Russian composer Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) is well known for his polystylistic compositions, in which multiple styles of both classical and popular music collide. From the early 1980s to the early 1990s, he enjoyed tremendous success in the West on the reputation of works such as Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977), leading to numerous commissions from high-profile ensembles. However, his career was cut short by a series of strokes that first obstructed his ability to compose and then led to his premature death. Perhaps because of this, his works were somewhat neglected in the West by both scholars and the public in the years following his death. This neglect has led to a relative paucity of information on him and his music in English until recently.
Gavin Dixon is among a new generation of scholars producing work on Schnittke, including the first major English-language edited volume on the composer.Footnote 1 In this Routledge Handbook, he has written the first comprehensive guide to all of Schnittke's compositions in English. Dixon compiles much of the extant information on Schnittke's music, including the significant untranslated Russian-language scholarship. Dixon's own contributions are vital, contextualising and synthesising the work of others as well as presenting original analyses.
In the preface, Dixon emphasises that this book is by no means a biography of Schnittke, but that biographical information is inextricable from the works discussed, particularly the series of pieces from the 1970s, which Dixon dubs ‘funereal’ works, written surrounding the death of Schnittke's mother. Dixon also acknowledges the difficulty inherent in categorising Schnittke's output, given the immense diversity of his work and the many threads, both technical and thematic, which connect his pieces.
Schnittke's contradictory stylistic unity and diversity inform Dixon's periodisation of the composer's work that makes up Chapter One. Rather than opting for a simple chronological series of periods, Dixon uses an overlapping sequence of eras that are defined by technique and subject matter. After Schnittke's student works, Dixon identifies his primary periods as serialism (1963–71), funereal and religious works (1972–80), polystylism (1968–91) and late style (1985–94). For each period, Dixon details the devices and techniques used by Schnittke and their relevance to his developing compositional style. This somewhat complex chapter provides the necessary context to understand the converging and diverging currents that comprise representative works such as Concerto Grosso No. 4/Symphony No. 5 (1988). This piece is not only an example of its two titular genres, but its second movement is an orchestration of Piano Quartet (1988), which is itself Schnittke's high-concept completion of an early sketch by Mahler. The complete orchestral work brings Mahler's music in dialogue with that of Bach, along the way incorporating many of the Schnittkean compositional techniques that Dixon describes.
The remaining chapters of the book are comprised of analyses of all of Schnittke's compositions, organised by instrumentation. Each chapter contains a brief introduction that gives an overview of the works discussed as well as detailing any juvenilia not deemed significant enough to be discussed individually. The mature works are grouped by genre and then chronologically, and Dixon notes each composition's biographical context and gives a short analysis. Throughout these chapters, Dixon provides numerous cross-references between related works as well as citing relevant sections from Chapter One.
The majority of the content of the analyses stems from Russian-language sources by Evgeniia Chigareva, Valentina Kholopova and Dmitri Shulgin, as well as from other sources in English and German. Dixon also presents considerable original research, drawing on his work in the Schnittke archives at Goldsmiths, University of London, and at Juilliard. A particularly fascinating example unearthed by Dixon is Schnittke's use of the I Ching in the composition of String Trio (1985): Schnittke quite literally maps the broken and unbroken lines of the I Ching trigrams on to the string texture of the composition, as well as using them to produce harmonic progressions.
The analyses of individual works that make up the bulk of this book are very brief (even the most substantial and well-known works receive no more than four pages), but each provides sufficient key details and references to assist anyone seeking more information. The music examples and diagrams are concise and clearly illustrate Dixon's points.
Schnittke's film music is the subject of the final chapter, in which Dixon discusses select scores by director instead of chronologically, focusing on the composer's work with five of them in particular: Igor Talankin, Andrei Khrzhanovsky, Alexander Mitta, Larisa Shepitko and Elem Klimov. Dixon concludes with a complete listing of Schnittke's works, combining catalogues by Alexander Ivashkin and Schnittke's publisher Sikorski, as well as a very thorough bibliography. This book is a significant contribution to the newly burgeoning English-language Schnittke literature. It is an invaluable reference source for both its consolidation of existing research and for Dixon's original work.
