Alfred Schnittke
Alfred Schnittke (full name Alfred Garrievich Schnittke) was a Soviet and Russian composer, music teacher, and musicologist. Born on November 24, 1934, in Engels, in the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, he came from a Jewish-German family. German was his first language; later, he spoke German with his mother and Russian with his father.
Schnittke began his musical education in Vienna in 1946. After his family returned to the Moscow area in 1948, he entered the conducting and choral department of the October Revolution Music College in Moscow in 1949 and graduated in 1953. He completed composition studies with Yevgeny Golubev at the Moscow Conservatory in 1958, followed by postgraduate study.
From 1961 to 1972, Schnittke taught orchestration and score reading at the Moscow Conservatory; his sole composition pupil there was Recep Allayarov. From 1962, and especially actively during the 1970s, he composed film music. He also worked at the Soviet Union's first experimental studio for electronic music.
His output included four operas, three ballets, ten symphonies, fifteen instrumental concertos, and numerous chamber, vocal, choral, and instrumental works, as well as music for films, animated films, and theatrical productions. His music is characterized by conceptual scope, large scale, expressive force, complexly differentiated orchestral and ensemble textures, polystylism, and systems of quotation.
Among his principal stage works were the ballets Labyrinths (1971), Sketches (1985), and Peer Gynt (1986). His operas included Life with an Idiot (1991), Gesualdo (1993), and The History of Dr. Johann Faust (1994). The latter incorporated music from his earlier cantata of the same name and was premiered at the Hamburg Opera in 1995. His symphonies ranged from the 1957 “Symphony No. 0” to Symphony No. 9, composed in 1997–98, while his six Concerti Grossi form another central part of his orchestral catalogue.
In 1985, Schnittke suffered the first of several strokes but resumed creative work after leaving hospital. He subsequently lived and worked in Hamburg, where he taught at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre. A severe stroke in 1994 left him unable to speak and impaired the use of his right side, but he continued to write musical scores with his left hand.
Schnittke was named an Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1987. His distinctions included the Nika Award for the music for the film Commissar (1989), the Imperial Prize (1992), the Triumph Prize (1992), and the State Prize of the Russian Federation (1995). He died in Hamburg on August 3, 1998, and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.