"More than 10 years after his death, Alfred Schnittke remains an enigma form any musicians and music lovers. Was he Russian or German? And to what musical camp did he belong? What role did his music play in the history of the 20th century? to these and similar questions, his string quartets will clearly provide at least the beginnings of answers.
"Schnittke’s claim to be Russian rests on an accident of history. After acceding to the throne of Russia in 1762, Catherine II, née the princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, encouraged the colonization of several Russian territories. As a result, many Germans settled on the banks of the volga. In 1924, lenin created the volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. it was abolished in 1941 by Stalin when, in the middle of the Second World War, Hitler’s troops began to invade Russia. it was in Engels, the capital of this German enclave in the USSR, southeast of Moscow, that Alfred Schnittke was born, in 1934. His mother was a Catholic of German origin. Because his father was a German Jew, his parents were exempted from the deportation ordered by Stalin. Schnittke was thus raised on Russian soil, except for the two years he spent in Vienna with his family between 1946 and 1948. 'Like my German forebears,' he told his biographer Alexander Ivashkin, 'I live in Russia. I can speak and write Russian far better than German. But I am not Russian.'
"Schnittke studied music in Engels; in Vienna, where he discovered Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern; and, especially, in Moscow, where he attended the Conservatory from 1953 to 1961 before teaching there for a decade. All his youth was colored by the fear spread by Stalin’s regime, and by its effects on music. The union of Soviet Composers was powerful, exercising its rigorous control over music by, for instance, accusing Shostakovich of formalism, and by giving Prokofiev good reason to regret having returned home. Schnittke, a great admirer of these two masters, also discovered Stravinsky, whose music was beginning to be played in the USSR, and deepened his knowledge of Viennese serialism and of the Polish avant-garde.
"From the beginning of the 1960s, Schnittke’s music, though relegated to the sidelines for being 'non-official' and too western by the union of Composers, was appreciated by the public, particularly his film scores, and played by the great virtuosos of his country. twenty years later his purgatory ended; he was hailed worldwide as Shostakovich’s successor and, along with Edison Denisov and Sofia Gubaidulina, as one of the pillars of the new Soviet music.
"Schnittke was very attracted by the religion and music of the Orthodox Church, and followed in Mahler’s footsteps by converting to Catholicism in 1982. 'My Jewish half gives me no peace,' he said. 'I know none of the three Jewish languages—but I look like a typical Jew.'
"In 1985, at the age of 51, Schnittke was hit by the first of a series of strokes which forced him, little by little, to slow down. Five years later, he was offered the post of professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik und theater in Hamburg, where he moved, and where he died in 1998. His funeral in Moscow drew an immense crowd, come to pay homage to the greatest Russian composer of the end of the 20th century.
"During almost half a century, Schnittke composed more than 250 works, from opera to chamber music to film music to concertos. An often pessimistic mystic who described himself as being 'born in the wrong place,' he did not seek 'to react against a rigid system' through his music but rather 'to act as though the system just doesn't exist at all.' While drawing inspiration from the past, and exploring the many esthetic facets of his day, he forged a personal language he called polystylistic.
"Between 1966 and 1989, Schnittke composed four string quartets. (They had been preceded by two unfinished attempts.) In 1971 he added the 'Canon in Memoriam Igor Stravinsky' to his works for string quartet, and in 1997, 'Variations'.
"He wrote the first string quartet for the Borodin Quartet, which premiered it in 1967 in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg). Though he gave each of the three movements of this dodecaphonic work somewhat Baroque titles, it squarely belongs to the new ways of the West. It follows the procedures of Witold Lutoslawski, of Krzysztof Penderecki, and of the Viennese school and its heirs, such as Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, including a vast panophy of nuances, such as pizzicato and glissando, and of effects, such as the mute and the bow on the fingerboard or bridge.
"Right from its very expressive introduction, the first movement, Sonata, strikes the listener with an impression of the sheer inventiveness of its young (he was 32) composer. A play of subtle nuances and the endlessly refreshed sonic effects recall both the legacy of Schoenberg and the expressive chromaticism of Bartók’s last quartets. This is notable in the second section of this movement, which is dominated by a drone ornamented with trills and glissandi. the movement ends fortissimo on a tutti that employs all the 12 chromatic tones of the scale.
"With its Webernian pointillism, the second movement, Canon, continues this sonic exploration in quite a rhapsodic way. this leads into the Cadenza. this third movement, reminiscent of the great figurative flights of the Baroque toccatas, is based on a Klangfarbenmelodie (a tone color melody) dear to the Viennese school: a phrase rapidly circulates from one instrument to another to form a long, monodic ribbon. The astounding coda is interspersed with six long dramatic silences and ends up quietly resolved on a unison C, a pole apart from the mood of the opening movement.
"Fourteen years later, Schnittke returned to the string quartet genre with a work dedicated to the memory of a friend, the Soviet filmmaker Larissa Efimovna Chepitko (1938-1979). She was killed in a car crash, and Schnittke’s work expressed his revolt and affliction at such a brutal loss. It served as a required piece at the international String Quartet Competition in Évian (France), and was premiered there in 1980 by the Muir Quartet, from the USA.
"The alternation of slow and fast episodes of the four movements of this intense funerary lamentation recalls the structure of the church sonatas of the Baroque era. The first movement, a kind of canon of harmonic sound, gives way to a generous recitative of intervals sounded by the first violin. A virulent and particularly dramatic Agitato follows. From this riot of strings with, as foundations, the chord of C minor, there emerges a psalm-like theme recalling the 'Panikhida' ('Requiem') of the Russian Orthodox Church. A second more contrapuntal section, dominated by a humming flight of trills, introduces a vigorous popular theme alla Stravinsky and a rapid recapitulation of the two preceding themes. After a long silence, the coda clearly sounds the liturgical motive before drowning it in a tumultuous riot of sound.
"The third movement is a dolorous chorale in double stops, dominated by abrasive minor seconds. the cello and the viola lead this somber funeral procession. It is soon joined by a moving duo of violins, and then climbs to a climax with violently pounding chords and arabesques.
"The final Moderato begins with a muted whisper; its dynamic marking is a quadruple piano. The Slavic psalmody, the recitatives, the allusions to the professional mourners who wail at funerals, the solemn chords and the Russian themes of the previous movements: all mix together to end this somber quartet as it began.
"Schnittke composed his third string quartet in 1983. It was commissioned by the Society for New Music, Mannheim (Germany) and first performed by the Hungarian quartet Eder. In this work, more tonal than his previous quartets, Schnittke uses a procedure he was fond of and of which he gave us a foretaste in the second quartet: a kind of polystylistic collage. in its first eight measures, the first movement quotes, in succession, the Stabatmater of Roland de Lassus, the Grosse Fuge of Beethoven, and the notes D-eb-C-B or, in German nomenclature D-S-C-H, the musical signature which Dmitri Shostakovitch incorporated in several of his works (S-C-H is the equivalent of Ш, the single letter of the Cyrillic alphabet with which his family name begins). On top of these musical, contrapuntal, and harmonic borrowing, in homage to three great figures in the history of music, Schnittke superimposed his very personal language, comprised of glissandi, disintegrations, trembling trills, atonal elements, and plays of nuance.
"The Agitato,with its neoclassical sound, irresistibly evokes a wild Beethoven scherzo. The last movement, pesante, introduces a new,more rustic theme alluding equally to Mahler and to Shostakovich. Against a background of fifths, tonal scales, chromaticism, and dissonant chords, all the preceding themes are heard and then disintegrate in an astonishing variety of nuances and attacks.
"Schnittke wrote his last string quartet in 1989 in response to a commission from the prestigious Wiener Musikverein (the Viennese Musical Association). It was premiered in the same year by the Alban Berg Quartet. This work, which consists of five very contrapuntalmovements of which three are marked lento, departs in style from the two preceding quartets and marks Schnittke’s return to the esthetic of Viennese serialism.
"After an expressionistic and quite delicate lento, an energetic Allegro rich in imitation unites the lyricism of Berg with the chromaticism and spirited outbursts of Shostakovich’s quartets. A new lento, enlivened by quarter tones and homophonic passages, recreates the contemplative mood of the first movement. The brief vivace, a tormented interlude dominated by an incisive rhythm and melodies with jagged chromatic intervals, evaporates, giving way to another lento. This last movement uses, sometimes, a harmonic language rich in chromaticisms and glissandi, and at other times, spare but always expressive canonic writing. A brief and peaceful chorale evoking the music of the Renaissance is brutally interrupted before gently fading away on an A embroidered by quarter tones by the first violin. This work, steeped in despair, is one of the last that Schnittke wrote in Russia before leaving his homeland forever for Hamburg." (Irène Brisson, tr. Sean McCutcheon. From the liner notes.)
Performers: Quatuor Molinari
1.1. String Quartet No. 3: I. Andante
1.2. String Quartet No. 3: II. Agitato
1.3. String Quartet No. 3: III. Pesante
1.4. String Quartet No. 1: I. Sonata
1.5. String Quartet No. 1: II. Canon
1.6. String Quartet No. 1: III. Cadenza
1.7. String Quartet No. 2: I. Moderato
1.8. String Quartet No. 2: II. Agitato
1.9. String Quartet No. 2: III. Mesto
1.10. String Quartet No. 2: IV. Moderato
2.1. String Quartet No. 4: I. Lento
2.2. String Quartet No. 4: II. Allegro
2.3. String Quartet No. 4: III. Lento
2.4. String Quartet No. 4: IV. Vivace
2.5. String Quartet No. 4: V. Lento
2.6. Canon In Memoriam Igor Stravinsky: Lento
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