Alfred Schnittke at 80

Today would have been Alfred Schnittke’s 80th birthday. He didn’t live to see it of course; he died in 1998 following a decade of desperately poor health. But he’s still with us in spirit. His music has gone up and down in popularity since his death, but it has never disappeared. In fact, a handful of his works, covering a variety of genres, have achieved central positions in the repertoire. His historical status is secure.

Schnittke has always been a controversial figure. In the years since his death, the new music world has increasingly polarised into conservative and progressive tendencies. Composers of tonal neo-Romantic music have been embraced by the establishment (at least in the English-speaking world) and no longer feel the need to make excuses or highbrow theoretical justifications for what they do. Schnittke is not among that company, but for many of his critics, the concept of polystylism is just such a justification, an intellectual disguise for reactionary tendencies.

He really belongs with the Modernists. But today’s advocates of Frankfurt School progressive values are increasingly besieged and isolated, and have little time for a composer who was very consciously at the edge of that world. In fact, Schnittke actively sought to destabilise the progressive paradigm, to challenge its insularity and claims to superiority. So perhaps it is of little surprise that he has ended up largely excluded from what remains of it.

Schnittke came to global attention in the mid-1980s. He was the right man at the right time for the classical music world. Just as organisations – orchestras and record labels in particular – began to acknowledge the cultural stagnation they were causing through the continual recycling of an Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Schnittke provided a revealing, and damning, self-image through which to play out that Angst. The whole phenomenon was a process, a fast one at that, and transience was inevitable. Another problem was the marketing line that presented Schnittke as the heir to Shostakovich, a valid comparison in some ways, but one with little relevance past the fall of the Soviet Union.

The fact that Schnittke lived and worked through the Soviet times has added an extra dimension to the debates about progression and reaction, populism and artistic worth. The American scholar Peter J. Schmelz argues that Schnittke’s advocates push his dissidence too far, and that his use of tonal idioms aligns Schnittke’s music with state cultural policy. Put crudely, polystylism is Socialist Realism.

It is a provocative polemic that contains a good deal of unhelpful exaggeration itself. Listening to Russian academics railing against this view brings back unwelcome memories of the Shostakovich Testimony debate, though it is unlikely to come to that. But Schmelz’s argument demonstrates how difficult it is to untangle the cultural politics of music written in Soviet times. Schnittke’s own political views were conservative, though he would probably use the term “traditional” himself, but his artistic outlook was not. He was much like Stravinsky, determined to retain and promote established cultural values, but in radical ways.

Perhaps that is why Schnittke’s reputation is so complex today, and so different in different parts of the world. In Russia, he is still a central figure in new music, but different generations approach his music with different agendas. However indifferent he himself felt about the political struggles of the 1980s, his music became a symbol of resistance, and many in Russia still hear it in those terms. That has caused a generation divide, with many younger musicians treating Schnittke as music of the Soviet past, with little relevance to the new Russia. On the other hand, the explicitly religious music he was writing (often covertly) from the 1970s parallels the resurgence of the Orthodox Church, creating a continuity into modern times.

In the West, Schnittke remains closely connected with the Russian diaspora. His global reputation was established by leading Soviet musicians touring his music in the 1980s, particularly Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet and Mark Lubotsky. Another important name here is Mstislav Rostropovich, already living in the West, but as keen as any of his colleagues in Russia to promote Schnittke’s work.

Many performers of Schnittke’s generation continue to champion his music. Their recorded legacy is also formidable. Almost all of Schnittke’s major works have extensive discographies, and in many cases the benchmark recording is the first, with the dedicatees providing versions that have yet to be surpassed.

Younger performers needn’t lose heart though. Schnittke’s music demands interpretation, it needs performers who can give individuality and emotion (another factor that puts it at the peripheries of Modernism). There are many significant textual issues with Schnittke’s scores, because whenever a performer suggested a change in rehearsal, he invariably said yes. He wasn’t interested in performers simply giving a presentation of the notes on the page, he expected them to live the music and to reimagine it in every performance. As a result, the recorded legacy of the music’s first performers is not definitive, whatever its quality. Performers continue to be drawn to Schnittke’s music for just this reason, and every new performance and recording has something different to say about it.

Some lament the passing of Schnittke’s period of extreme popularity, and it is a great shame that his orchestral music is not played more. But, from the sheer number and quality of recent recordings, it is clear that his solo, chamber and choral music is as popular as ever. Schnittke’s legacy remains complex, with scholars and commentators likely to debate its significance and value for years to come, but the music itself lives on because it continues to inspire and engage musicians from one generation to the next.

Saving Schnittke for the Nation. But which one? And why?

My heart sank to read of a sale at Sotheby’s in London at the end of this month, at which will be auctioned, among other treasures, Schnittke’s working manuscripts for his Faust Cantata. My first reaction was that these must be priceless, but closer inspection reveals that they are likely to go for £20-30K. As yet very few of Schnittke’s sketches and working scores have been made available to researchers, and the now burgeoning field of Schnittke scholarship often finds itself speculating about issues of creative psychology that could probably be determined through access to existing documents. So to see this, like many other collections before it, change hands from one anonymous private collector to another is galling.

So what’s the solution? Should public libraries or national institutions rally (and spend) to bring these resources into the public domain? If we are to save Schnittke’s manuscripts for the nation, which nation should we save them for? Russia, perhaps, or Germany. This is, after all, one of Schnittke’s most “German” works, but it was written in Moscow. The way that Handel’s work is celebrated provides a model, with museums dedicated to his work in both Germany and Britain, the former at his birthplace in Halle, the latter at his Brook Street home in Mayfair. It could be argued that both countries are being very generous with their precious resources, given that the composer wrote in a predominantly Italian style, wherever he was based.

In the UK, the British Library is the great bastion of source materials: autographs, first editions and the like, and it has an excellent track record of collecting these materials with little concern for the specifically British interests that they might serve. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert are all well represented, along with Purcell and Elgar. But such collections are the exception rather than the rule, and it doesn’t take much digging into the provenance of these manuscripts before magnanimous private benefactors start appearing. The fact is that, however historically significant such documents are, the assumption of our culture is, and always has been, that they are private property, historical significance equating monetary value.

Private collectors have an important part to play, not least in preserving these historical artefacts for future generations, whatever their own motivations might be. No doubt the motivations to amass private collections of historically valuable documents are diverse. It is difficult to imagine anybody buying this collection for its aesthetic value; much of it seems to consist of pages of text typed on an old Soviet typewriter and then scribbled on in pencil. You wouldn’t want it on your wall.

But the private provenance of many valuable documents in publically accessible collections demonstrates that collectors often have posterity in mind. The most significant collection of Schnittke’s sketches and drafts to have surfaced in recent years is that now at the Juilliard School, part of their extensive manuscript collection. There are all sorts of treasures in there, and in fact, when the acquisition was announced, the Schnittke contingent didn’t even get a mention in the high profile press coverage, where the even more impressive Bach and Beethoven manuscripts took centre stage. The source that time round was Bruce Kovner, a hedge-fund billionaire who had apparently been buying up every significant musical manuscript to have appeared at auction for some years. Chances are there are other wealthy collectors out there keen to get their names attached to portions of major library collections, and with that a small place in musical history. Let’s hope the lucky buyer at Sotheby’s next week has something similar planned for their acquisitions.