The Routledge Handbook to the Music of Alfred Schnittke

Gavin Dixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000512205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Routledge Handbook to the Music of Alfred Schnittke is a comprehensive study of the work of one of the most important Russian composers of the late 20th century. Each piece is discussed in detail, with particular attention to the composer's groundbreaking polystylism, as well as his unique approach to musical symbolism and his deep engagement with Christian themes.

This is the first publication to look at Schnittke's output in its entirety, and for most works it represents either the first ever published analysis or the first in a language other than Russian. The volume presents new research from the Ivashkin-Schnittke Archive at Goldsmiths, University of London and the collection of Schnittke's compositional sketches at the Julliard Library in New York. It also draws on the substantial research on Schnittke's music published in the Russian language. Including a work list and bibliography of primary and secondary sources, this is an essential reference for all those interested in Russian music, 20th-century music and performance studies.

1ERAS AND TECHNIQUES

DOI: 10.4324/9780429274046-1

Student works 1953–1962

Schnittke's earliest surviving works date from his years at the Moscow Conservatory where he studied as an undergraduate student from 1953 to 1958 and as a postgraduate student from 1958 to 1961. Throughout these years, Schnittke studied under the composer Evgeny Golubev (1910–1988), and his student works document a rigorous training programme, covering all major instrumental and vocal genres.

By 1953, Schnittke was already a proficient pianist, and his early exposure to the Russian late-Romantic piano school, particularly Rachmaninov, is evident from his earliest works. He had also studied harmony and counterpoint privately with Iosif Ryzhkin since 1950 (Ivashkin 1996, 44–45). Golubev agreed to teach Schnittke on the strength of his Poème for Piano and Orchestra, a single-movement work, written under Ryzhkin's supervision, but only completed in piano score. The music is clearly reminiscent of Rachmaninov, with the piano textures of the main theme and contrasting middle section modelled on those of Rachmaninov's Prelude in C♯ minor, op. 3, no. 2.

Schnittke remembered Golubev as a musical conservative: ‘In terms of harmony, he, unfortunately, could not help me at all, because his own interests ended in Romantic-era major and minor, with supplementary major and minor chords, and some extended dominants’ (Shulgin 2004, 14). But a constructive tension arose between teacher and pupil, with Golubev stressing the value of smooth transitions and a natural, ‘narrative’ flow, while Schnittke's tendency was towards stark contrasts and rhythmical regularity (Ivashkin 1996, 58–60).

Golubev asked Schnittke to write in a broad range of genres, and his student works gradually expanded in scale from piano works to solo songs and chamber works 1953–1955, to choral then orchestral works 1955–1958, culminating in his graduation piece, Nagasaki, a full-scale cantata (1958). Schnittke entered the Conservatory in the year of Stalin's death, and his earliest works demonstrate a conformity to the stylistic conventions of the time. Myaskovsky and Kabalevsky are clear models, especially in Schnittke's piano writing, in the Six Preludes (1953–1954) and the piano part to the Violin Sonata No. 0 (1954–1955). From Kabalevsky, the E minor Prelude takes the triadic harmonies alternating with downbeat diatonic dissonances. In the D minor Prelude, Schnittke alternates major harmonies with their tonic minor, another idea found in Kabalevsky, for example in the Prelude in C major, op. 38, no. 1.

Myaskovsky was a more direct influence, as Golubev himself had studied with him. During classes with Golubev, Schnittke played in four-hand arrangements of Myaskovsky's symphonies (Kholopova & Chigareva 1990, 22). Myaskovsky's piano writing was particularly influential on Schnittke's early work, a lyrical and Romantic style, but more direct and less florid than Rachmaninov. The piano part for Schnittke's Violin Sonata No. 0 employs textures derived from Myaskovsky's ‘Barcarolle-Sonatina’ from his Piano Sonata No. 8 (Vashchenko 2016, 97). The Myaskovsky sonatas also influence the Six Piano Preludes. The D minor and B minor Preludes both employ simultaneous chromatic mirroring between treble and bass, a textural device that Schnittke would return to in his orchestral music of the 1980s, but which here looks back to Myaskovsky, for example his Piano Sonata No. 4, movement III. Schnittke's A♭ major Prelude is modelled even more closely on Myaskovsky's Piano Sonata No. 1, movement II (see Example 1.1). In both cases, the quiet lyrical opening theme is presented over widely arpeggiated left-hand harmonies, accompanied by a more static alto voice, and then reprised in octaves.

Example 1.1 (a) Myaskovsky Piano Sonata No. 1, op. 6, movement II, bars 1–10; (b) Schnittke Six Preludes (1953–1954): Prelude in A♭, bars 1–20

Music from outside the officially endorsed curriculum was difficult to access in the early 1950s, but opportunities gradually increased later in the decade. Schnittke also attended the composition class of Vissarion Shebalin (1902–1963), who made great efforts to introduce students to forbidden Western music – Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartók, Schoenberg. In addition, the Students' Association (Scientific Student Society – Nauchnoe Studencheskoe Obshchestvo), under the energetic leadership of Edison Denisov, regularly met to hear recordings of new music. Stravinsky's Russian-period ballets figured prominently, as did wartime works by Shostakovich, still censured following the Zhdanov denunciations. The Symphonies Nos. 8 and 9, which had been singled out for criticism in the first draft of the 10 February 1948 Resolution on Music of the Central Committee (Bolshevik) and officially proscribed four days later (Fay 2000, 157, 162), were performed at the Students' Association in four-hand piano arrangements (Ivashkin 1996, 56). As Schnittke recalled: ‘for a long time I was tormented by the covert logic of Shostakovich’s voice leading. It seemed that a lot of time passed until I was able to understand it. Also interesting, but just as unclear, was Stravinsky's linearity, but it is obvious that just my independent contact with the music of these luminaries … was a necessary stage in the development of my compositional skills' (Shulgin 2004, 14).

As Schnittke's studies moved to orchestral forms, he was increasingly influenced by the contemporaneous works of Shostakovich. The premieres of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 and Violin Concerto No. 1, in 1953 and 1955, respectively, made a significant impact on the way that Schnittke understood the orchestra. In his Symphony No. 0 (1956–1957), the passacaglia third movement is modelled on the third movement of the Shostakovich concerto. The symphonic scope of Schnittke's early concertos also reflects the influence of Shostakovich, and the first violin concertos of both composers are effectively symphonies for violin and orchestra (Ivashkin, preface to Collected Works Edition, Series III, Volume 5a). Distinctive features of Shostakovich's orchestration also appear in Schnittke's early scores, such as the xylophone doubling the melody in the coda of the first movement of the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1960).

In 1993, Schnittke drew up a list of his ‘early’ compositions, which formed the basis of the ‘Early and Unfinished Works’ appendix to the works list compiled by Alexander Ivashkin (Ivashkin 1996, 223–24). The only two student works not consigned to the juvenilia list were the concertos, for violin (1957, rev. 1962) and piano (1960). The two concertos are also the most stylistically advanced of his early works, with 20th-century innovations in harmony and orchestration applied to the otherwise traditional structuring and expression. The harmonic language of the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra provoked heated debate at a meeting of the Composers' Union in 1961 (Kholopova & Chigareva 1990, 11), but such harmonic explorations were becoming an increasingly prominent feature of Schnittke's music in his first years of postgraduate study. A collection of four works for violin and piano, also written in 1960, show a similarly experimental approach. One movement (the second in the manuscript copy) is notated without key signature, but hovers around a modal E minor. The final movement is in a similarly ambiguous D minor, with repeated diatonic dissonances in the piano part, and prominent movement in parallel fifths – another borrowing from recent Shostakovich (see Example 1.10).

Most of Schnittke's postgraduate works were large-scale projects to official commissions. Schnittke described these years as a ‘time of unsuccessful attempts to enter into friendly relations with the Union of Composers’ (Shulgin 2004, 17). The relationship lasted just over two years and resulted in the cantata Songs of War and Peace (1959), the orchestral Poem About Space (1961) and the unfinished operas African Ballad (1961–1962) and The Eleventh Commandment (1962). The large-scale, civic style of these works drew on Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, which had impressed Schnittke when he heard it performed in 1957, as well as on the patriotic cantatas of Gigory Sviridov (1915–1998), although neither influence lasted long into the 1960s.

Schnittke's ‘short affair’ with the Composers' Union came to an abrupt end around the time that he completed his postgraduate studies. Poem About Space did not meet the Union's requirements, and in the fallout from that project, the two operas that had been commissioned also fell through. Work on The Eleventh Commandment also demonstrated to Schnittke that his path lay in a different direction: ‘While working on the opera, I realised that I needed to put the larger issues to one side for a while and thoroughly examine my musical language. I realised that I didn’t care enough about the exact embodiment of ideas, often being satisfied with a “generalised” approach based on my technique. And since limitation of means encourages invention, I turned to chamber music, and wrote a number of works in this genre' (Kholopova & Chigareva 1990, 14).

The issue of an ‘exact embodiment of ideas’ relates to the texts that Schnittke was setting, none of which he had chosen himself (Shulgin 2004, 33, 35, 37; Ivashkin 1996, 63). But the move away from vocal writing was emphatic, and for several decades Schnittke's music was dominated by instrumental forms, with voices only returning in a significant capacity with his choral works from the late 1970s. Chamber music took precedence over orchestral works, in part because these were easier to perform, and could be organised at short notice to avoid censorship (Schmelz 2009c, 205). But that limitation paralleled Golubev's syllabus a decade before, with Schnittke now exploring his growing interest in serialism and post-war avant-garde techniques first through piano works and pieces for small ensemble, but then gradually building in scale up to orchestral scores at the end of the 1960s.

Serial period 1963–1971

Serialism

Like many Russian composers of his generation, Schnittke spent the early years of the 1960s experimenting with serial techniques. The wave of interest in serialism across Western Europe between the wars was impeded in Russia by Soviet censorship, and information about the techniques and practices of the Second Viennese School only became widely available during the Khrushchev years of the mid-1950s. The result was a rapid and chaotic assimilation, with information about Schoenberg's pitch-based serialism arriving simultaneously with scores from the Darmstadt School, where serialism was by then being applied to all musical parameters. Schnittke learned of serial techniques while still a student, but only began to explore their potential seriously after completing his studies in 1961. The relationship soon proved to be problematic, and after a short period of strictly applied technique, 1963–1964, Schnittke began to move away, still employing tone rows and serial practice, but increasingly combining them with other ideas. Schnittke's polystylism of the 1970s grew out of the composer's dissatisfaction with serialism, with its resolutely technical approach and its enforced abstraction.

Schnittke learned of Schoenberg's musical philosophy earlier than most of his contemporaries, through Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, which he read in the original German soon after its first publication in 1947. Mann's Faust is a thinly veiled portrait of Schoenberg, and while the text does describe Schoenberg's serial technique, it is more concerned with the symbolism and philosophy of the idea than the mechanics of serial composition. So, from the start, Schnittke's attitude to serialism was informed by the numerological symbolism of the number 12 – which Mann perceived in Schoenberg's approach – and by a philosophical dichotomy between technical restraint and personal expression. That idea had come from Mann himself, and was presented in the novel with a profound ethical significance, as the restraint and depersonalisation were linked in the narrative with evil and the demonic.

Exposure to serial music came later, during Schnittke's undergraduate years at the Moscow Conservatory. From 1954, scores by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern became available in the USSR. While Schnittke was an undergraduate, he lived with his family in Valentinovka, three hours by train from Moscow. The journey was often spent studying these scores and writing musical exercises that imitated the techniques (Ivashkin 1996, 62). At the Conservatory, many of the students were taking a similar interest in serialism, with scores and recordings distributed as they became available. Edison Denisov, as head of the Students' Association, was particularly active in this respect, well connected with musicians in the West and able to provide fellow students with otherwise unavailable scores and recordings. Under his leadership, the Students' Association became a ‘window on Europe’, introducing students to recordings of still forbidden works.

Another important figure for composers of Schnittke's generation was Philipp Hershkowitz (or Gershkovich, 1906–1989). Hershkowitz was a Romanian-born composer who had studied briefly with Alban Berg and more extensively with Anton Webern. In 1946, he settled in Moscow and from the 1950s became a mentor for young composers, a ‘living witness’ to the Second Viennese School (Smirnov 2003, 69). Hershkowitz was wholly outside the musical establishment – he earned a living editing film scores, while continuing to write and propagate serial music privately – and acted as an independent mentor to many composers of Schnittke's generation. Denisov described him as ‘the anti-secretary of the anti-union of (anti-Soviet) composers’ (Kholopova 2003, 69). Although Hershkowitz was versed in serial technique, his influence on Schnittke was more aesthetic and philosophical. The Viennese musical culture he brought to Moscow stretched back to Beethoven, whom he revered for the perfection of his thematic development. The implicit link that Hershkowitz presented between First and Second Viennese Schools communicated Schoenberg's own view on the historical foundations of his theories. Schnittke also recalled that Hershkowitz taught his followers to be wary of relying too heavily on serial techniques. ‘What was important was that Hershkowitz was influential, not so much as a source for techniques, but as a person with a powerful aesthetic instinct, who helped us find specific and concise characteristics for the artistic sid...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of examples
• List of Figures
• Conventions
• Preface
• 1 Eras and techniques
• 2 Stage works
• 3 Choral works
• 4 Solo vocal works
• 5 Orchestral works
• 6 Chamber works
• 7 Keyboard works
• 8 Film music
• Works list
• A note on sources
• Bibliography
• Index