String Trio (1985)

Alfred Schnittke never regarded himself as a Russian composer, still less as a Soviet composer, even though much the larger part of his life was spent in what was then the USSR. He was born in Russia but his mother was Volga-German, his father was German-Jewish and his first language was German. It was in Vienna, where his father was posted as a journalist just after the war, that he received his first musical training and it was the second Viennese school that interested him most when –– after the death of Stalin and before Brezhnev attempted to close the window again – Russians were allowed to hear modern music from Western Europe.

So when Schnittke was commissioned by the Alban Berg Society of Vienna to write a work to mark both the hundredth anniversary of Berg’s birth and the fiftieth anniversary of his death (Berg was born in 1885 and died in 1935) the project must have been particularly attractive to him and far more challenging than the average professional assignment. Certainly, the String Trio, which betrays little of Schnittke’s sense of humour, is one of his most serious works. Its commemorative aspect is clear enough from the melodic allusion in the opening bars. The theme introduced here supplies, in fact, the melodic material – in one variant or another, in one harmonic context or another – for the whole work. There is a variety of other material but it is mainly textural rather than melodic: a hushed and dissonant chorale, an episode of energetic minimalist gestures, a violent exchange of counterpoint, solo deliberations underpinned by pedal points…

By the end of the first movement, where the textural events are treated as themes and developed and repeated, the structural motivation is clearly established. But it is only in the second movement, a characteristically long-sustained Adagio, that the emotional significance of the work becomes fully apparent. The melodic theme, initially reintroduced in inversion, is the same ass before. So is the organisation by means of textural contrasts, although there is an atmospheric new element here in a trumpet call evoked by string harmonics. Now, however, the process is so much more thoughtful, the expression so much more intense, the minimalist intervention so much more dramatic. The endings of the two movements are not dissimilar but that of the Adagio, as the violin climbs ever higher, is so much more elevated and so much more attenuated.

Gerald Larner ©2006