Schnittke Studies ed. by Gavin Dixon (review)

In his contribution to this fine collection of essays, Gavin Dixon (its editor) applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic novel to Alfred Schnittke's polystylism. In particular, he raises the issue of voice in Schnittke's Piano Quartet (1989), which is built around a youthful fragment by Gustav Mahler. Reading Dixon's essay and others in this volume, I kept returning to the idea of voice and voices, those of Schnittke, his contemporaries, and his exegetes. These essays are almost exclusively about the composer and his work: how it was made and what he may or may not have wanted it to mean. Schnittke died almost twenty years ago, yet his image and intentions still overshadow his output: very little is said about performers, performances, audiences, critics, history, or society. This is far from what Bakhtin might have called a dialogic collection, for despite the unerring focus on Schnittke's voice, it remains curiously absent. Like most scholarship on Schnittke, the essays are firmly rooted in his interviews with the Russian musicologist Dmitry Shulgin and with the performer and musicologist Alexander Ivashkin. But we lose sight of how mediated these interviews are as products of specific circumstances, times, and places—other equally valuable, largely unused sources exist.

Ivashkin, the dedicatee of Dixon's collection, deserves praise and gratitude for his tireless efforts on behalf of Schnittke as both performer and scholar. Yet his essay in this volume illustrates the perils of interpreting and presenting Schnittke's voice in scholarship today. The essay is a meditation on metaphysical and spiritual meanings in Schnittke's compositions. It is no secret that, like many composers before him (Bach, Schumann, Berg, and Shostakovich among them), Schnittke built his scores with the encoded initials of friends, places, and even abstract concepts—Deutschland and evil in Symphony No. 3 (1980), for example. Ivashkin traced the composer's general mysticism and his interest in religion and Neoplatonism by looking at the later score Klingende Buchstaben (Sounding letters) for solo cello (1988), a score he knew very well since Schnittke composed it for him. The theorist Christopher Segall has also looked at this composition and at Schnittke's general tendency to use musical codes in an excellent article not cited by Ivashkin, "'Klingende Buchstaben": Principles of Alfred Schnittke's Monogram Technique', Journal of Musicology, 30 (2013), 252–86.

Yet Ivashkin followed Schnittke's interest in the beyond too literally and too willingly. One moment illustrates the limitations of the approach: Ivashkin seriously contended in his essay that Schnittke predicted the date of his own death and composed it into his score: 'The structure of the piece is very symbolic, even mystical. Written in 1988, a decade before the composer's death, it represents a striking example of predicting the future with accuracy almost to the day. And this is clearly readable in the structure of the piece' (pp. 203 and 205–6). Such claims belong not to scholarship, but to religious exegesis or hagiography. This is the central problem of voice and Schnittke, of others speaking authoritatively for a once voluble, but now silenced composer, who practised dialectical thinking to an often confounding degree. It is deeply ironic that material based on an actual dialogue between Ivashkin and Schnittke has been rendered closed off, mono-logical. Just as others cite only Ivashkin and Shulgin, Ivashkin ultimately cites only his own mediations of Schnittke.

The helpful essay by the Russian musicologist Evgeniia Chigareva on Schnittke's late style is also best viewed as a historical document. It is valuable as a critical response to Schnittke's music by someone who knew him and his music intimately. Her sensitive readings of the later scores stand out, as in her account of the finale of Concerto Grosso No. 5 (1991), in which the amplified piano 'create[s] a sensation of unreality, its sounds like falling drops of water. And at the end, a violin glissando soaring upwards in zigzags, in circles, disappears into the distance beyond...