CHAPTER 6
THE TEEMINGLY prolific post-Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke has achieved phenomenal eminence in what may turn out to be a new world order of music. Not since Shostakovich has a composer from the Russian sphere been such a world celebrity as this son of a German-Jewish father and a Volga-German mother, whose first language was that of his parents, and who has lately made a suburb of Hamburg his home.
With such a background, Schnittke would seem to come naturally enough by his fabled eclecticism, yet the reasons for his emergence and his appeal seem nevertheless bound up with the milieu in which he was formed. Aesthetically, if not stylistically, his brand of “postmodernism” is not so far from the Soviet unmodernism of old. Ideas about art that were kept alive under Soviet power by decree, and pronounced dead by the modernist establishment in the West, have reemerged as viable now that both old regimes have collapsed.
On its surface Schnittke’s music sounds anything but Soviet. He first became widely known in the West during the 1970s as a shadowy, semiunderground figure who divided his time between writing utilitarian film scores for a livelihood and unperformable masterworks “for the drawer.” That romantic aura heavily influenced the early reception of his works, many of which were first performed abroad, and continues to dominate reportage about him in the wake of his voluntary exile. Echoes of the Vienna serialists, of Ligeti, of Stockhausen and Boulez abound in early scores like Pianissimo for orchestra, first performed at the august Donaueschingen Festival in 1969. They would have made him out a very conforming composer indeed had he been a Westerner, but coming from a Soviet composer (expected as a matter of Mayakovskian course to express public sentiments fortissimo) they were read as scurrilously countercultural.
The phantasmagorial, hour-long First Symphony (1972), first performed in Gorky, later the city of Andrey Sakharov’s exile, was a harbinger of Schnittke’s famous “polystylistic” manner, now pigeonholed (quite unnecessarily, I think) as postmodern. It is a grim riot of allusion and outright quotation, much of it self-quotation, in which Beethoven jostles Handel jostles Mahler jostles Chaikovsky jostles Johann Strauss, and thence into ragtime and rock, with parts for improvising jazz soloists. Here, too, the smashingly (and crashingly) distinctive Schnittke orchestra first announced itself, an omnivorous combine to which the harpsichord is as essential as the electric bass. All styles and genres are potentially and indiscriminately germane to this musical equivalent of a universal solvent.
Like Mahler, and of course like Ives, Schnittke envisioned the symphony as a musical universe, enfolding all that is or could be within its octopus embrace. But it is not a loving embrace. The Schnittkean Tower of Babel proclaims not universal acceptance but more nearly the opposite, an attitude of cultural alienation in which nothing can claim allegiance. Postmodernism here reduces simply to postism, after-everythingism, it’s-all-overism. The symphony comes to rest on a note of desperate irony. A childishly banal violin solo, reminiscent of the crooning yurodivïy at the end of Boris Godunov, is followed by a reprise of the opening unstructured freakout, finally giving way to a sudden unison C—simplicity itself.
But a simplicity so unearned and perfunctory suggests no resolution, merely dismissal. The world of early Schnittke is Dostoyevsky’s world without God, where everything is possible (and nothing matters). Within the administered world of Leninist dogma, where nothing was possible and everything mattered, this was sheer subversion.
The Concerto Grosso no. 1 (1977), the first Schnittke composition to gain a big reputation in the West, propounded things even more graphically. It deploys three distinct stylistic strata—highly disciplined and intensely fiddled neobaroque; amorphous entropic atonal; and syrupy Soviet kitsch, the last banged out on a prepared piano sounding like a cross between the Soviet radio’s signature chimes and the beating of ash cans. Guess which one wins in the end. It is a chilling demonstration of “negative dialectics,” resolution as degeneracy. It is also terribly funny, but who could miss the blackness of the humor? These early scores were obviously the work of a resentful, marginalized artist. To that extent, at least, they remained securely modernist in attitude.
Yet beneath the surface avant-gardism, Schnittke has at bottom always conformed, for better and for worse, to the customary outlook and manner of a Soviet composer. Since Shostakovich’s death in 1975, he has increasingly cast himself—how deliberately one cannot really say—as that great figure’s heir and torchbearer, and he has begun to command Shostakovich’s huge and loyal following.
Like Shostakovich, Schnittke is very much the public orator. He favors genres with proven mass appeal. By now (1995) there are eight stout symphonies to his credit, and more concertos, perhaps, than any major contemporary has written. His rhetorical manner ranges from grand to grandiose. A half-hour’s duration counts as short. The symphonic scores are often so bulky that they have to be printed in condensed form.
The concertos have been written almost as if in collusion with an outstanding generation of late-Soviet soloists, particularly string virtuosos—violinists Mark Lubotsky, Gidon Kremer, and the late Oleg Kagan; violist Yuriy Bashmet; cellist Natalya Gutman—who have taken them around the world. The concentration on the traditionally humanoid, voice-aping strings, so often shunned for just that reason by modernists of an earlier generation, is already a token of Schnittke’s orientation. He prizes the heroic subjectivity audiences habitually identify with.
Following the pattern set by the First Concerto Grosso, Schnittkean musical arguments almost always take shape through bald, easily read contrasts. Plush romantic lyricism (at times ironic, as often ingenuous), chants and chorales and hymns (real or ersatz), actual or invented “historical” flotsam (neoclassic, neobaroque, even neomedieval), every make and model of jazz and pop—all of this and more are the ingredients. As they are stirred together, the pot frequently boils over in violent extremes of dissonance: tone clusters (a Schnittke specialty), dense polytonal counterpoint (often in the form of close canons), “verticalized” melodies whereby the notes of a tune are sounded simultaneously as a chord.
Yet however harsh or aggressive or even harrowing, the music never bewilders. Discord, heard always as the opposite or absence of concord, functions as a sign (just as it does in Shostakovich), and so do all the myriad stylistic references.
This “semiotic” or signaling aspect, a traditional characteristic of Russian music, is what makes Schnittke’s music so “easily read”—or rather, so easily paraphrased on whatever terms (ethical, spiritual, autobiographical, political) the listener may prefer. Not only do Schnittke’s raw materials often carry prefabricated associations, he also packs his music with symbolically recurring sonorities and leitmotifs. These include, again as in Shostakovich, the self-advertising melodic anagram of the composer’s name (along with those of favored friends or soloists), as well as such hoary standbys as the B-A-C-H cipher, even (unbelievably) the Dies Irae. No other composer writing today so fearlessly recycles clichés.
The result is socialist realism minus socialism. It implies dramaturgy and aspires, beyond that, to the condition of philosophy, even oracle, meanwhile (unlike most oracles) providing built-in ponies to guarantee comprehension. The music seems ever engaged with the grandest, most urgent, most timeless—hence (potentially) most banal—questions of existence, framed the simplest way possible, as primitive oppositions (though the dialectics are no longer unremittingly negative). With a bluntness and an immodesty practically unseen since the days of Mahler, Schnittke tackles life-against-death, love-against-hate, good-against-evil, freedom-against-tyranny, and (especially in the concertos) I-against-the-world.
When the stakes are raised so high, a composer who can come up with musical matter of sufficient interest and pliancy to sustain the tension of argument over a vast Schnittkean time span can engineer a mighty catharsis indeed. And this is true however the opposing forces appear to play themselves out, whether as tragedy (the Viola Concerto, with its pathetic, brutally quashed attempts at harmonious cadence) or triumph (the Cello Concerto, with its stout hymnodic finale) or, perhaps most affectingly, at some fraught point in between (the Concerto for Piano and Strings, with its vacillating gestures toward a chorale). One who cannot come up with the right notes, of course, will produce the worst sort of bathos. That constant risk is itself riveting.
And here again Schnittke’s habits bring Shostakovich’s to mind. They share an ascetic predilection for (or a fatal limitation to) homely unprepossessing ideas, just this side (or even that side) of hackneyed, stretched taut (or thin). There seems to be a Tolstoyan conscience at work in their determination not to let the mere notes distract the listener from the meaning, and their unwillingness to let go of an idea until they are sure that every last listener has got the point. It certainly enhances the impression of high ethical purpose, and it also greatly increases the risk of bathos. The wonder of it all, for those receptive to the method, is how often Schnittke, like Shostakovich before him, manages to skirt the pitfall and bring off the catharsis—a catharsis a mere hairbreadth from blatancy and all the more powerful for having braved the risk.
Others will remain unmoved. Black-and-white has never been much of a moral color scheme. The music has violence galore but no sex whatever, and it is still resolutely scaled to the attention span and the reaction time of a Soviet audience. A taste for Schnittke, as for so much Russian music, requires willingness to regard music as a sweaty, warty human document; and even then, listening to one composition after another can lead to the discovery within oneself of surprising reserves of fastidiousness. Yet Schnittke’s best scores, like those of Shostakovich, are reminders that the tawdry and the exalted can be near-twins at the opposite extreme from the safe and the sane.
What are the best scores? Those in which the sheer sensory experience of the medium predominates, for this immediacy is Schnittke’s saving grace, the surest compensation for his crudeness, his naivety, his square rhythms and noodling ostinatos, his gooey structures. The string concertos are a natural starting point, especially as played by their intended soloists, whose visceral collective voice provided the prototype for Schnittke’s musical oratory.
Two of the symphonies are engrossing. The monumental Third (1981), commissioned by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, begins with what sounds like Wagner’s Rheingold prelude cubed and cubed again: a musical motif derived from the natural harmonic series that ascends through a canon in which every single member of the orchestra participates individually. Out of this primal sonic soup emerges a potted history of classical music (second movement, featuring the musical ciphers of thirty-four German composers’ names) that is savagely attacked by a division of anarchic rock guitars spewing feedback-distortion (third movement) and sinks back into the ooze, the canon now descending in retrograde (fourth movement). Yet there is hope: the canon theme comes back one last time in a limpidly harmonized coda piped by an innocent solo flute.
In summary this Pandora’s box parable is triteness itself, but what a texture the telling has! Among other richnesses, the Schnittke sound world is saturated with archetypal Russian tintinnabulation, produced not only by the orchestral bells and glockenspiel but by the vibraphone and even the flexatone, normally a child’s toy.
And then there is the constantly strumming Schnittkean “continuo” of piano, celesta, harps, harpsichord, Hammond organ, electric guitar, electric bass, and various mallet instruments in ever-changing combos. Its descent from the Schoenberg of Herzgewaechse via the Boulez of Le Marteau sans Maitre and (especially) the Stravinsky of the Requiem Canticles is clear, and very moving in its implied gesture of reconciliation; and its exaggerated presence is superbly palpable, practically tactile.
The continuo contingent comes virtuosically into its own in the Fourth Symphony (1984), actually a sinfonia concertante in the form of a colossal set of variations on three themes, ecumenically representing the Orthodox Slavonic, Roman Catholic, and Protestant liturgies respectively, with a fourth, from the synagogue, as occasional leavening. They are enunciated by a trio of keyboard protagonists (piano, harpsichord, and celesta) that play in perpetual canon at the almost-unison and the almost-octave—an invigorating counterpoint of skewed cross-relations, imaginatively educed from various medieval theories of Eastern and Western chant.
In the turbulent middle of the symphony the contrapuntal dissonances become harmonic clusters, and the writing reaches a crazed intensity that terrifies cathartically the way only rock concerts ordinarily do. In its ecumenical reach and its harsh spirituality the symphony seems a postmodern manifesto, and a masterpiece—until the sentimental letdown at the end, when all the themes are montaged in a treacly conventional choral counterpoint.
In the glasnosf days Schnittke was exalted in his native land by audiences hungry for formerly forbidden fruit as a religious moralist who, in the words of one critic, “pitilessly exposes the tragedy of the world in which we live and seeks salvation in God.”1 But I would prefer not to see the religious impulse as primary in his work, because more than anything else it nudges him over the edge into banality and bluster—as in the Second Symphony (1979), an unbearably maudlin six-movement meditation on the Latin Mass, inspired by a visit to the Austrian monastery of St. Florian, where Bruckner had been organist. Yet Schnittke’s religious ecstasy seems to derive less from Bruckner than from Messiaen, as witness the Turangalila-like fanfares in the Gloria movement. The saccharine, contrived purity of the choral parts, confined to real and ersatz Gregorian melodies, descends from there into the lower celestial regions inhabited by the likes of Alan Hovhaness, especially as Schnittke shares Hovhaness’s fascination with endless “oriental” melismas noodled snake-charmer fashion by oboes and their bigger brethren.
Yet even this composer’s misfires are appealing in their way, because they arise out of something rare and suspect in the reticent and conflicted West, namely moral commitment. Long oppressed by an ideological dictatorship, Schnittke has survived it, and survived his nihilism. He has emerged as an upholder of what another Russian critic calls “eternal moral categories”2— just what progressive humanists, in countries where artists risk nothing more than public indifference or the withholding of largesse, are apt to denounce as the sheep’s clothing of complacency or worse.
Such a charge will not stick to this composer. Like Shostakovich—like Solzhenitsyn, for that matter—he has earned the right to preach to us. The appeal of his music often lies less in our response to its sound patterns than in our sense of the composer’s moral and political plight (and the fragility of his life, if we know about his recent strokes and heart attacks). That empathy, born of historical awareness, lends an extra concreteness, an extra force, to his musical plots and arguments—that is, to the way we construe and value his paraphrase-inviting antitheses and juxtapositions.
That is a double standard, of course, blatantly unfair to many other composers who have homely ideas and overorchestrate egregiously but are not so readily given the benefit of the doubt. But fair or no, it’s human—and sanctioned by history. Even after everything, a Russian voice is still special, still privileged. Russia is still different, still other. And Russian music still has the power to define that difference.
1 Lev Nikolayevich Raaben, Sovetskaya muzika 60-80 godov, v svete novogo muzïkal’nogo mishleniya XX veka (unpublished typescript), p. 384.
2 L. Ivanova, “Ot obryada k èposu,” in Zhanrovo-stilisticheskiye tendentsii klassicheskoy i sovremennoy muzïki (Leningrad: LGITMiK, 1980), p. 174.