String Quartet No.3 (1983)

Andante

Agitato

Pesante

There is no better example of Schnittke’s “polystylism,” his way of setting different historical styles alongside each other and alongside his own idiom, than the third of his four string quartets. The first movement begins with allusions to three kinds of music – a cadential phrase from a Stabat Mater by Orlando di Lasso, the theme of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, and the musial monogram DSCH (D, E flat, C, B) of one of the composer’s hero figures Dmitri Shostakovich. This material is worked into a turbulent scherzo (Agitato) and a passionately thoughtful finale (Pesante), the latter dying away on a last memory of the DSCH motif., the main theme of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, and Shostakovich’s musical monogram DSCH (D, E flat, C, B)