Alfred Garrievich Schnittke (November 24, 1934 – August 3, 1998) was a Russian composer of Jewish-German descent, who was among the most performed and recorded composers of late 20th-century classical music. Schnittke was born on November 24, 1934, at Engels in the Volga-German Republic of the Russian SFSR. Schnittke’s father, Harry Maximilian Schnittke (1914–1975), was Jewish and born in Frankfurt. He moved to the Soviet Union in 1927 and worked as a journalist and translator from the Russian language into German. His mother, Maria Iosifovna Schnittke (née Vogel, 1910–1972), was a Volga German born in Russia. Schnittke’s paternal grandmother, Tea Abramovna Katz (1889–1970), was a philologist, translator, and editor of German-language literature.
Alfred began his musical education in 1946 in Vienna, where his father had been posted. In 1948, the family moved to Moscow. Schnittke completed his graduate work in composition at the Moscow Conservatory in 1961 and taught there from 1962 to 1972. Evgeny Golubev was one of his composition teachers. Thereafter, he earned his living chiefly by composing film scores, producing nearly 70 scores in 30 years. Schnittke’s early music shows the strong influence of Dmitri Shostakovich, but after the visit of the Italian composer Luigi Nono to the USSR, he took up the serial technique in works such as Music for Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1964). He created a new style which has been called “polystylism”,where he juxtaposed and combined music of various styles past and present. His first concert work to use the polystylistic technique was the second violin sonata, Quasi una sonata (1967–1968).
Schnittke experimented with techniques in his film work, as shown by much of the sonata appearing first in his score for the 1968 animation short The Glass Harmonica. He wrote the music for Aleksandr Askoldov’s Commissar, combining and juxtaposing European, ethnic Russian and Jewish musical patterns. He continued to develop the polystylistic technique in works such as the epic First Symphony (1969–1972) Other works were more stylistically unified, such as his Piano Quintet (1972–1976, later orchestrated and retitled as In Memoriam…), written in memory of his mother, who had died in 1972; First Concerto Grosso (1977); and the Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra (1979).
In the 1980s, Schnittke’s music began to become more widely known abroad, thanks in part to the work of émigré Soviet artists such as the violinists Gidon Kremer and Mark Lubotsky, the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, and also by the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky. Despite constant illness, he produced a large amount of music, including important works such as the Second String Quartet (1980); the Third Symphony (1981); Third String Quartet (1983); the Faust Cantata (1983), which he later incorporated in his opera Historia von D. Johann Fausten.
After his mother’s death in 1972, he began to seek solace in Catholicism; he converted on June 18, 1983. This period was also marked by a turn in Schnittke and his music to Christian themes, exemplified in his deeply spiritual unaccompanied choral works, and the Penitential Psalms (1988), and alluded to in various others works, including the Fourth Symphony (1984); the Concerto for Mixed Chorus (1984–1985); the String Trio (1985); Viola Concerto(1985); First Cello Concerto (1985–1986); the ballet Peer Gynt (1985–1987); the Fifth Symphony, the last of which is also known as the Fourth Concerto Grosso (1988); and The Penitential Psalms (1988)
Schnittke and his music were often viewed suspiciously by the Soviet bureaucracy. His First Symphony was effectively banned by the Composers’ Union. After he abstained from a Composers’ Union vote in 1980, he was banned from travelling outside the USSR. On July 21, 1985, Schnittke suffered a stroke that left him in a coma. He was declared clinically dead on several occasions, but recovered and continued to compose. In 1990, Schnittke left the Soviet Union and settled in Hamburg, Germany.
As his health deteriorated from the late 1980s, Schnittke started to abandon much of the extroversion of his earlier polystylism and retreated into a more withdrawn, bleak style, quite accessible to the lay listener. The Fourth Quartet (1989) and Sixth (1992), Seventh (1993) and Eighth (1994) symphonies are good examples of this. Some Schnittke scholars, such as Gerard McBurney, have argued that it is the late works that will ultimately be the most influential parts of Schnittke’s output. After a stroke in 1994 left him almost completely paralysed, Schnittke largely ceased to compose. He did complete some short works in 1997 and also a Ninth Symphony; its score was almost unreadable because he had written it with great difficulty with his left hand due to his strokes.
The Ninth Symphony was first performed on June 19, 1998, in Moscow in a version deciphered – but also ‘arranged’ – by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who conducted the premiere. After hearing a tape of the performance, Schnittke indicated he wanted it withdrawn. His health remained poor, however. He suffered several more strokes before his death on August 3, 1998, in Hamburg, Germany, at the age of 63. He was buried, with state honors, at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. After he died, though, others worked to decipher the Ninth Symphony score. Nikolai Korndorf died before he could complete the task, which was continued and completed by Alexander Raskatov. In Raskatov’s version, the three orchestral movements of Schnittke’s symphony may be followed by a choral fourth, which is Raskatov’s own Nunc Dimittis (in memoriam Alfred Schnittke). This version was premiered in Dresden, Germany, on June 16, 2007. Andrei Boreyko also has a version of the symphony.
My CD collection includes the following works by Alfred Schnittke:
Concerto for Oboe, Harp, and String Orchestra (1971).
Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra (1979).
Concerto Grosso No. 1 for Two Violins, Cembalo, Piano, and Strings (1977).
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