Alfred Schnittke
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Alfred Garyevich Schnittke (Russian: Альфре́д Га́рриевич Шни́тке, November 24, 1934 – August 3, 1998) was a Russian-German Jewish composer. [link]
Biography
Schnittke's father was born in Frankfurt to a Jewish family of Russian origin who had moved to the USSR in 1926, and his mother was a Volga German born in Russia.Alfred Schnittke was born in Engels in the Volga-German Republic of the RSFSR, Soviet Union. He began his musical education in 1946 in Vienna where his father, a journalist and translator, had been posted. In 1948 the family moved to Moscow. He completed his graduate work in composition at the Moscow Conservatory in 1961 and taught there from 1962 to 1972. Thereafter he supported himself mainly by composing film scores. Schnittke converted to Christianity and possessed deeply held mystic beliefs which influenced his music. In the 1960s he studied at the Moscow Conservatory where, among his teachers in composition, was Evgeny Golubev.
Schnittke was often the target of the Soviet bureaucracy. His First Symphony was effectively banned by the Composers' Union, and after he abstained from a Composers' Union vote in 1980 he was banned from travelling outside of the USSR. In 1985, Schnittke suffered a stroke which left him in a coma. He was declared clinically dead on several occasions but recovered and continued to compose. In 1990, Schnittke left Russia and settled in Hamburg. His health remained poor, however, and he suffered several more strokes before his death on August 3, 1998 in Hamburg.
Schnittke's early music shows the strong influence of Dmitri Shostakovich, but after the visit of the Italian composer Luigi Nono to the USSR he took up the serial technique in works such as Music for Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1964). However, Schnittke soon became dissatisfied with what he termed the "puberty rites of serial self-denial" and moved on to a new style which has been called "polystylism", where music of various different styles past and present are juxtaposed in proximity (the composer once wrote "The goal of my life is to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my neck in doing so"). The first concert work to use the polystylistic technique was the Second Violin Sonata, Quasi una sonata (1967-1968), but the influence of Schnittke's film work on his stylistic development is shown by the fact that much of the music of this work was derived from a score for the film Glass Accordion. He continued to develop the polystylistic technique in works such as the epic First Symphony (1969-1972) and First Concerto Grosso (1977), but also composed more stylistically unified works such as the Piano Quintet (1972-1976), written in memory of his recently deceased mother.
In the 1980s, Schnittke's music began to become more widely known abroad, thanks in part to the work of emigre Soviet artists such as the violinists Gidon Kremer and Mark Lubotsky. Despite constant illness, he produced a large amount of music, including important works such as the Second (1980) and Third (1983) String Quartets and the String Trio (1985); the Faust Cantata (1983), which he later incorporated in his opera Historia von D. Johann Fausten; the ballet Peer Gynt (1985-1987); the Third (1981), Fourth (1984) and Fifth (1988) Symphonies (the last of which incorporates his Fourth Concerto Grosso); and the Viola (1985) and First Cello (1985-1986) Concertos.
As his health further deteriorated, Schnittke's music started to abandon much of the extroversion of his polystylism and retreat into a more withdrawn, bleak style. The Fourth Quartet (1989) and Sixth (1992), Seventh (1993) and Eighth (1994) symphonies are good examples of this, and some Schnittke scholars such as Gerald McBurney have argued that it is the late works which will ultimately be the most influential parts of Schnittke's output. After a further stroke in 1994 left him almost completely paralysed, Schnittke largely ceased to compose, though some short works emerged in 1997 and a Ninth Symphony was left incomplete at his death.
Operas
- *The Eleventh Commandment, opera in two acts, libretto by Marina Churova, Georgy Ansimov and Alfred Schnittke, (1962)
- *Arrangement: Peter Tchaikovsky, Queen of Spades, opera in 2 acts after Alexander Pushkin (1977)
- *Life with an Idiot, opera in 2 acts (4 scenes) by Viktor Yerofeyev after his likenamed short story (in Russian, 1991)
- *Historia von D. Johann Fausten, opera in 3 acts, a prologue and an epilogue by Jörg Morgener (Jurjen Köchel]] and Alfred Schnittke based on the likenamed book published by Johann Spies in 1587 (in German, the third acr also in a Russian version by Victor Schnittke). Electronic music by Andrei Schnittke, (1991-1994)
- *Gesualdo, opera in 7 tableaux, a prologue and an epilogue by Richard Bletschacher (in German, 1993)
Further reading
External links
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