The Sound of Russian Fury

By Michael Walsh

There is something so tenebrous, so portentous, so downright antagonistic about Alfred Schnittke's music that it is almost a wonder anybody either performs it or listens to it. In Schnittke's dark, Russo-Germanic artistic universe, strings do not soar, they brood; woodwinds do not chirp, they protest; brass does not shine, it glowers. Created in the caldron of Central Europe, his music speaks of epic battles and terrible defeats; it is Kutuzov and Napoleon at Borodino, Von Paulus at Stalingrad. Why, then, is it suddenly so popular?

Not, of course, popular in the Michael Jackson sense; you won't see the Concerto Grosso No. 4 turning up on MTV. But no living composer of so-called serious music exerts so much hold on the imagination and loyalty of his interpreters as does the reclusive Schnittke, 59. Performers from the old East bloc such as violinist Gidon Kremer, a fellow Soviet emigre, cellist-conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and conductor Kurt Masur have been championing his works for years. Now, it seems, the rest of the world is catching on.

"His music reflects not only his own life, it reflects ideas about life and death, just as the greatest composers have always had," notes Masur, who has known Schnittke personally since 1974. Masur last month led the New York Philharmonic in the world premiere of Schnittke's spare, incantational Symphony No. 7, which the orchestra commissioned at Masur's insistence.

That performance was part of a veritable Schnittke festival in the U.S. in recent weeks. Among the highlights: the American premiere of the composer's second piano sonata by pianist Boris Berman, the American debut of his Symphony No. 6 in Washington under Rostropovich's baton, and conductor Leon Botstein's North American premiere with the American Symphony Orchestra of Schnittke's Faust Cantata, an oratorio version of an opera in progress. Against all odds, Schnittke is among the most commissioned of living composers.

Schnittke's rise to prominence is a tribute to his artistic integrity. His slight frame, perilous health (he has suffered two strokes and a heart attack) and diffident demeanor mask a revolutionary sensibility. As an iconoclast in a country of enforced artistic conformity, Schnittke represented for many of his Soviet countrymen a kind of artistic glasnost long before Gorbachev made it permissible. Stylistically unpredictable and resolutely uncompromising -- there are no "Socialist Realist" elements in his music, no compositions celebrating factories at work or peasants at play -- Schnittke's music is fundamentally deconstructive. It uses the past as raw material for the present, often referring to or quoting directly from Bach, Mozart and other Germanic composers and then tearing them apart in a destructive analytical frenzy that would have terrified Freud. "I attempt to compose symphonies," Schnittke wrote in a program note to his Third Symphony, "although it is clear to me that logically it is pointless."

Born in the central Russian town of Engels, Schnittke, half Jewish and half German, had the misfortune to belong to two of the old Soviet Union's least favorite ethnic groups. But he was luckier than most; his father, a journalist of Russian-Jewish extraction who was born in Germany, was posted to Vienna in the mid-1940s. The family moved to Moscow in 1948, where the bilingual Alfred began his studies at the Moscow Conservatory.

Schnittke has been a resident of Hamburg since 1990, but his music remains inseparable from his native milieu in its anxiety, its foreboding, its confusion and its fury. The cacophonous, almost pugnaciously eclectic First Symphony stunned Soviet audiences in 1974 with its melange of Gregorian chant, jazz, Baroque and Romantic references. The ominous Fifth Symphony (1988) is sufficiently Baroque in form that Schnittke also calls it his Concerto Grosso No. 4, although its content is stark, nearly tragic. And the 1992 opera, Life with an Idiot, is the most potent satiric Russian opera since Shostakovich's The Nose.

The comparison with Shostakovich points up the reason for Schnittke's appeal. Like his great forebear, Schnittke has dealt with unremitting horror by creating an internal, personalized musical world in which salvation, though elusive, remains possible. Unlike Shostakovich, who was finally ground down by Stalinism and had to express his rebellion in a private musical code, Schnittke has lived to see the end of overt artistic oppression. Grim as his . music can be, it is never hopeless; relentless as it sometimes is, it is never despondent. Schnittke's compositions are a challenge to modern Central European history, one man's potent protest against not only the ugly present but also the even uglier recent past. As the century staggers to a conclusion, Schnittke suddenly seems to speak for us all.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York