Alfred Schnittke

New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians

Alfred Schnittke first studied privately in Vienna (1946–8), where his father was working; this decisive experience was to have a decisive effect on his work as a composer since this exposure to the Austro-German cultural tradition fundamentally influenced his future tastes and approach to form and vocabulary throughout his career. On his return to Russia, Schnittke studied in the Choirmasters’ Department at the October Revolution Music College in Moscow (1949–53) as well as studying theory privately with Iosif Rïzhkin. He later enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory (1953–8, and as a postgraduate 1958–61), where his teachers were Yevgeny Golubev and Nikolay Rakov. Schnittke later observed that his ‘polystylism’ could be traced to the filling of gaps in his musical knowledge during these years. He himself taught instrumentation at the Conservatory for a decade from 1962, and from this time worked as a freelance composer, writing for the theatre and for film as well as concert works. Between 1962 and 1984 he wrote a total of 66 film scores for Mosfilm and other Soviet film companies: this aspect of his life was to have an important technical influence upon his career as a concert composer. During the course of his life he also wrote a large number of articles concerning various issues in contemporary music, and lectured extensively in Russia and Germany.

Though Schnittke’s growing reputation permitted him numerous journeys abroad from the 1980s onwards, before then his trips outside the Soviet Union had been restricted to one in 1967 to hear Dialogue in Warsaw and another in 1977 to Germany and Austria, as a keyboard player with the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra. His inevitably complicated relationship with the Soviet regime began with the condemnation of his oratorio Nagasaki by the Union of Composers in 1958. He was subsequently well-treated by the Union, and received commissions from the Ministry of Culture and from two opera companies, but when he was asked to conform to a less experimentalist ideal after completing his second opera – ‘African Ballad’ – he no longer enjoyed official approval. Due to the more liberal attitude of the Krushchyov era, Schnittke and other young composers saw formerly sanctioned scores by Western composers; he was thus able to analyze in great detail not only the music of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, but also Stockhausen, Nono and Ligeti. These analyses led to his abandonment of serial techniques. At the same time, however, he was constantly attacked in official publications such as Sovetskaya muzïka. After its première in Gor’kiy in 1974, his First Symphony was to all intents and purposes banned from performance in the wake of Khrennikov’s blanket condemnation of it. This situation changed only when Gorbachyov came to power in 1985.

It was precisely from this time onwards, when, paradoxically, he was finally able to travel to attend performances of his works outside the Soviet Union, that Schnittke began to be plagued by health problems, beginning with a serious stroke in June that year. A second occurred in 1991, a year after he had moved to Hamburg, where he was teaching composition as the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, and from that point on Schnittke’s music became more austere and more obviously concerned with mortality. He suffered another stroke in 1994, but did not cease to compose; he died in 1998 in his adopted city of Hamburg.

Later in life Schnittke was the recipient of numerous international prizes and awards, including the Russian State Prize (twice, in 1986 and 1995) and awards from Austria, Germany and Japan. He was made a member of the Academies of Arts of Munich, Stockholm, Hamburg, Berlin and London, and given honorary membership of several others.

Obituary: Tikhon Khrennikov

Gerard McBurney, The Guardian, 19 September 2007

Tikhon Khrennikov: Philistine functionary who kept an iron grip on postwar Soviet music and persecuted dissident composers

The composer, pianist and emblematic Soviet functionary Tikhon Khrennikov, who has died aged 94, will be remembered outside Russia for his drearily dispiriting effect on postwar Soviet culture, his ponderous and largely unchallenged reign over musical life in the USSR from Stalin to the age of Gorbachev, and his dishonourable role in spearheading the attacks on Prokofiev, Shostakovich and other talented composers in the so-called Zhdanovshchina (or state-directed purging of musical life) of 1948.

In his native land, his reputation is more complicated. While most educated Russians would concur with this negative assessment of his career – and “career” is the word – there are some musicians even today who feel that Khrennikov was a more honourable man than he has been given credit for, that he protected his colleagues in difficult times, ensured some kind of stability in the day-to-day running of Soviet music – and that things could have been a lot worse had someone else been in charge.

His music, while it may appear to sophisticated listeners facile, badly orchestrated and comically derivative, still has a certain charm for older Russians with less demanding tastes. Perhaps this is because those lumbering, but sometimes catchy, patriotic tunes remind them of the hard times when such music provided a precious excuse for light-heartedness and celebration.

Khrennikov was born into pre-revolutionary poverty, the youngest of a large family, in Yelets, 200 miles south of Moscow. A talent for composing and playing, first on the mandolin and guitar, then on the piano, enabled him to contact the composer and teacher Mikhail Gnesin, who in 1929 brought him to his musical school in Moscow, to study composition with Gnesin himself and piano with Efraim Gelman. In 1932, Khrennikov moved to the Moscow Conservatoire, to the class of Vissarion Shebalin, one of the most talented Soviet composers of his age. Later he joined the piano class of the legendary Heinrich Neuhaus, who taught Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels, among others.

By the time he graduated in 1936, Khrennikov had made a reputation as a serious composer with his First Piano Concerto (1933), which he performed himself, and his First Symphony (1935). He followed these with an opera, Into the Storm (1939), based on a novel by Nikolai Virta, supposedly a favourite of Stalin’s. There is a story that Shostakovich wrote to Khrennikov with critical observations on this work: if true, it suggests an origin to the long history of difficult relations between the two men.

The great stage director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko encouraged Khrennikov to turn to opera, having been struck by his earlier theatrical efforts, among them a 1934 score for Natalia Sats’s famous Musical Theatre for Children and attractively fresh music for a production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Vakhtangov theatre. Thereafter, theatre and theatricality, and later cinema, remained at the heart of Khrennikov’s work.

His popular songs were mostly composed for films and plays, and several of his larger works are developments of such pieces. Much Ado About Nothing, for example, was reworked several times, ending up as a full-scale opera Much Ado About Hearts (1972) and a ballet, Love for Love (1975).

Before the second world war, Khrennikov had already made a name for himself as a willing young political activist and busybody, and the success of his patriotic music in wartime ensured he was a useful man to have around. Towards the end of 1947, Andrei Zhdanov, who had already led the postwar cultural purges of literature, philosophy, film-making and various scientific and journalistic disciplines, turned his attention to music.

Why should the dictatorship of the world’s largest country have bothered at all with composers? This was the age of radio, cinema and the gramophone record, and through these mass media music was a powerful influence on the daily life of the nation and (crucially) its loyalties. The Union of Soviet Composers, which was largely reformed by Zhdanov in 1948, was a means for the state to control in minute detail what millions of people listened to from the cradle to the grave. And Khrennikov was the man to make sure this happened.

Anyone who met Khrennikov realised that he loved power. From the crowing Stalinist vulgarity and crude threats of his 1948 onslaughts on Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian and his own teacher Shebalin, through his philistine enthusiasm for keeping knowledge of the outside world at bay in the 1960s and 70s, and his amazing influence over Soviet broadcasting, publishing, recording and concert life, he was a figure of historical and political significance. He made and broke the careers of hundreds of musical figures, and was dauntless in his opposition to any trend that threatened the hold of socialist-realist music and the stridently patriotic and à la russe manner he considered the true path in music (and the style in which his own talents were heard to best effect).

When modernism began to penetrate the Soviet Union as a result of the Khrushchev thaw, Khrennikov and his henchmen stamped on the “outrageous disgraces” being perpetrated by composers such as Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt and Valentin Silvestrov. Later, he turned his aggressive attentions to even younger figures like Dmitri Smirnov, Elena Firsova and Alexander Knaifel.

In the early 1960s, the brilliant Italian modernist Luigi Nono was invited to the Soviet Union, on the unmusical grounds that he was a leading light of the Italian Communist party. When a young Moscow modernist, Nikolai Karetnikov, met Nono and exchanged scores and ideas about 12-note rows, he was promptly summoned to Khrennikov’s office and carpeted with the words: “You hobnob with foreigners! You give them your music! How dare you? There is such a thing as discipline!” Khrennikov was equally unrelenting in his hostility to western popular music – smuggled Beatles tapes conquered Soviet youth with astonishing speed – and jazz.

At the same time, like so much of Soviet power, Khrennikov’s rule functioned with carrot as well as stick. He helped many composers when they fell on hard times: he issued orders for families to be housed, for children to be given clothes, for food to be made available, for pieces to be allowed to be performed. Among those he protected were several talented composers who made a quiet but profitable living composing his later works from the somewhat exiguous sketches that were all he himself had time to write.

Naturally, with the Yeltsin revolution of 1991, Khrennikov finally fell from power and grace. But he never left the stage. In 1993, the newspaper Kultura published a celebration of his 80th birthday, complete with an astonishing picture of the composer on his knees in Yelets cathedral being blessed by the local bishop (after years of opposition to any composer interested in religion). He continued to compose (a ballet entitled Napoleon caused much mirth) and published two self-justifying memoirs.

The first of these, That’s the Way It Was (1994), is a surprisingly good read, with recollections of Stalin that show Khrennikov still in awe of the tyrant he served. More recently, he was decorated by Vladimir Putin. Khrennikov’s wife, Klara Vaks, is widely believed to have been a formidable influence on his success. She predeceased him; the couple had one daughter.

Tikhon Nikolaevich Khrennikov, composer and administrator, born June 10 1913; died August 14 2007

Alfred Schnittke: a crazy mixed-up kid

Geoff Brown, The Times, 30 October 2009

In the cellist Alexander Ivashkin’s biography of Alfred Schnittke there’s a touching photo of the future composer, circa 1935, aged about 12 months. He’s grinning eagerly as babies do, clinging to the top bar of a battered crib in the family home in the drab Volga port of Engels, in the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The future stretches before him.

But what future? The tot’s bright eyes know nothing of Stalin’s cruelties, of Hitler’s Holocaust, of atom bombs and the rest of the madness of the century conjured up so vividly in the expressive phantasmagoria of the adult Schnittke’s music.

By the 1980s he was labelled the natural successor to Shostakovich, but since Schnittke’s death in Hamburg in 1998, his reputation has been idling, if not taking a dip. Next month at the South Bank Centre Between Two Worlds, the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Schnittke season – steered by Vladimir Jurowski, with help from Ivashkin and the Alfred Schnittke Archive – presents a chance to re-visit, re-evaluate or discover his tumultuous work.

He was born to reflect the century’s roar and chaos. Even his genes didn’t know which way to turn. His mother was German; his father German-Jewish. In the late 1940s his father’s newspaper work took the family to Vienna. In those two years Schnittke became saturated with Austro-German traditions. Reading Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus sparked a lifelong fascination with the Faust legend. The symphonies of Mahler took hold.

Culturally, he was almost a vagabond. “Like my German forefathers, I live in Russia,” he wrote. “But I am not Russian.” Nor could he feel completely Jewish: “My Jewish half gives me no peace: I know none of the three Jewish languages – but I look like a typical Jew.”

No wonder, then, that Schnittke’s most individual gift to music was a collision of styles, high and low, crammed into a single piece. He called it “polystylism”. A simple example occurs in his first Concerto Grosso (featured on November 22), in which the strings’ baroque swirls suddenly cut off to reveal his grandmother’s favourite tango plonking away on a harpsichord. For complex examples, you can’t beat the First Symphony (missing, alas, from the season), where the stew includes jazz improvisation and transmuted morsels from classical music’s all-stars, Beethoven, Haydn, Chopin and folks, jostling in madcap array.

Both are pieces from the 1970s, the years of the Brezhnev “stagnation”, of government by smoke and mirrors: a fitting context for Schnittke’s dysfunctional games, amply disliked by Moscow’s Establishment, especially Tikhon Khrennikov, the powerful head of the Composers’ Union.

Another influence on the music was more practical. Between 1962 and 1984 Schnittke earned a living writing cinema scores, some for adventurous animated films such as The Glass Umbrella, with music and sound effects usually worked in counterpoint with the images. He became used to montage and collage: art in slices.

Was he a dissident? The violinist Dimitry Sitvoketsky, featured in several concerts, thinks not. “It was just that the music he wrote wasn’t officially liked.” Yet it wasn’t merely the music that irked the Soviet bosses. There was also Schnittke’s public popularity. “By the 1980s the public treated him almost like a rock star,” Ivashkin recalls. “Crowds in Moscow beat down the doors to come to his concerts. Police had to be called.”

Khrennikov’s petty response to his fame was to obstruct the composer’s travel. Once Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1984, the situation eased, only for Schnittke’s health to worsen. In 1985 he had the first of three strokes that reduced the quality of his life, furthering a musical shift towards the greater simplicity of means made fashionable by the “holy minimalists”, such as Arvo Pärt. He admired the ascetic beauty of Pärt’s music, but he told Ivashkin: “I can’t be a saint!” A revealing reply. Schnittke’s music is always formidably human.

For Jurowski, born in 1972, the season will be in part a voyage of discovery. “Learning about Schnittke and his time,” he says, “has a special meaning for me, since it was also the time of my parents’ youth and my own childhood.”

As for Ivashkin, he hopes the season will help bring the music to the same pitch of popularity in Britain as Shostakovich’s, and encourage opera companies to investigate The History of D. Johann Faustus (the season presents extracts) or another neglected item, Gesualdo. “Maybe the situation is healthier now. We can hear his music from a more realistic perspective, and judge him more like a composer of the world.”

Crazy world; crazy music. But so compelling.

Obituary: Alfred Schnittke

Martin Anderson, David Revill, The Independent, 5 August 1998

The “polystylism” that came to be characteristic of Alfred Schnittke’s music was a reflection of the man himself: he was a Russian composer, born in a once-German part of the Soviet Union, to parents of Latvian origin – his father Jewish and his mother German, who grew up a Catholic in a German community in an atheist state.

Schnittke’s natural openness to this kaleidoscope of influences was characteristic of his generous intellectual curiosity: he likewise accepted all the rest of music as material to feed his own creative urge. He was also two ways a hero, although, in keeping with his personal modesty, an unemphatic one: at the beginning of his career he assiduously took on the Soviet cultural dictatorship on behalf of new music, and at the end of his life he showed extraordinary physical courage in continuing to compose despite a series of vicious strokes.

Schnittke’s musical ambitions manifested themselves early but the family’s limited means, and their geographical isolation in the Volga during the Second World War (Stalin deported the Volga Germans en masse; Schnittke’s father’s Jewishness allowed his family to escape the net), meant that systematic instruction was not available. The child none the less made crude attempts at composition, demonstrating a creative will that was to ignore formidable obstacles throughout his career.

In 1945 Schnittke’s father, now a journalist in the Soviet army, was posted to Vienna with the occupying forces, and the nine-year-old Alfred could at last study music theory and piano, also soaking himself in concerts and broadcast music (Stalin had banned the private possession of radios during the Second World War). The Viennese tradition he encountered at this formative age provided a vital underlay to his later stylistic explorations.

The Schnittke family returned to the Soviet Union in 1946, settling in the Moscow area, and Alfred began to teach himself harmony. At the age of 15 he was accepted as a student in the army music college, and began private theory lessons with Iosif Ryzhkin, who taught him to compose in a wide variety of styles to improve the fluency of his technique. In 1953, just as Stalin’s death gave way to Khrushchev’s brief “thaw”, Schnittke became a student at the Moscow Conservatory, where the students courted the disapproval of their orthodox teachers by listening privately to the “bourgeois” music of composers like Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartók and Schoenberg, who were only now beginning to be heard in Russia.

Another massive influence on Schnittke at this time, as on virtually every young composer of note in the Soviet Union, was Dmitri Shostakovich, whose First Violin Concerto, premiered in 1955, had a very direct impact. Schnittke’s friend Alexander Ivashkin – whose excellent biographical study Alfred Schnittke (1996) is the only publication on the composer in English – points to the similarities between the concertos of the two composers: there is “the same feeling of drama, the same sharp, even exaggerated, contrasts between the movements, and the same freedom and space for the cadenza, a monologue of the soloist ‘hero’”. Ivashkin neatly characterises the difference in their styles: “Shostakovich, under the burden of Stalin’s dictatorship, was much more cautious, preferring to speak indirectly and symbolically. Schnittke’s generation grew up in a different situation and wanted to speak more openly and directly.”

Schnittke’s graduation piece, an oratorio called Nagasaki (1958) brought him his first brush with authority: his depiction of the explosion of the atomic bomb, using atonality, tonal clusters and howling trombones, was hardly calculated to appease the apparatchiks of the Composers’ Union. Schnittke was unable to make the compromises in his musical language to suit the political lines of the commission he was offered, and so in the early 1960s he was blacklisted, a covert ban that was to last 20 years.

That meant that travel abroad, even to other Communist countries, would be a rare privilege, despite his growing fame as one of the Soviet Union’s most individual voices and leading modernists. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s Schnittke was invited to around 20 premieres of his works abroad; permission to attend them was never granted.

In a search for a musical language that would synthesise past and present Schnittke was already beginning to unite a variety of elements in his music, in the beginnings of his “polystylism”, where reminiscences of Renaissance, Baroque and Classical composers sit alongside the most dramatic devices of modernism, in stark contrasts that produce music of considerable tension and power. Studies with the Moldova-born Webern pupil Philip Hershkovich, who pointed to the origins of much modern music in the classics of the past, now gave Schnittke’s search intellectual cohesion, and the music began to flow fast from his pen.

In 1962 Schnittke wrote the first of his film scores, a genre that was to afford him a relatively good living over the next two decades, accounting for no fewer than 66 of his 200 or so works. It also allowed him more room for experiment than works destined for the Communist-controlled concert halls: he could choose his techniques according to the film in question, commenting on the action rather than merely illustrating it. These scores provided a rich vein of material for later concert works.

One of those pieces was the First Symphony, first performed in 1974, an unabashed ragbag of music, discordantly, exultantly sewn together with some pointedly rough needlework, like some crazed Charles Ives on speed. The effect on Russian musical life was electric: it heralded the beginning of the end for the old, repressive order, which predictably reacted by putting an effective ban on its performance.

Schnittke’s music meantime was moving on, refining his magpie eclecticism in favour of a new depth of emotion; the occasion for this search for expressive power was the death of his mother, from a stroke, in 1972; the sense of mortality it brought Schnittke was supported by a growing sense of religious awareness.
The advent to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 loosened the grip of Tikhon Khrennikov, the Stalinist head of the Composers’ Union, on musical life in the Soviet Union. Schnittke was poised to reap the rewards of his intellectual and moral consistency. And that was when he had his first stroke, with a brain haemorrhage so severe that three times he was pronounced clinically dead.

His reaction was to tighten his grip on life: he began composing his First Cello Concerto within three months. Stage works, orchestral music, choral pieces, chamber music followed, one score after another with an almost frantic urgency. A second stroke hit him in 1991, after which Schnittke completed his opera Life with an Idiot. Two years later another opera, Gesualdo, was finished, as were the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies.

Schnittke’s doctor had advised him to take complete rest; when Schnittke found that the result was yet another stroke, he threw caution to the winds and, though he could barely speak and could write only with his left hand (he was right-handed), he managed to compose his Ninth Symphony, which was premiered in Moscow in June this year.

No composer as productive as Schnittke can expect to write a consistent string of masterpieces. But the best of Schnittke is, quite simply, great music: his Second Cello Concerto, for example, is one of the finest additions to the cello repertoire this century; and Ivashkin chronicles how the audience at his ballet Peer Gynt left the hall in tears.

Much of his work is touched with a sense of imminent loss, of some disaster about to break on the listener, in music of searing pain – which, indeed, is exactly how Schnittke lived much of the latter part of his life.

(Martin Anderson)

Alfred Schnittke was one of Russia’s most prolific and innovative composers and, in the last few years, became one of an elite of composers this century to achieve broad popularity, writes David Revill.

His interest in the European avant-garde was only awoken, however, by a visit to Russia from the Italian composer – and son-in-law of Schoenberg – Luigi Nono in the early Sixties. From then until the late Sixties Schnittke employed serial techniques himself. This brought him hostility from the Soviet authorities, whose criteria for good music were still basically political. Performances of works such as the First Symphony (1969-72) were delayed and often held in obscure parts of the Union (the Symphony premiered in Gorky on 9 February 1974). Other young Russian composers, on the other hand, increasingly admired his daring.

The authorities still let him teach at the Conservatoire and at the Experimental Studio for Electronic Music. From 1972 onwards, he began to make his living as a composer, thanks to such energetic work as writing music for stage productions of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, for films of The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Eugene Onegin.

Starting with his Second Violin Concerto (1966), he returned to expressive music in a more broadly dramatic way. He fitted his interest in serialism into this, producing, for example, 12-note rows with implied tonal centres, so that he could build a contrast between tonal and atonal styles into a single piece. He tried this approach in pieces such as Quasi una Sonata (1968).

As early as the First Symphony, Schnittke had begun to combine earlier musical styles in pastiche – quotes from Beethoven symphonies, imitation Baroque music, stylised modern dances, and so on. This polystylism is one of his work’s most controversial features. Most offended are those who feel they own the music he has cited. When his arrangement of Stille Nacht was played near its composer’s birthplace, Schnittke recalled, “It made some people upset that I made some changes in his music, which gave it a much more mournful sense.”

Schnittke received little critical attention in the West before the end of the 1980s. After that, more and more attention was devoted to his music, though some critics derided him for crude structures, unsophisticated themes, and over-sentimentality. What was more significant was that at the same point there was an explosion of interest from a broader public – part of the biggest upsurge this century of enthusiasm for “serious” music, which also brought to prominence composers such as Henryk Górecki and John Tavener.

Popular interest brought wider opportunities for performances and recordings. Schnittke pieces were championed by, among others, the cellist Yo Yo Ma, the violinist Gidon Kremer, and new music stars, the Kronos Quartet. He was also the subject of a film by Donald Sturrock, The Unreal World of Alfred Schnittke.

Why the big explosion of public interest came when it did is a fascinating question. Partly it was because many people were ready for serious music they could actually understand. For decades composers had been pursuing their own musical agendas and scarcely thinking of an audience. A composer who could write dramatic, moving, humorous music, with references to recognisable syles, and who dared to call pieces by the kinds of title people could recognise, would have an enthusiastic welcome. Schnittke genially fitted the bill.

Alfred Schnittke, composer: born Engels, Soviet Republic of Volga Germans, 24 November 1934; married 1956 Galina Koltsina (marriage dissolved 1958), 1961 Irina Katayeva (one son); died Hamburg, Germany, 3 August 1998.