The Routledge Handbook to the Music of Alfred Schnittke by Gavin Dixon (review)

In summer 2022, Amoeba Music, arguably the best independent record store chain in the United States, published its annual Music We Like zine. One item from its lists of recommended recordings—by Felix (no last name given), a staff member from Berkeley, California—featured this endorsement of Daniel Hope and Alekseĭ Botvinov's release of Schnittke's violin and piano music: "Nothing on this compilation is predictable, for Alfred Schnittke's music is multifaceted and quite entertaining. His skills involved adopting old traditional music into contemporary form without concern [for] any one idiom. Easily one of the most underrated and overlooked composers of the 20th century. I encourage you to embrace this captivating assortment of Schnittke works. Your ears will gape with wonderment" (http://www.amoeba.com/music/music-we-like, "2022 – Summer," p. 41 [accessed 9 September 2022], referring to Deutsche Grammophon, DG 483 9234 [2021], CD). Listeners captivated by Schnittke's music and eager for further information on his Suite in the Old Style, Violin Sonata no. 1, or any of the other compositions on Hope and Botvinov's disc now have a reliable Englishlanguage source to consult: Gavin Dixon's Routledge Handbook to the Music of Alfred Schnittke.

Yet this reference volume is by no means for neophytes alone. Dixon has established himself as an authoritative guide to Schnittke's output as the author of, among other things, an innovative dissertation ("Polystylism as Dialogue: A Bakhtinian Interpretation of Schnittke's Symphonies 3, 4, and His Concerto Grosso No. 4/Symphony No. 5," PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2007) and as editor of (and contributor to) Schnittke Studies (New York: Routledge, 2017). A student of the late Alexander Ivashkin, a pioneering figure in Schnittke advocacy and research, Dixon also has deep familiarity with the many sketches and scores in the Ivashkin–Schnittke Archive at Goldsmiths, University of London. His Schnittke handbook is based on these and other primary and secondary sources, including the significant collection of Schnittke drafts and sketches in the Juilliard Manuscript Collection.

A listener to Hope and Botvinov's disc looking for Schnittke's violin and piano compositions in Dixon's handbook would be in luck, and they won't need to flip many pages to find them all. Organized by genre, the handbook collects all of Schnittke's music for violin and piano in the same section. The bulk of the volume consists of capsule accounts of each and every Schnittke composition, major and minor, in all their versions and arrangements. These entries are, in effect, very thorough program notes (several originated as program and liner notes [p. xvii]). Each provides basic details about the work's composition history, first performance, form, structure, motives, harmony, salient stylistic elements, as well as commentary on any texts. Each entry also contains scrupulous documentation of revisions and any variations between autograph score and published editions. Most of the analyses are brief, but Dixon knows Schnittke's music well and has a keen ear and eye for telling details. It is true that some descriptions betray a certain dutifulness (e.g., Drei Gedichte von Viktor Schnittke for tenor and piano [pp. 97–98]). But others are more extensive, the fruits of a prolonged engagement, particularly those for the symphonies, Peer Gynt, Life with an Idiot, and the Piano Quintet, to name but a few.

The handbook synthesizes available sources, compiling and collating material from the dominant interpretative studies in Russian, German, and English, including foundational works by Ivashkin, Valentina Chigareva, Valentina Nikolaevna Kholopova, and Jürgen Köchel. Dixon carefully presents all sides of any disputes or interpretative puzzles, often letting dissonant interpretations remain unresolved (e.g., my difference of opinion with Ivashkin over Schnittke's indebtedness to socialist realism in his early compositions [p. 74]). When combined with the evidence from Schnittke...