Search Results

Using its final movement, Postludio, as an anchor, the book’s final chapter discusses the Soviet reception of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1. It focuses on the comparisons the music evoked with Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker and the 1986 postapocalyptic Soviet film Letters from a Dead Man (Pisʹma mertvogo cheloveka, dir. Konstantin Lopushansky). The chapter also traces Schnittke’s life and works into the 1980s and 1990s, with emphasis on his later compositions that continued the trail marked by the Concerto Grosso no. 1, particularly the sequence of six concerti grossi he wrote until the end of his life. The chapter concludes by examining the reception of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 in the recent past, when it was allied with the Holocaust, zombies, and the macabre.

The second movement of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, Toccata, frantically evokes the baroque past, leavened with heavy borrowings from contemporary musical practice, particularly the micropolyphony of György Ligeti. This chapter begins to account for the distinctive musical language of the movement and the entire composition, its basic building blocks and its central structural and stylistic features. It addresses the music’s sources in Schnittke’s film music, including scores to a film about Rasputin (Agony, dir. Elem Klimov); an ecological cartoon (Butterfly, dir. Andrei Khrzhanovsky); a film about World War II (Ascent, dir. Larisa Shepitko); and The Tale of the Moor of Peter the Great (dir. Alexander Mitta). This background informs the chapter’s critique of Schnittke’s goal to bridge the gap between high and low in this music and his related goal to reconcile his paid job writing for film with his largely unpaid calling as a serious composer.

One of the most distinctive, and most famous, movements in Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 is the fifth, Rondo, which returns to the frantic baroque gestures of the second movement but with a promise of redemption. Most notably, these gestures, among them thrumming strings, are interrupted by the seductive strains of a tango, resulting in one of Schnittke’s most obvious and yet most effective polystylistic collisions. The Rondo points to the larger philosophical questions raised by the score. This chapter examines the construction and meaning of the Rondo, as well as its critical reception, focusing particularly on the larger implications of its clashes between high and low. The chapter closes by examining choreographer John Neumeier’s use of the Concerto Grosso no. 1 in his 1985 ballet Othello.

This chapter advances the argument of Sonic Overload by turning to the interactions between art and popular music in Schnittke’s Symphony No. 1, Requiem (1975), Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977), Piano Concerto (1979), Symphony no. 3 (1976–81), and Faust Cantata (Seid nüchtern und wachet, 1983), as well as several of his film scores. It considers for the first time Schnittke’s ongoing negotiations between high and low across his entire career, giving careful scrutiny to his declaration in the late 1980s that “pop culture is a good disguise for any kind of devilry.” Schnittke’s change of heart, from embracing popular music—and specifically jazz and rock—from the late 1960s through the 1970s, to expressing grave concerns about its effects a decade later, mirrored the sentiments of many. In the turbulent final years of the Soviet Union, rock supplanted poetry as the conscience of the nation yet it still inspired deep anxiety among those embracing traditional Soviet conceptions of being “cultured.” Schnittke’s apprehensions about popular music in the 1980s stemmed from its growing presence in the fragmented late-Soviet soundscape and its growing prestige among newly influential tastemakers, chief among them younger intellectuals and other cultural figures. The elevation of pop music in the USSR (as in the West) expanded a growing generational divide. Schnittke’s own rejection of popular music seems to have been instigated in part by his son, Andrey, who in the early 1980s was a member of the noted Moscow rock group Center (Tsentr), a fact overlooked by previous scholars.

A focused point for the two soloists, the Cadenza movement of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 further engages with its themes of autonomy and control, motion and arrest, consonance and dissonance. This chapter considers the first performances of the Concerto Grosso no. 1, focusing on those by Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko in both the Soviet Union and Europe, specifically the 1977 European tour of the two soloists with the Lithuanian Chamber Ensemble conducted by Saulius Sondeckis. The chapter also discusses the early performances of the composition by violinists Oleh Krysa and Liana Isakadze, who first recorded it in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Schnittke was embarrassed by how well the composition did, telling Kremer that he now would need to write something unpopular, for “it is too dangerous to ride a wave of success.”

The third movement of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, Recitativo, lays bare the soloists, foregrounding and undercutting them simultaneously. More strangely, the movement ends with quotations from Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and from Berg’s Violin Concerto just before its climax. This chapter further discusses Schnittke’s sketches for the Concerto Grosso no. 1. Particular attention is given to Schnittke’s reference in these sketches to Adelbert von Chamisso’s novella “Peter Schlemiel,” and the parallels that might be drawn between it and the Concerto Grosso no. 1. This chapter also considers more fully what this composition says about Schnittke’s polystylism at the time and his changing accounts of balancing often irreconcilable opposites. What does it all mean? Was he earnest or not? Schnittke insisted that he viewed all of the themes in the Concerto Grosso no. 1 “completely seriously,” but he was as prone to laughing as crying in the face of absurdity.