John Sichel's Program Notes April 21-22, 2001 Schnittke Piano Quartet

Alfred Schnittke (1934-xxxx): Piano Quintet (1972-6)

 The most recent work on the program is the piano quintet by Alfred Schnittke, a Russian composer, pupil of Shostakovich,  who was born in 1934 and died young a few years ago.  Schnittke was a student during a period of relative cultural thaw in Soviet history, and his music reflects the fact that he was not only raised in the officially approved socialist realism, but also was exposed to the techniques of the Western Avant Garde (such as Stockhausen, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, etc.).  In addition he seems to have shared with his great teacher a sensibility which combines sorrow and irony, the latter of which sometimes borders on savagery.  Out of this mixture he forged an eclectic, sometimes even dadaist style which is thoroughly distinctive. 
 The quintet is a deeply emotional work, having been written in memory of Schnittke’s mother.  Through its linked five movements it seems to draw ever deeper into a tortured sense of grief and disorientation, the latter perhaps a musical evolcation of the circumstances of his mother’s death: she was felled by a stroke on the streets of Moscow.  The anguished tone is relieved only in the last movement.  This is accomplished by using extended 20th century performing techniques to push chromaticism even farther than the previous generation of modernists.
 The piano opens with what is to become the signature motive of the piece, a tortured chromatic turn around the note C#.  This mournful motive, with its agonized half-steps, echoes through every movement.  You can’t get any chromatic than that... or can  you?  You can if you allow the string players to do something the piano cannot: play intervals smaller than half steps, the note, for instance, between C and C#.  And so they do, playing in intervallically strangled, twisting, agonizing canons while the piano imitates the tolling of funeral bells.
 The second movement is a surrealistic and nightmarish waltz, wherein the twisting chromatic motive which dominates the first movement is recast in a form familiar through 300 years of music history: the notes Bb-A-C-B, or, in German notation, B-A-C-H.  Did Schnittke have some iconic significance in mind in using this famous collection of pitches?  It’s hard to imagine that this particular composer, with the famous purveyor of encrypted musical messages Shostakovich as his teacher, could have employed it coincidentally or accidentally but its meaning remains elusive to me. 
Part of the eerieness of this movement comes from employing the right hand of the piano and all of the strings in very close canon, all playing the same narrow-ranged and highly chromatic melody.  The resulting effect is of a crawling, insect like mass of notes, seething above the banal accompanying figure in the left hand.  An even creepier effect occurs later in the movement when-- still over the absurd oom-pah-pahs in the piano-- the strings play a tortuously sinking canon in microtones and in rhythmic prolation (that is, the cello is playing in dotted half-notes what the viola plays in half notes, the second violin in dotted quarter notes and the first violin in quarters).  The effect here is of a giant swarm of angry bees sinking into  a vat of butterscotch-- and it’s about as chilling an evocation of death as has ever been put to manuscript.
The third movement reverts to the original form of the chromatic motive.  The tolling bells of the first movement return in the piano while the strings reach a high point of anger and grief and then quietly recede.  The fourth movement begins as a chorale, and reaches another high point of passion.  There seems to be no end to grief.
 Solace comes to the bereaved-- or the solace of death comes to the sufferer: suddenly, quietly but unmistakably in the haunting finale.  As the final microtonal tone cluster of the fourth movement dies away there is a low Db in the piano and then a series of vaulting, diatonic intervals in the upper register.  After the claustrophobic microchromaticism of the first four movements, the effect of this 14-bar melody, which repeats over and over again in the right hand of the piano, is quietly electrifying.  The choice of the Db tonality is significant.  Iconographically in classical music, Db seems to be the “official” key of heaven.  Berlioz’ Marguerite ascends to heaven in Db as do Aida and Boris Godunov.  Mahler’s 9th bids it’s heartbreaking lebwohl in Db (to digress, B major is the alternate route to heaven; it seems to be reserved particularly for star-crossed lovers, such as Tristan und Isolde or Tschaikovsky’s Romeo & Juliet.).
 At any rate, while this simple melody is repeating over and over again in the piano, the strings play beneath it tortured, microtonal echoes of the previous movements, waves of grief welling up and then receding under the piano’s mantra of solace.  At last all come together on a Db major chord, and the piece fades hauntingly away.  20th century music is still generalized by some to be empty headwork devoid of emotional content.  It’s hard to listen to this strange and haunting work and still feel that way.