Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) Piano Quintet String Trio Stille Musik Fuga Klingende Buchstaben Born in Engels on 24th November 1934, to parents of...
Alfred Schnittke
(1934-1998)
Piano Quintet String
Trio Stille Musik Fuga Klingende Buchstaben
Born in Engels on 24th November 1934, to parents of German-Jewish
origin, Alfred Schnittke spent his early years in Vienna, where he received his
earliest musical instruction. Resident in Moscow from 1946, he studied at the
October Revolution Music Academy, and at the Moscow Conservatory, with Yevgeny
Golubev and Nikolay Rakov, from 1948 to 1953: becoming a teacher of
instrumentation there for ten years from 1962. He was elected a member of the
Federation of Composers in 1961. Film scores formed the backbone of his musical
undertakings during the 1960s and early 1970s, and he became a member of the
Federation of Cinematographers in 1970. From 1980, he was a guest teacher at
the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna. He was a member of
the Akademie der Kunst of the former German Democratic Republic, and of the
Bayerische Akademie der Schonen Kunste. He was awarded the State Prize of the
RSFSR in 1986. A series of strokes from 1985 coincided with the increasing
dissemination of his work in Western Europe, where he came to be seen as the
true successor to Shostakovich. Resident in Hamburg from 1990, he died on 3rd
August 1998.
Schnittke's music falls into several discernible phases. After a
formative period where Shostakovich vied for influence with Prokofiev,
Stravinsky and Hindemith, the greater availability of new music at the turn of
the 1960s led to a time of increasing
Experimentation, as first serial techniques, latterly collage and
aleatoric devices were incorporated into the composer's technical armoury. The
stylistic melting-pot that is the First Symphony gave way, in the
mid-1970s, to a more intuitive composition, with quotation and allusion now
integral to what Schnittke termed his 'polystylistic' mode of expression. In
the early 1990s, the effects of prolonged ill-health brought about a final
period in which the expressive focus becomes narrower and starker; the music
seeming to exist, like the composer himself, almost at a point of no return.
Written in 1953, the Fugue is among the adolescent composer's
earliest surviving efforts, bearing witness to studies well learnt and, given
the enforced insularity of musical life at the close of Stalin's reign, an
engaging, if unformed, combination of old and new. The forthright subject is
naturally in the mould of Bach' s unaccompanied works, but with Shostakovich's
Mussorgskian manner strongly in evidence. The pizzicato presentation of the subject
(2'08") adds a malevolent undercurrent which Schnittke would intensify in
his mature work.
One of the performers to have become most associated with Schnittke in
his later years is the cellist Alexander Ivashkin, now resident in the United
Kingdom and author of the only book-length study in English of the composer
(Phaidon Press, 1996). Klingende Buchstaben (Sounding Letters) was a
tribute to Ivashkin on his fortieth birthday in 1988. Opening with a monogram
deriving from the cellist's first name -A-E-A-D-E- what begins as a mournful
soliloquy, becomes inceasingly impassioned. A central climax, with flailing
glissandi, is reached, after which (2'21") the music returns to its brooding
opening depths; finally ascending out of earshot.
Schnittke's Piano Quintet is in many respects the defining work
of his career. Begun in 1972, in the wake of his mother's death and, perhaps,
as a reaction to the titanic conflict with the musical past and present that
forms the basis of the vast First Symphony (1969-72), the work took
Schnittke longer to complete than any other. Many sketches were tried and
rejected in the process of composition, some of which went into the Requiem which
Schnittke wrote during 1972-4, and used clandestinely as the music for a
production of Schiller's Don Carlos by Moscow's Mossovet Theatre in
1975. Shostakovich died in August that year, and it is not impossible that the
quintet became a double homage, stylistically indebted as it is to the last
three string quartets of the older composer. Schnittke's orchestration of the
work in 1978, as In Memoriam, consolidates the feeling that this is in
essence an instrumental requiem.
In its haze of never-quite-literal allusions, moreover, the quintet would
remain the stylistic template for his music over the next fifteen years. A
fragile piano solo, with an ominous Schubertian trill in the left hand, lauches
the opening Moderato, before the strings enter (1'34") in
confirmation of the frozen mood. Their narrow intervallic range lends a
claustrophobic air as tension gradually mounts, the piano remaining detached
with a stark repeated-note gesture. Its more conciliatory rejoinder prepares
for the second movement. Marked In Tempo di Valse, this opens
unexpectedly with a bittersweet waltz idea, the strings becoming entangled in
dense canonic strands of sound which quickly transform the music into a dance
of death. Descending trills (from 1'56") offer a vivid proximity of this
work to the Thirteenth Quartet of Shostakovich. The waltz motion
resumes, only to collapse in on itself even more completely. The music moves
pensively into the third movement, Andante, a grieving threnody for
strings, offset by passive gestures from the piano, which maintain a tenuous
tonal outline. Stabbing string dischords (3'02") alternate with a dour
cello solo, before (4'51") a piano cadence pointedly recalls
Shostakovich's Piano Quintet. The sound dissolves, leaving a quiet
depressing of the pedals to introduce the fourth movement. Marked Lento, this
returns to the mood and textures of the opening movement. A series of stark
cadential phrases from solo strings contrast with impassioned statements for
the ensemble. Eventually (3'19") the music freezes into a prolonged
discord, which fades out into the Finale, Moderato pastorale, and the
strongest contrast imaginable - an undulating motion, high in the piano, of an
almost musical-box whimsicality. This appears fourteen times as the basis for
an unlikely passacaglia, during which the strings review ideas from earlier in
the work, as gradually a stable, even affirmative tonal feel comes into focus
(2'47"). The piano remains on its own at the close, now repeating its
refrain as a benediction on that which came before.
Written in April 1979
and dedicated to the memory of Michail Druskin, the St Petersburg musicologist
and champion of new music, Stille Musik (Silent music) is typical of the
short pieces for strings - singly, in combination and with piano - found
throughout Schnittke's maturity. Equally typical is the way in which the
composer subverts a simple three-part structure so that the audible form
becomes anything but straightforward. The piece starts out fitfully, its
progress toward any tonal or melodic definition interspersed with pizzicato
gestures and solo lines which emerge fleetingly from the texture. After a brief
central climax (3'19"), the music solidifies into a tenuous band of sound,
rich in microtonal inflections, before fading out of earshot.
Completed in the
spring of 1985, as a commission from the Alban Berg Society of Vienna to
commemorate both the centenary of that composer's birth, and the fiftieth
anniversary of his death, the String Trio is Schnittke's homage to the
city where, as a piano student, he spent a short but vital stage of his
formative years. Echoes of Schubert and Mahler, as well as Berg, resonate
through the intense and often tortured progress of this two-movement work. A
melodic strain emerges immediately in the opening Moderato, the
distinctive five-note idea forming the basis for much that follows. Violent
convulsions (4'18") recall a similar passage in the Second Quartet (1980)
and indeed the music's progress, through a sequence of blunted cadences which
never quite resolve, is typical of Schnittke's music from the 1980s as a whole.
Further forceful outbursts follow, the primary melodic idea pounded at
unceasingly but with evident futility. It closes the movement more in sorrow
than in despair (12'25"). The proceeding Adagio does not develop or
especially intensify the material already heard, as prolong the sensation of
creative amnesia; the composer striving for some semblance of formal logic,
against overwhelming creative and emotional odds. Again a sequence of
convulsions and strivings for a recognizable coherence: again the music closes
in on itself (10'24"), as sound merges regretfully but inevitably into
silence. Schnittke's Vienna remains as a haunting, haunted memory.
Richard Whitehouse
Performers on this
recording are:
Piano Quintet
Irina Schnittke, piano
Mark Lubotsky, violin
Dimity Hall, violin
Irina Morozova, viola
Julian Smiles, cello
String Trio
Mark Luhotsky, violin
Theodore Kuchar, viola
Alexander lvashkill, cello