Revolutionary Musical Voice Is Silenced

Alfred Schnittke, the most prominent Russian composer after Shostakovich, died relatively young on Monday in a hospital in Hamburg, Germany, after having suffered a stroke. He was 63. But he was a very worn 63. Schnittke’s music, which at its most exorbitant presented a simultaneous reflection of the world’s crazy vitality and a single soul’s deepest spiritual yearning, had begun losing life a few years ago.

I recall Schnittke during his last trip to the United States, when he visited New York for a week in 1994. During that time, the New York Philharmonic premiered his Seventh Symphony under Kurt Masur and the National Symphony, conducted by Schnittke’s very close friend, Mstislav Rostropovich, performed the Sixth.

It was a cold snowy winter in New York, and Schnittke, glum and weakened from strokes, appeared much older than his then 59 years. Both of his symphonies were equally dispiriting, so unlike his arresting earlier music.

Schnittke’s First Symphony, for instance, had exhilarated and outraged Russia, and I like to think of its premiere 20 years earlier on a reportedly frigid February evening in Gorky, the grimly industrial city now called Nizhniy Novgorod, as a kind of musical Potemkin, firing the first loud canon shot in a musical and, ultimately, cultural and political revolution.

That symphony, which lasts about an hour, perfectly captured the chaos that was roiling under the surface of outwardly controlled Soviet society. Highly theatrical, it seems to come from all periods of history at once and makes room for an raucous improvising jazz band as well. The fourth movement begins with symphony brass players walking onstage playing a funeral march full of crashing dissonances. It ends in apocalypse, a clashing collage of jazz, Haydn and a deafening Dies Irae. The Soviets banned the symphony, but the word was out.

The Schnittke who came to New York two decades later was a world-famous figure in music, but much of the life seemed gone from him and his music. The quiet and spare Sixth Symphony was a study in uncertainty. Thin phrases begin, peter out, begin again, peter out again. The Seventh was only a little different. Instead of dissipating, incomplete contrapuntal lines stick together in clusters. Schnittke was next to incommunicative during his stay. He left early and in a wheelchair, after slipping on an icy sidewalk.

It all seemed so sad, and was made even more so to me by the fact that I had recently returned from a trip to Russia, where there was very little interest in Schnittke anymore.

When Schnittke was in disfavor in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Russians flocked, even though they might be in danger, to hear his music. His stylistic diversity (Schnittke called it polystylistic) offered a window into the world. His spiritual intensity gripped a secular society. His music was so very Russian, yet so worldly. But the New Russia didn’t need the windows, didn’t care so much about the soul anymore and didn’t want to be reminded of the past.

Still, neither the old Soviets nor the New Russians could silence Schnittke. Nor could his poor health. As discouraged as I was by his New York visit and the new symphonies, the sound of those symphonies has stayed with me. I haven’t heard them since, but I cannot forget those phrases in the Sixth that dispersed into the air like strewn flowers and those in the Seventh that clumped together in exclamation points. I didn’t understand this music then and don’t now. But I know it is important and will last.

Schnittke went through many changes. He was a man never comfortable in the world. Born to German parents in Russia, he lived part of his youth in Vienna. He was half Jewish. And these cultural divisions remained unresolved. His musical life, too, was cut up. He composed music for some 60 Soviet films in order to make a living.

And yet all this conflict served him. The resulting polystylism meant that he could do, and did, anything he wanted in his music. Meanwhile, his lack of cultural identity made him a seeker. He was a spiritual delver. The cabala, mystical Christianity, the I Ching all fascinated him. He was intensely drawn to the Faust legend and wrote a fabulous Faust opera.

Indeed, Schnittke in his short life dug deep into a very wide culture and wrote much. There were ultimately eight symphonies, a great many concertos, overwhelmingly intense chamber music (the Kronos Quartet has a new survey of Schnittke’s string quartets on Nonesuch that provides a useful overview of the composer’s development during his most important years), three operas and some very interesting incidental music for the theater. And let me say it again: It will last.