Alfred Schnittke

Alfred Schnittke was born on 24 November 1934 in Engels, the capital of what was then the Volga German Republic (today in Russia). His musical education began in 1946 in Vienna, where his father, a Jewish journalist and translator of German descent, worked for a newspaper. He received piano lessons, attended opera and concert performances, and first tried his hand at composing. Residing in Moscow since 1948, Schnittke began training as a choral conductor. From 1953 to 1958, he studied composition and counterpoint (with Yevgeny Golubev) and instrumentation (with Nikolai Rakow). He received significant inspiration from Philipp Herschkowitsch, a student of Webern who lived in Moscow.

Even during his postgraduate studies (1958–1961), Schnittke distinguished himself with a rich compositional output. From 1962 to 1972, he taught instrumentation at the Moscow Conservatory. During this period, he published numerous works on music theory (on problems of contemporary music). He was also active as a composer of film music. Since 1975, Schnittke’s works have been performed at all major festivals of new music, and in the 1980s they found their way into the concert programmes of leading international cultural orchestras. Festivals dedicated to his work and cyclical performances of his compositions have been produced in cities including Moscow, Stockholm, London, Huddersfield, Vienna, Berlin, Turin, Lucerne, Hamburg, and Cologne.

In the 1990s, he was one of the most frequently performed composers of his time in Europe. Schnittke, who taught composition at the Hamburg University of Music from 1989 to 1994, was an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Free Academy of Arts in Hamburg, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in Stockholm, the Academy of Arts in Berlin, the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.

Schnittke’s first prolific period of creativity began in the mid-1950s. Although clearly influenced by Dmitri Shostakovich, his work already bore the recognisable signature of the later master. After a phase of twelve-tone music, beginning around 1963, with his second violin sonata, quasi una sonata (1968), Schnittke found his way to polystylism – a technique in which heterogeneous materials and styles, tonal and atonal, past and present, familiar and alienated, permeate each other and are brought into a new context. Finally, in the early 1990s, Schnittke moved away from this approach. His scores became increasingly sparser, his musical language more austere and abstract. In his late years, he was afflicted by serious illness, yet he still managed to complete a Ninth Symphony. Alfred Schnittke died on 3 August 1998.