Alfred Garrievich Schnittke (Russian: Альфред Гарриевич Шнитке; born Novemb… Read Full Bio ↴Alfred Garrievich Schnittke (Russian: Альфред Гарриевич Шнитке; born November 24, 1934 in Engels, USSR; died August 3, 1998 in Hamburg) was a soviet composer, pianist, theoretician of music and educator. His music is derived from various traditions: Russian (Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky), Germanic (Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg), and American (Charles Ives).
On his mother’s side he was of Volga German and Roman Catholic extraction, on his father’s side he was German-Jewish. His sense that his background set him apart from the majority in the USSR was reinforced when, from 1945-48, his father was posted to Vienna, and the delighted boy discovered Austro-German cultural and musical traditions.
He entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1953, completed post-graduate work in 1961, and from then on earned his living, partly by teaching, partly by writing for the cinema (nearly 70 scores in 30 years). Fired by the rebellious modernism prevailing in Moscow in the early 1960s, Schnittke embarked on a voyage of compositional discovery. His works of the 1960s show him embracing the modernist and avant-garde fascinations of the time. Outstanding among his pieces of this period are 2 violin sonatas (1964, 1968), and the String Quartet No.1 and Violin Concerto No.2 (both 1966).
In 1972 he finished the massive First Symphony, blending Soviet symphonic thought, often parodied, with highly experimental elements. This powerful work established him as a leader of Soviet modern music, loathed by the authorities and adored by the anti-Soviet ‘underground’. Later came the hauntingly simple Piano Quintet (1976), and the comically sinister Concerto Grosso No.1 (1977). All three pieces have taken his name all over the world.
String concertos play a large part in Schnittke’s output and reflect his close friendship with some of the leading players of his time including Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet and Mstislav Rostropovich. For such stars he has written 4 violin concertos, a viola concerto, 2 cello concertos, 6 concerti grossi and much else besides. Symphonies continued to be important. At the time of his death he had sketched, but not finished, a Ninth. He also wrote much chamber music.
In 1985 Schnittke suffered a stroke which left him in bad health for the rest of his life. Far from impeding him, however, sickness seems to have released an inner torrent and in later years he became prolific, answering each successive brush with death with a further flood of music. And with each new work he moved further from the more playful and satirical modernism of his earlier pieces into a dark and often difficult but always personal world where spiritual concerns and religious themes predominate. In his last years he and his wife moved to Hamburg, where he died on 3 August 1998.
On his mother’s side he was of Volga German and Roman Catholic extraction, on his father’s side he was German-Jewish. His sense that his background set him apart from the majority in the USSR was reinforced when, from 1945-48, his father was posted to Vienna, and the delighted boy discovered Austro-German cultural and musical traditions.
He entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1953, completed post-graduate work in 1961, and from then on earned his living, partly by teaching, partly by writing for the cinema (nearly 70 scores in 30 years). Fired by the rebellious modernism prevailing in Moscow in the early 1960s, Schnittke embarked on a voyage of compositional discovery. His works of the 1960s show him embracing the modernist and avant-garde fascinations of the time. Outstanding among his pieces of this period are 2 violin sonatas (1964, 1968), and the String Quartet No.1 and Violin Concerto No.2 (both 1966).
In 1972 he finished the massive First Symphony, blending Soviet symphonic thought, often parodied, with highly experimental elements. This powerful work established him as a leader of Soviet modern music, loathed by the authorities and adored by the anti-Soviet ‘underground’. Later came the hauntingly simple Piano Quintet (1976), and the comically sinister Concerto Grosso No.1 (1977). All three pieces have taken his name all over the world.
String concertos play a large part in Schnittke’s output and reflect his close friendship with some of the leading players of his time including Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet and Mstislav Rostropovich. For such stars he has written 4 violin concertos, a viola concerto, 2 cello concertos, 6 concerti grossi and much else besides. Symphonies continued to be important. At the time of his death he had sketched, but not finished, a Ninth. He also wrote much chamber music.
In 1985 Schnittke suffered a stroke which left him in bad health for the rest of his life. Far from impeding him, however, sickness seems to have released an inner torrent and in later years he became prolific, answering each successive brush with death with a further flood of music. And with each new work he moved further from the more playful and satirical modernism of his earlier pieces into a dark and often difficult but always personal world where spiritual concerns and religious themes predominate. In his last years he and his wife moved to Hamburg, where he died on 3 August 1998.
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Piano Quintet V
Alfred Schnittke Lyrics
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The lyrics are frequently found in the comments by searching or by filtering for lyric videos
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sea otter
Description from allmusic.com
Alfred Schnittke's Piano Quintet is a dark and heavy planet. Even in the midst of his bewilderingly prolific output, this extremely personal work commands a massive gravity; it seems to orient, arrange, and set in motion so many of Schnittke's works, before and after. If one wants to find the founding trauma for such a consistently agonizing body of artistic work, it can be found in the Piano Quintet.
This centrality may owe much to the quintet's function: conceived as a memorial to the composer's mother, who died of a stroke in September 1972, here's a composition whose substance was drawn from a real event, powerfully tangible and irrevocable. This kind of reality had not been Schnittke's basis for previous works. His Symphony No. 1 (1972) and other contemporaneous works are brazenly extroverted stylistic carnivals, full of fantasy, denunciation, and dark humor, and are largely artistic statements on art or cultural critiques on culture itself.
In this light, the Piano Quintet was a radical departure into an entirely personal sphere. This shift caused the composer tremendous difficulty. After finishing the first movement very quickly, Schnittke was blocked, "unable to continue because I had to take what I wrote from an imaginary space defined in terms of sound and put it into the 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."
Hence the Piano Quintet was shelved, and Schnittke did not resume work on it for almost four years. When he did pick up the work again, his musical temperament had changed, becoming more distilled, tauter, and more unabashedly morbid. Schnittke had perfected a personal sound, a dense, claustrophobic web of chromatic clusters. This signatory sound, rich yet obscure, serves as the backdrop for much of his succeeding work, and is seamlessly crafted into this work. The second movement is a wraith-like slow waltz on the name of B-A-C-H (H in German notation is B, B is B flat). The waltz is the only "polystylistic" concession in the piece, and throughout the movement consistently descends back into torturous clusters.
The next two movements form the heart of the work, pulling it increasingly inward. Schnittke explains that they "are real experiences of grief which I would prefer not to comment on because they are of a very personal nature." Both movements bind themselves in shells of stasis; each movement suffers its own shocked outburst and epiphany. Eventually the fourth movement ruptures the thick web of chromaticism that seems to paralyze the work.
After its crushing, cathartic crisis on a single, repeated note, the movement ebbs into the work's final bars, based on a 14-measure theme repeated 14 times in the piano. Over this theme, Schubert-like in its studied rusticity, one hears blanched recollections of previous passages; everything liquefies as it materializes, swept along by the piano theme's current. Eventually a faded reconciliation emerges and the strings are silenced; the work ends on the sonic outskirts as Schnittke instructs the pianist to play tonlos, "without tone."
There is hyper-sentimentality in Schnittke's quintet, a weird excess of morose emotion that exists in few other of his works. Somehow the sentimentality works here, perhaps because of the sincerity of the utterance, perhaps because, despite wearing his heart on his sleeve, Schnittke is not merely personal but also highly idiosyncratic. The work is an uncomfortable twentieth century classic, and a key to Schnittke's music in general.
sea otter
Description from allmusic.com
Alfred Schnittke's Piano Quintet is a dark and heavy planet. Even in the midst of his bewilderingly prolific output, this extremely personal work commands a massive gravity; it seems to orient, arrange, and set in motion so many of Schnittke's works, before and after. If one wants to find the founding trauma for such a consistently agonizing body of artistic work, it can be found in the Piano Quintet.
This centrality may owe much to the quintet's function: conceived as a memorial to the composer's mother, who died of a stroke in September 1972, here's a composition whose substance was drawn from a real event, powerfully tangible and irrevocable. This kind of reality had not been Schnittke's basis for previous works. His Symphony No. 1 (1972) and other contemporaneous works are brazenly extroverted stylistic carnivals, full of fantasy, denunciation, and dark humor, and are largely artistic statements on art or cultural critiques on culture itself.
In this light, the Piano Quintet was a radical departure into an entirely personal sphere. This shift caused the composer tremendous difficulty. After finishing the first movement very quickly, Schnittke was blocked, "unable to continue because I had to take what I wrote from an imaginary space defined in terms of sound and put it into the 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."
Hence the Piano Quintet was shelved, and Schnittke did not resume work on it for almost four years. When he did pick up the work again, his musical temperament had changed, becoming more distilled, tauter, and more unabashedly morbid. Schnittke had perfected a personal sound, a dense, claustrophobic web of chromatic clusters. This signatory sound, rich yet obscure, serves as the backdrop for much of his succeeding work, and is seamlessly crafted into this work. The second movement is a wraith-like slow waltz on the name of B-A-C-H (H in German notation is B, B is B flat). The waltz is the only "polystylistic" concession in the piece, and throughout the movement consistently descends back into torturous clusters.
The next two movements form the heart of the work, pulling it increasingly inward. Schnittke explains that they "are real experiences of grief which I would prefer not to comment on because they are of a very personal nature." Both movements bind themselves in shells of stasis; each movement suffers its own shocked outburst and epiphany. Eventually the fourth movement ruptures the thick web of chromaticism that seems to paralyze the work.
After its crushing, cathartic crisis on a single, repeated note, the movement ebbs into the work's final bars, based on a 14-measure theme repeated 14 times in the piano. Over this theme, Schubert-like in its studied rusticity, one hears blanched recollections of previous passages; everything liquefies as it materializes, swept along by the piano theme's current. Eventually a faded reconciliation emerges and the strings are silenced; the work ends on the sonic outskirts as Schnittke instructs the pianist to play tonlos, "without tone."
There is hyper-sentimentality in Schnittke's quintet, a weird excess of morose emotion that exists in few other of his works. Somehow the sentimentality works here, perhaps because of the sincerity of the utterance, perhaps because, despite wearing his heart on his sleeve, Schnittke is not merely personal but also highly idiosyncratic. The work is an uncomfortable twentieth century classic, and a key to Schnittke's music in general.
Fernando Alejandro Andonaegui Sánchez
Thaaaaaanks
Andre Carvalho
Perfect
Lucy Benjamin
Thanks for a gorgeous description!
auerod
Wow, the passacaglia theme in the finale is absolutely devastating. What a gorgeous work. This quintet will undoubtedly be my next obsession.
spanglock
I. Moderato: 0:00
II. Tempo di Valse: 5:01
III. Andante: 10:46
IV. Lento: 16:25
V. Moderato pastorale: 20:22
Castor Denston
Thanks for this. Schnittke, for all my limited knowledge, is one of my favorite composers.
Daniel Zarb-Cousin
+Castor Denston Yes. I'd agree. Although I think he is my top favorite composer.
datdam
Wow. What an incredibly authentic portrait of tragedy. Look at the way these familiar, jolly passages break and fragment into discord. One feet planted in history, another in the world of lived experience.
I think this one, along with his 2nd String Quartet, are quickly becoming two of my personal favorites. Thank you for uploading this, along with the score.
Viscamo
Thanks for your great comment @D.Damarjiwo. Schnittke is my favorite composer of the XX century