Lento - Alfred Schnittke / Dmitri Shostakovich

Schnittke’s Piano Quintet and Shostakovich’s 15th String Quartet are works which prefigure a return to a direct emotional expression which has come to characterise an entire landscape of post-Soviet music. The concentrated intensity that often distinguishes the work of composers as different as, for instance,  Arvo Pärt, Sofia Gubaidulina, Edison Denisov, Tigran Mansurian, Giya Kancheli, and Valentin Silvestrov  is anticipated in Shostakovich’s last compositions and in Schnittke’s piece.  In the face of very real griefs, Shostakovich was no longer sending coded messages to fellow victims of a repressive regime, and Schnittke found himself unable to sublimate emotions in his game-playing “polystylism”. Yet the consolatory powers of  the compositions are evident and contribute to the works’ enduring appeal.

 

Though Schnittke and Shostakovich belonged to different musical generations, and though Schnittke was strongly influenced by the older master, the pieces heard here are of the same epoch, both written in the 1970s.  Schnittke laboured over  his Piano Quintet for four years, finally finishing it in 1976. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich: “As many of Schnittke’s most substantial works were composed very quickly, the long period he spent on the Quintet suggests that it was something special. The work was triggered by the death of Schnittke’s mother, who suffered a fatal stroke on a Moscow street. Grief is the underlying emotion of the piece, but it is coupled with an exquisite, inexpressible tenderness. The fragile, crystalline motif with which the piano begins is like a gently luminous path of memory leading to the mysteries of a deeply affectionate relationship. The piece is undoubtedly intended to record what has been lost and to deny loss…And yet the sensitivity and discretion with which Schnittke shapes ‘regained’ time unmistakably suggests the imaginary quality of recapturing the past. Grief does not turn outwards, it remains in an objectified but almost diary-like sphere of intimacy. The listener is alone as he participates in another’s  solitary grief.”

 

The most striking feature of Shostakovich’s 15th Quartet is  the consistently subdued character of the tempi of the six uninterrupted movements.  As journalist Erika Kienetz has written, “By this point Shostakovich could barely move his hand to write and in his exhaustion was content to say much less [there are obvious parallels with the fate that was finally Schnittke’s]. But the more he leaves out, the more intense the effect of each stroke. By speaking less he makes us listen much harder”. In his liner notes, Jungheinrich draws analogies with  Haydn’s famous late work for string quartet, The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, “Shostakovich’s quartet, too, explores strongly contrasting content in the context of a single, sustained, sombre mood... The brooding contemplativeness is disturbed by the “stinging” sounds of the single instruments, which can be perceived quite realistically as attacks of pain. The requiem character is at its most pervasive in the fifth movement, where the tempo slackens and begins to falter. It is rare for the music of the late Shostakovich to end in unremitting gloom, and in the 15th Quartet, the epilogue provides a glimmer of light, a feeling of finally being able to exhale.”

 

Alfred Schnittke felt a strong kinship with the late Shostakovich in particular. “Like many of his fellow artists in the Soviet Union, Schnittke was a highly religious man. Shostakovich, who started out as an ardent Communist and gradually descended into ever more disillusioned scepticism, remained an atheist throughout his life. But this did not bar him from the difficult path to inner tranquillity. Both Schnittke’s Piano Quintet and Shostakovich’s 15th String Quartet are expressions of the “De Profundis” that conquers deep despair to achieve serene consolation.”