did other pieces from the period.

  The First Concerto Grosso of 1977 had already moved his reputation outside the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, that reach widened further, partly through the work of Soviet emigre artists who championed his music abroad: the violinists Gidon Kremer and Mark Lubotsky, the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, and the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky.

• 5. Strokes and the Late Style

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  On the 21st of July 1985, Schnittke suffered a stroke that left him in a coma. He was declared clinically dead on several occasions. He recovered and kept composing. The productivity of the mid-1980s continued despite his condition: the Viola Concerto appeared in 1985, the First Cello Concerto in 1985-1986, and the ballet Peer Gynt was completed between 1985 and 1987.

  But as his health continued to deteriorate, the music changed. The extroversion of polystylism gave way to something more withdrawn and bleak. Schnittke scholars, including Gerard McBurney, have argued that these late works will ultimately prove the most influential part of his output. The Fourth Quartet of 1989, and the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Symphonies, completed in 1992, 1993, and 1994, respectively, belong to this period.

  A stroke in 1994 left him almost completely paralysed. He largely stopped composing. In 1990 he had already left the Soviet Union and settled in Hamburg, Germany. He managed to complete some short works in 1997. He also completed a Ninth Symphony, writing the score with great difficulty using his left hand. The manuscript was nearly unreadable.

  In 1990, Schnittke left the Soviet Union for Hamburg, where he would spend his final years.

• 6. The Ninth Symphony's Strange Afterlife

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  The Ninth Symphony received its premiere on the 19th of June 1998 in Moscow. The version performed that night had been deciphered and also arranged by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who conducted it. Schnittke heard a tape of the performance. He indicated he wanted the work withdrawn.

  He died on the 3rd of August 1998, in Hamburg, at the age of 63. He was buried with state honors at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

  After his death, others took on the task of making the Ninth playable. Nikolai Korndorf began work on a new decipherment but died before finishing. Alexander Raskatov continued and completed the effort. In Raskatov's version, the three orchestral movements of Schnittke's symphony may be followed by a choral fourth movement that is Raskatov's own composition, titled Nunc Dimittis, dedicated in memoriam to Alfred Schnittke. That version premiered in Dresden, Germany, on the 16th of June 2007. A separate version by Andrei Boreyko also exists. The symphony that Schnittke wanted withdrawn has, in the end, been heard in more than one form he never approved.