Schnittke Studies

Gavin Dixon, Gavin Dixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317059226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) was arguably the most important Russian composer since Shostakovich, and his music has generated a great deal of academic interest in the years since his death. Schnittke Studies provides a variety of perspectives on the composer and his music. The field is currently diverse and vibrant, and this book demonstrates the range of academic approaches being applied to Schnittke's work and the insights they provide, covering: polystylism, for which Schnittke is best known, the significance of the composer's Christian faith, and detailed formal analyses of key works, with connections drawn between the apparently divergent periods of the composer's career. This book has been prepared as a memorial to Professor Alexander Ivashkin, a leading scholar in the field, who died in 2014, and will be of interest not only to those studying Schnittke's music, but also those with an interest in late Soviet-era music in general.

Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I
Interpretative studies

1 ‘Crucifixus etiam pro nobis’

Representations of the cross in Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 2, “St. Florian”

Ivana Medić

Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 2, “St. Florian”, for soloists, mixed choir, and symphony orchestra, written in honour of Anton Bruckner and premiered on 23 April 1980 in London by Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, is one of the crucial works for understanding the spiritual side of Schnittke’s oeuvre. Born to a Jewish father and a German Catholic mother, but raised as an atheist in the communist Soviet Union, a multinational federation which was nevertheless dominated by an overwhelming influence of Russian culture and language, Schnittke often asserted that he felt like an outsider. An avid reader who developed an interest in various religious and mystical teachings early on, Schnittke nevertheless waited until he was in his late 40s to get baptised.¹ That he chose the religion of his mother, rather than his father, probably had to do with the fact that, according to his biographers, he felt closer to the German than to the Jewish side of his heritage (with Volga-German being his mother tongue).² Moreover, Schnittke’s spiritual awakening was precipitated by the sudden death of his mother in 1972.

1 As discussed by Peter J. Schmelz, there has been some discrepancy regarding the date of Schnittke’s baptism; see Peter J. Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical. Unofficial Soviet Music During the Thaw (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 268, footnote 150.

2 Alexander Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), 17.

Aside from being an expression of Schnittke’s personal spiritual quest, the Symphony No. 2, completed a few years before his baptism, was also part of a broader trend in late Soviet music, namely a fascination with religious and/or mystical topoi. As I have observed in my discussion of Schnittke’s and Arvo Pärt’s ‘Credo’ works, the sheer number of religious pieces composed in the Soviet Union in this period – something over 100 – testifies to the impact of this trend, which was characterised by the composers’ attempts to convey their religious experiences through music, to reconnect with a supposedly lost religious past, and revive the spiritual side of art.³ The spiritual quest was fairly urgent in a society in which atheism rooted in dialectical materialism was the official doctrine and whose citizens had been, more or less, deprived of religious comfort for many decades.⁴ Throughout the 1970s, Schnittke displayed an interest in liturgical genres, such as the Requiem, Mass, or hymn. As revealed in his conversations with Dmitri Shulgin and Alexander Ivashkin, his main philosophical concern at that time was the dialectics of life and death and the idea of overcoming death.⁵ He put an emphasis on the intuitive side of the creative process and stated, ‘The change of my relation towards music meant not only that I changed the technique. The main thing was that it stopped being the matter of primary concern to me and became secondary’.⁶ His new, less collage-based type of musical dramaturgy, labelled by Valentina Kholopova and Evgeniia Chigareva as ‘meditative’,⁷ replaced the sharply conflicting dramaturgy of Schnittke’s earlier works.

Schnittke’s Symphony No. 2 closely relates to his Fourth (1984), not only because both works belong to the genre of vocal symphony, but also because both engage with religious topoi and, by means of quotation, paraphrase, or simulation, reference sacred music. However, in the Symphony No. 2 the composer mostly refers to the Western European and, more specifically, Catholic tradition, thus anticipating (and perhaps announcing) his religious conversion. By contrast, the Fourth Symphony, with its references to Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Jewish chants, reveals Schnittke’s ecumenical conviction, i.e., the idea that a synthesis and harmonious coexistence of various embodiments of God, various confessions, could be achieved.

The Symphony No. 2 is an unusual work, in which Schnittke merged two, seemingly incompatible, genres: the symphony and Catholic Mass. This fusion of independent genres connoting different artistic goals is not easily achieved, and the seams are obvious. The starting point is the symphony divided into six movements and interpolated with segments of the Mass. According to the composer:

This symphony is at the same time a mass, but it is less a mass than a symphony, because it refers to the mass only in the beginning of each movement. I begin by quoting Gregorian chorales (either two at once, or one in canon with itself), and then I add orchestral material that is mostly self-sufficient and has nothing to do with the chorale – or it is but a continuation of the chorale.⁸

3 I have discussed the issue of the late-Soviet religious revival, especially as related to Alfred Schnittke’s and Arvo Part’s works, in: Ivana Medic, ‘I Believe... In What? Alfred Schnittke’s and Arvo Part’s Polystylistic Credos’, Slavonica 16, No. 2 (2010), 96–111.

4 Medic, Slavonica (2010), 96.

5 Dmitri Shulgin, Gody neizvestnosti Alfreda Shnitke, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Delovaia liga, 2004); Alexander Ivashkin, Besedy s Al’fredom Shnitke (Conversations with Alfred Schnittke). 2nd, rev. ed. (Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 2003).

6 Quoted in Valentina Kholopova and Evgeniia Chigareva, Al’fred Shnitke. Ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1990), 93.

7 See Kholopova and Chigareva (1990), 93.

8 Quoted in liner notes to the CD Alfred Schnittke — Symphony No. 2 ‘St. Florian’s’, BIS-CD-667.

As noted by Kholopova and Chigareva, “The Gregorian mass ‘carved’ into the Symphony No. 2 connotes a temporal distance and becomes an object of both admiration and reflection”.⁹ Schnittke sought inspiration and solace in the idealised distant past, as a means of reviving and reaffirming the symphonic genre. His idiosyncratic half-Mass/half-symphony could also be understood as a result of his quest for his elusive national, cultural, and religious identities. As testified by his biographers, Schnittke felt ‘cut off’ both from the symphonic matrix of the German/Austrian symphonic tradition (represented here by the composer who inspired him – Anton Bruckner), and from the Catholic confession and its cultural heritage. Schnittke’s uneasiness is obvious as, throughout the Symphony, he vacillates between the paradigms of symphony and Mass. This crossbred frame is then filled with quotations, allusions, and Schnittke’s ‘original’, (but, as we shall see, derivative) themes, featuring a mixture of pretonal, tonal, and posttonal styles. Having been trained within the Soviet system, where the symphony was understood as an ‘atheist Mass’,¹⁰ Schnittke gave himself an impossible task to merge this ‘substitute for the Mass’ with the very thing that it was meant to substitute. Although the final result is an ambitious yet incongruent mixture of styles, and thus Schnittke’s Second cannot realistically be grouped among his best works,¹¹ it is beyond doubt that Schnittke’s fascination with the Mass was profound, and his desire to share his religious feelings with his listeners sincere.

The story of the genesis of this work is well known and often quoted. Schnittke was inspired by a visit to the monastery of St Florian in Austria,¹² where Anton Bruckner spent much of his professional life, and where he was buried:

We arrived at St Florian at dusk, and the entrance to Bruckner’s tomb was already closed. The cold, dark baroque church was filled with a mystic atmosphere. Behind the wall an invisible choir was singing the evening mass – ‘missa invisibile’ … A year later I received a commission from the BBC Symphony Orchestra to write something for a concert with G. Rozhdestvensky. I thought of a piano concerto. Rozhdestvensky suggested a work dedicated to Bruckner, but I could not think of anything, and then he said ‘Maybe something related to St Florian?’ That was it, and I decided to write an ‘invisible mass’ – a symphony with a choral background. Six movements of the symphony follow the ordinarium of the Mass, and the choir parts quote the liturgical melodies. Can a form which ends with words ‘Give us peace’ ever grow old?¹³

9 Kholopova and Chigareva (1990), 163.

10 In his book on the symphonic genre in the Soviet union, Mark Aronovskii argued that in the modern (bourgeois, industrial, atheist) times, the symphony had actually become a substitute for the Mass (i.e., an atheist Mass). See Mark Aronovskii, Simfonicheskie iskania — Problemi zhanra simfonii v sovetskoi muzyke 1960–1975 godov (Leningrad: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1979), 35.

11 For example, Richard Taruskin has called the Symphony No. 2 “an unbearably maudlin six-movement meditation on the Latin Mass.” See Richard Taruskin, ‘After Everything’, in Defining Russia Musically — Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 103–104.

12 http://www.stift-st-florian.at/en.html. Accessed 4 November 2013.

13 Quoted after kholopova and Chigareva (1990), 161–162.

Despite being one of Schnittke’s most intriguing large-scale works, the Symphony No. 2 has attracted little analytical attention; only a handful of authors – none of them from the West – have engaged with this work. Hence, the analytical study of Schnittke’s entire oeuvre by Valentina Kholopova and Evgeniia Chigareva,¹⁴ an important book on Schnittke’s symphonic music by Dziun Tiba,¹⁵ a textbook by Elena Barash and Tatiana Urbakh,¹⁶ an unpublished doctoral thesis by Alla Voblikova,¹⁷ as well as my own doctoral thesis,¹⁸ provide departure points for the present chapter. Among these authors, only Dziun Tiba has discussed representation of the cross, i.e., the Crucifix in this symphony (and his analysis is merely reproduced by Barash and Urbakh). Even the authors who have analysed representations of the cross in other of Schnittke’s works from the 1970s, such as Georg Borchardt (who compared the use of this symbol in Schnittke’s and Mahler’s music)¹⁹ and Gottfried Eberle (who discussed the depiction of the crucifix in Schnittke’s Piano Quintet)²⁰ have refrained from even mentioning the Symphony No. 2. This lack of analytical interest is quite surprising, because Schnittke himself emphasised that the image of the crucifix determined the form and content of the entire work:

The entire harmonic content of the symphony, as well as its overall form, were constructed on the principle of the crucifix. How is it possible to build a chord on the basis of a cross? In this case it means that two non-symmetrical chords are interlinked, but their link results in symmetry, and this works in horizontal movement again, so that optically a crucifix is formed. I obeyed this exactly. It was very important for me to discover such a constructive principle, especially for the ‘Credo.’ Everything that happens in the vertical is strictly controlled. Everything must correspond to the principle of the crucifix.²¹

14 Kholopova and Chigareva (1990), 161–170.

15 Dziun Tiba, Simfonicheskoe tvorchestvo Al ’freda Shnitke: Opyt intertekstual ’nogo analiza (The Symphonic Works of Alfred Schnittke: An Attempt at Intertextual Analysis) (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2004), 68–73.

16 Elena Barash and Tatiana Urbakh, Simfonii Al freda Shnitke: mysl kompozitora i analiticheskiy kommentariy (The Symphonies of Alfred Schnittke: the composer’s approach and analytical commentary) (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2009), 24–25, 55.

17 Alla Bronislavovna Voblikova, ‘Simfonicheskie kontsep...