Cello Concerto No. 1 (1986)
Natalia Gutman, cello
USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, conductor
Schnittke’s first cello concerto was written during a near fatal time in his life, after having suffered a severe stroke in 1985, during which his heart stopped three times. Upon recovery he completed the concerto, the music becoming more dissonant and discordant, with the melodies more contorted.
The first cello concerto was a monumental endeavour for large orchestra, and approximately 40 minutes in duration. The work was written for Schnittke’s close friend, Russian cellist Natalia Gutman. The solo part is most feverish and virtuosic, exhausting the performer both technically and emotionally. The last, fourth, movement creates an unusual structural progression, ending in what feels like a celestial, hymn-like prayer. Schnittke himself said: Suddenly I was given this finale from somewhere, and I’ve just written it down.
Symphony No. 1
Programme note by Susan Bradshaw
Royal Festival Hall, London, 17 December 1986 (UK Premiere)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, conductor
Rein Rannap, jazz piano
Paul Mägi, jazz violin
1. Senza tempo – Andante
2. Allegretto
3. Lento
4. Lento
According to the composer himself, the title “symphony” in this instance is to be understood as partly serious, partly ironical. Written at a time (1969-72) when the lure of new techniques had led only to the seeming impasse of avante-garde serialism, Schnittke’s First Symphony evidently represents an attempt to clear a path into the future – demolishing the musical landscape of the late 1960s as a prelude to reconstructing it from fragments of a remote as well as a more recent past. The symphonic structure arising from this sometimes brutal demolition process is likened to the architecture of a Warsaw church which, flattened by war-time bombing, was rebuilt by inserting such fragments as remained of the old within the walls of the new, “without concern for stylistic unity”.
Schnittke goes on to say that his symphony likewise reconstructs symphonic form “from left-over bits and pieces” – he lists Beethoven, Chopin, Strauss, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, the Dies Irae, Gregorian chant and Haydn – “the missing areas being filled in with new material”.
The resulting structural collage (the composer’s own word) seeks to question the very existence of the symphony as a meaningful contemporary form. Akin to a musical manifesto, it expresses Schnittke’s determination to disregard the stylistic anxieties that plague so many present-day composers and, while remaining true to himself, “freely to invoke contemporary tensions without attempting to arrive at false solutions”. Some of these tensions are expressed through stylistic argument, others in terms of the degree to which a composer may have control over his own material; this ranges from none at all (at the outset, just before the entry of the conductor), to some (as in the freely-outlined suggestions which may, but need not, be adhered to as a basis for improvisation), to almost total (most of the apparently improvised tutti passages are in fact notated in extraordinary detail).
It is not hard to imagine the political implications – whether by design or no – of such an anarchic musical statement; the 1974 premiere of the work was relegated to the remote city of Gorky, and the first Moscow performance took place only last year [1985].
The symphony is scored for huge orchestra: quadruple woodwind (plus three saxophones) and brass, forty-eight strings, piano, celesta, harpsichord, organ, two harps, electric guitar and a large amount of percussion – including a rhythm section. Very much the product of its time and physical surroundings, this is a work likely to arouse strong reactions. Impressively crafted, it is nonetheless full of contrasts that are often intentionally crude, emotionally (as well as musically) disturbing, even shocking. It is also nearly impossible to describe or to prepare for in any detail.
Nevertheless it is clear that the first and third movements are the mainly new walls of the symphonic edifice, with the second and fourth containing the patched-in fragments of the old. The work begins as the first player walks on stage and starts, as if casually, to warm up for his or her part in the ensuing proceedings; as the last to enter, the conductor eventually brings this increasingly improvised chaos to a stuttering halt.
The first movement proper gets under way as he then calls things to order on a unison C; thereafter, and despite the early intrusion of a group of alien ideas, it is as if a modern symphonic movement were seriously trying to emerge from a cloud of chromatic writing that is never allowed to acquire any too discernible features. Although underpinned by sporadic attempts to attach the music to tonal centres, the whole movement has a restless, searching feel – with numerous interruptive elements and with wind and percussion becoming ever more detached from the sobering influence of the material heard on the violins at the outset. Not until near the end is there a concerted tutti outburst as the first obvious quotation (here seeming like the inevitable outcome of the initial unison C) for a moment holds sway.
The following scherzo seems about to enter another world as the strings announce an elegantly classical theme which, rondo fashion, recurs throughout. Meanwhile, all sorts of Ives-like chaos intervene, gathering momentum to become a whirling fray in which the dance-band element gradually comes to the fore – eventually obliterating the rest in an improvised cadenza. During the sudden quiet of a brief coda, the wind players leave the platform, until only the flute remains to carry the thread of the music to its inconclusive end.
In many ways the philosophical heart of the work, the third movement is an extended and largely self-contained adagio for string orchestra; with no more than an occasional touch of colour from one or other of the percussive instruments left on stage, it has a grave and sometimes eerie beauty that sets it apart from the rest. From its pianissimo start on two solo violins, the tone gradually increases as the texture thickens to arrive at a midway climax on a C minor chord that is reinforced from afar by the wind.
The finale begins with the off-stage players returned to the fold – bringing with them a number of quotations that aptly reflect the elegiac vein of the movement just ended. But this mood of resignation is soon rudely shattered – to be recaptured only in the intensely moving circumstances of a penultimate peroration that is once again initiated by the unison C. Old memories are revived one last time as a distant echo of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony launches the work full circle to quote its own origins in the improvised turbulence from which it all began.
A Shy, Frail Creator of the Wildest Music
Alex Ross, The New York Times, 10 February 1994
If you knew little of Alfred Schnittke or his music, you might say he is trendy, hip, in fashion. It is an understandable assumption, given the current spate of Schnittke performances: the world premiere of his Symphony No. 7 tonight by the New York Philharmonic, the American premieres last week of his Piano Sonata No. 2 by Boris Berman and his Symphony No. 6 by the National Symphony Orchestra, and a forthcoming performance of his Faust Cantata by the American Symphony Orchestra. Other recent works are being rushed to recordings. Not since Britten has a living composer been given this kind of attention.
But the man who sat patiently through an interview at the Watergate Hotel in Washington on Saturday morning has nothing to do with the world of trends. Soft-spoken, shy and physically frail from two recent strokes, this Russian-born composer is incapable of self-promotion. Unlike many composers before him, he does not conduct, and he has written perplexingly little for his own instrument, the piano. He has gained recognition only through the substance of his music, with its anarchic conjuration of musical history and its underlying eloquence.
Mr. Schnittke talked about the new symphonies he has written for the National Symphony and the New York Philharmonic in typically muted and gnomic terms. “I prepared something that was not exactly perfect,” he said of the Sixth Symphony, speaking in Russian through a translator. “It seemed incomplete in a sense, and it’s not clear if we’ve really heard it. I already cut one episode, and I’m thinking about other ways to change it.” Mr. Schnittke’s printed discussions of his music regularly speak of attempts, reports, experiments and sometimes failures.
As it happens, these new works, particularly the severe and enigmatic Sixth, are atypical of the 59-year-old composer’s output as a whole. He first gained notice in the West with a style that seemed to match popular trends, so to speak, of the 1960s and 70s. It was not one style, but many: “polystylistics”, he called it, a rampant musical eclecticism drawing on Baroque arpeggios, the Viennese waltz, 12-tone modernism and avant-garde procedures. There was an exhilarating expressive vibrancy to the blend, and more than a touch of dark comedy.
Some commentators, and some imitative composers, have mistaken this approach for mere nostalgia. “That’s one of the major inaccuracies,” Mr. Schnittke said. “The style was never focused on the past, nor, for that matter, on the future.” The most remarkable aspect of his work is how a distinctive and recognizable voice emerges through an impossible variety of material. The composer of the present is emphatically, grippingly in control.
Mr. Schnittke’s relation to the past remains very complex. He derived his polystylistic method from Mahler, Ives, Berg and Shostakovich, all of whom stitched together a musical language from disparate sources. If there was a formative moment in his career, it was his encounter in the early 60s with Shostakovich’s monumentally chaotic Fourth Symphony, which had been hidden for three decades in the composer’s desk. “What was most important to me,” he said of the Fourth, “was not only the incredible technical accomplishments, but also the unexpected compositional choices, polyphony in the largest sense.”
The first major work of Mr. Schnittke’s mature period, his First Symphony of 1972, amplified the discoveries of the Shostakovich Fourth in every possible dimension. It is a good candidate for the wildest piece of music ever written. Gregorian chants, bits of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, motoric Baroque music and coffeehouse jazz collide in front of a dark and turbulent orchestral mass. It seems inconceivable that such a work was given a public performance in the Soviet Union of 1974, when other composers were setting Leonid Brezhnev’s diaries to music. But Rodion Shchedrin, then head of the Russian composers’ union, pushed the symphony past the bureaucracy.
“There was a great deal of tension and negative official reaction to the premiere,” Mr. Schnittke recalled. “But at the same time it was in an incredible moment, important and positive for me. The reaction of the public astonished me: people went not only to the performance but to rehearsals.” Mr. Schnittke was able to continue working without official support, although obstacles impeded him continually until 1985.
A tempting interpretation of this music is that it somehow represents or foreshadows the collapse of the Soviet state. Leon Botstein, the conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, has indeed titled his Feb. 18 concert “The Breakup of the Soviet Union: A Musical Mirror”. Mr. Schnittke’s reaction to this view was hesitant: “When I wrote, I wasn’t thinking about events, although some connection with events is of course possible. There is the example of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the ‘Leningrad’.”
This last analogy is best interpreted as one of Mr. Schnittke’s characteristic ironical gestures. His music demands a deeper historical perspective. Just as strong as the connection to Shostakovich are the links to Mahler and Berg, whose music, Mr. Schnittke said, he “adores above everything else”. He is of German as well as Russian descent, and one of his favorite stylistic modes is a wistful German Romantic lyricism; the introduction and coda of the Seventh Symphony furnish a strong example. He now lives in Hamburg, the birthplace of Brahms.
Another plausible reading of Mr. Schnittke is that he pessimistically mirrors the decline of the classical tradition itself, writing music for the end of music. He has encouraged this sort of thinking with some dire pronouncements of his own. “I attempt to compose symphonies, although it is clear to me that logically it is pointless,” reads the program note for the Third Symphony. The Sixth Symphony, in four traditional movements, is an altogether frightening vision of music stripped to the bone; at one performance in Washington, several distressed young children were led out after the first movement.
But even though his music has taken on an increasingly grim tone, the composer is not a doomsayer: “In what I do, there is definitely going to be an exit and there is definitely going to be an answer to these questions, but at the same time there is a lot of rightful doubt about the forms and a nervousness about what the future holds for music.” While he considers the possibility of a synthesis of classical and popular genres “pure utopia”, he has dabbled in rock and jazz instrumentation, and enjoyed the orchestral music of Frank Zappa.
Might it be possible that Mr. Schnittke’s music has been inspired by the eclectic, parodistic, fundamentally grave and serious compositions of Adrian Leverkühn, the fictional hero of Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus? “Yes, the book had an incredible influence on me,” said Mr. Schnittke, becoming slightly more passionate than he had been for most of the interrogation. “I read it in the 50s when I was still a young man. I thought about it my whole life, but unfortunately never wrote anything connected with it.”
There is, however, the Faust Cantata, based on the same 16th century source that the fictional Leverkühn employs for his valedictory work. It has been expanded into a three-act opera, with a libretto drawing from various Faust sources; the Hamburg Opera will give the premiere in 1995. “Faust was a man both good and bad,” Mr. Schnittke said of this 20-year-old project, “and that ambivalence draws me to the story.”
Ambivalence, in the end, is what draws us into Mr. Schnittke’s magic schemes; they match our best and worst imaginings. Despite continuing poor health, the composer forges ahead with ambitious plans: an opera based on the life of Gesualdo for the Vienna State Opera, and an Eighth Symphony for the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who led the dangerous premiere of the First in 1974. He is close upon the mystical symphonic number nine, and might deserve whatever greatness it mythically confers.
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