Schnittke: Quintet for Piano and Strings (1972–76)
Moderato –
Tempo di Valse –
Andante –
Lento –
Moderato pastorale
At the end of the FSQ’s first visit to the USSR, in November 1976, we were guests of the Union of Soviet Composers at the House of Composers in Moscow. We were entertained there by a number of the leading Soviet composers of the time (organised for us by Irina Shostakovich, the composer’s widow), and treated to about five hours of their quartet music. For us the most striking and memorable contribution was a brief piece by Schnittke – the Canon in memory of I. F. Stravinsky (1971) – and we were able to give it its Western première not long afterwards. He was probably the youngest of those present, and represented a marked turning away from the post-Shostakovich idiom from which so many of his older colleagues seemed unable to break free. Indeed, at the time he was not at all accepted by the Soviet Establishment; although since then, of course, he has become one of the most well-known of all later twentieth century composers. He had been a Professor of Composition at the Moscow Conservatoire and also worked in the electronic music studio there. In the late seventies both the Fitzwilliam and our former colleague at York, Prof. David Blake, developed a personal friendship with Al’fred; and in May 1979 we were able to reciprocate the Soviet hospitality when he became our guest at York University for a few days.
The piano quintet was begun the year after the Canon, and finally completed four years later – not long before the FSQ first met him. During that time he was also at work on a Requiem in memory of his mother, Mariya Iosifovna Vogel – and indeed this quintet is also a deeply touching memorial to her: she had died on 17 September 1972 of a stroke – as also did others in the composer’s family (he himself suffered at least three during his lifetime). He wrote that his intention to write “a simple, but earnest [memorial] posed an almost insoluble problem”, even though the first movement was completed “almost without effort”. However,
I was unable to continue because I had to take what I wrote from imaginary spaces defined in terms of sound and put it into psychological space as defined by life, where excruciating pain seems almost unserious, and one must fight for the right to use dissonance, consonance, and assonance.
Much of the quintet’s musical language indeed reveals a marked change from his earlier serial works – not least from the little Canon itself; although the latter’s occasional use of quartertones spills over to a far greater extent in the quintet, at times almost evoking a sense of painful weeping in the opening Moderato. Schnittke’s love of Bach can be heard – via the familiar B-A-C-H cryptogram – in the unlikely setting of a naive waltz, which has been described by Alexander Demchenko as “conjuring up a haze of fragile memories from the days of 78 RPM gramophone records and touchingly heartfelt outpourings”. The composer himself admitted to “outpourings of grief” in the two slower movements which follow; but what to make of the eerie, childlike, hypnotic stillness of the final passacaglia? Al’fred Garrievich himself suggests
……only fading shadows of a tragic sensation that has already fled.
© Alan George
