Cellist Alexander Ivashkin, friend and biographer of Alfred Schnittke (1934-98), who's performing Schnittke's music at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, talks to Michael Dervan about the great composer
Alexander Ivashkin came to know composer Alfred Schnittke in the simplest, most everyday way you could imagine. They were neighbours, living in the same apartment block in Moscow in the early 1960s. After a while, Ivashkin realised that the Schnittke who lived nearby was the Schnittke he'd already heard about as a composer. He became involved in extending an invitation for a talk at the music academy where he was studying.
"Schnittke came, and he was a very easy man to deal with, unlike many others. He talked for hours, playing examples of his music from tapes. It was a very special feeling listening to him, like reading something.
"Later, when I was trying to put on paper whatever we talked about together - because we did have some taped dialogues - I felt that no editing was necessary. He actually talked as if he was writing. It's a very special kind of mentality or brain - full control over whatever he said, and absolutely in depth, nothing superficial at all. This is something which never occurred to me with anyone else, except probably John Cage, a very similar personality."
The worst facets of artistic repression in the former Soviet Union may have disappeared after the death of Stalin in 1953, but things were still difficult in the 1960s. "We knew Schnittke's name, because some of his compositions had been performed. But the compositions which had been performed were not typical of him. These were compositions based on folk tunes, or dedicated to certain dates in Russian history, so-called official compositions. He had very few of those, but in his early years, I guess, he had to accept some commissions like that.
"So we had heard these compositions, but we had also heard that he could write quite different music, which, already in the 1960s, started to be performed in the West, especially in Warsaw and Prague, because that was "West" for the Soviet Union. That was as far as we could go." Ivashkin laughs loudly as he talks of the Polish and Czech capitals as "The West".
"He had some of these compositions on tape. Then, you know, the Borodin Quartet, quite bravely, commissioned a string quartet from him. That was an absolutely modern and interesting composition. That's probably my first experience with his real music, the String Quartet No 1."
Schnittke's music at this time explored 12-tone writing, as well as the aleatory composition and extended instrumental techniques that were greatly in vogue in the West.
Schnittke, of course, was by no means the first Soviet composer to engage with Western techniques likely to provoke official disapproval.
The Romanian-born pupil of Webern, Philip Herschkowitz (1906-89), and Andrey Volkonsky (born in 1933 in Geneva into a noble Russian family which returned to the Soviet Union in 1947), both got there before him.
"I think it's unfortunate of course that we spent so much time under a Communist regime," says Ivashkin. "But, on the other hand, it's a paradox, we did have some advantages, living at that time. When you are completely restricted, it actually stimulates your fantasy or imagination, or at least you try to find ways around things, looking for bypasses.
"You mentioned Herschkowitz - he pronounces the name Gershkovich, with the emphasis on the O - he was a very interesting man, who I got to know in his very, very late years. He didn't actually compose much. But he was extremely influential as a thinker. I distinctly remember visiting him, just having a supper with him. He talked about Beethoven or about Weber, and the way he described music - a Beethoven piano sonata, say - was completely new, fresh and full of extremely provocative ideas. I think he was always like that.
"He was a paradoxical person. He was not an easy person to deal with. He wasn't really a great composer, but he was a great thinker, and he influenced Schnittke, Denisov and Gubaidulina a lot in this particular way. They had to be independent. They had to find their own way. And they always had to find a new point of view on something that is very well known.
"I think what was most important in his informal teaching, was that there is no such thing as modern music, old music, traditional music and avant-garde music. Music is actually something which cannot be divided.
So the same rules, or same ideas apply to Beethoven, Bach, Palestrina, Webern, Schnittke or whoever. This was fantastic. He was one of the pioneers in this kind of thinking, who did it just because he had an incredibly developed intuition in music. Not knowledge as such. He felt music like nobody else."
Volkonsky, who wrote his first totally serial piece in 1956, "started, I wouldn't call it an illness, but he spread out new ideas among the Soviets. I think that was the greatest job he did. He started the process which is now, I think, over, the result of which is that Russian music is not isolated any more, now. And the Russian mentality is not as terribly much separated as it used to be, not only for decades, but centuries". Herschkowitz worked as a music editor and orchestrator of film scores. Volkonsky, who came under Herschkowitz's influence, was expelled from the Moscow Conservatory in 1954 when a fellow student denounced him for owning scores by Schoenberg and Stravinsky. To make a living, he involved himself with Rudolf Barshai's Moscow Chamber Orchestra, and later founded the Madrigal Ensemble, an early music group specialising in Renaissance music. He emigrated to France in 1973.
Ivashkin remembers some of the practical difficulties of working outside the system. "For instance, we were not allowed to make any photocopies in the Soviet Union. How can you make multiple copies of your string quartet or piano composition? In order to do this you had to submit the composition, in the original form only, to the Composers' Union. They would discuss it, and if they didn't like it, then that was the end of the game. It only exists in a single copy, no computers, nothing like that. Friends could play your music, but only on a chamber music scale.
All the orchestras were state controlled. Officially, you were not allowed to send your scores abroad, so if you went to the Central Post Office, they would refuse. The way around that was to find some provincial post office, and if they didn't quite know what they were doing, they just accepted something for Prague or for Warsaw. That was the gate to paradise."
There was, of course, the exception to prove the rule. The pianist Marina Yudina managed to keep in contact with the real West. "She was what you would call a maverick. I clearly remember her concerts. She played recitals, usually in the Tchaikovsky Hall, which seats around 2,000, and it was always full. People saw her not just as a pianist, but as a prophet, as someone who could help you to establish connections with the past. People saw her in a mystical way. She was always talking before she started. She never accepted flowers, and if someone brought flowers to her, she said you have spent your money in the wrong way, you should give them to poor people, something like that. And she always managed to read forbidden poetry, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, impossible to imagine.
"I think officials didn't touch her, because they thought, she is mad, or a witch, or something. She was very strange. For at least her 10 last years, she slept in a coffin, because she was very religious, and felt she had to prepare herself for a different world. But she just simply wrote and sent letters to Stravinsky or Boulez, and it worked. The only reason I can imagine is they thought she is out of her mind. They didn't consider it to be something serious.
"Nevertheless, when she died, we actually couldn't arrange her funeral in the hall. Usually, when someone like that dies, thecoffin is placed in the Moscow Conservatory Great Hall, on stage, you know, like with Schnittke himself, when he died. But she was only allowed to be placed somewhere near the front door to the street. But many people attended. She was exceptional, absolutely exceptional. But she didn't have anything. She didn't have any money. She had a terribly small flat, even I think just a room in a communal flat. She was always dressed in the same sort of black robe. That's how she wanted to be. An absolutely great person."
Schnittke, of course, didn't just suffer under the system, but he also benefited. The Composers' Union had no hold over film music, and Schnittke wrote music for more than 60 films, music which, says Ivashkin, can bear concert performance, and music in which Schnittke developed ideas for his major compositions.
His First Symphony was directly influenced by his work on the music for Mikhail Romm's documentary, The World Today, which surveyed the history of the 20th century. Schnittke's symphony, which was denied a Moscow première (and heard instead for the first time in the closed city of Gorky in 1974), has theatrical entrances and exits for the orchestra (and a reminiscence of the Haydn's Farewell symphony at the end), quotes other music and styles widely, including passages in mock-baroque style, and incorporates a free improvisation for jazz musicians. It's been described as "not so much a 'what if?' piece as a 'what the hell' one".
Late in life, when Schnittke achieved international fame, he suffered from ill-health, experiencing a series of debilitating strokes from 1985 onwards. His determination to continue composing revealed an indomitable spirit.
"I think the biggest number of his compositions was written when he was gravely ill, especially after 1991. Between 1991 and 1994, when he finally lost the ability to speak, he wrote an enormous number of compositions. Of course the scoring is sparse, it's not big scores anymore, but it was difficult for him to write. On the other hand, I think there are some real masterpieces, like the Fragments after Bosch, or Symphony No 8, for instance. Even after 1994, when he was unable to write with his right hand, he was still writing with his left hand, and he finished his Symphony No 9, Viola Concerto, and a couple of small pieces, which is amazing, really. It was not just that he learned to write with his left hand, he couldn't write the names, but he still could write music. He lost the ability to spell things correctly, but in terms of music it was still OK."
And, clasping his hands to his heart, Ivashkin adds, "I think this is something which comes from there, really." Ivashkin values Schnittke's music most for developing a style in which "the very simple elements mean a lot".
He recalls the early responses to the Piano Quintet, which was completed in the mid-1970s after the death of the composer's mother, and is "an instrumental requiem". Ivashkin recalls how "the ending, with the music disappearing, the pianist pretending to play on the keyboard but not making any sound, caused a lot of conflict between Schnittke and other Russian composers like Denisov. Denisov actually accused Schnittke of writing a compromising music and he didn't feel that the quintet was good music, just officially required music. Of course, Schnittke didn't write any officially required music. But that was a difference in understanding of how simple music could be. Denisov, of course, in his later years, also wrote a lot of simple compositions. But he never got to this kind of deep understanding of what Schnittke did, of what simplicity should be about."
The Piano Quintet will be played at this year's West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry , as also will the Second Piano Sonata of 1990, by the composer's widow, Irina, for whom it was written. "It's very unquiet, extremely unquiet, almost hysterical in a way. This is Schnittke as we see him in the Nineties. He became a kind of expressionist composer, with some ideas that you could hear in German music in the mid-20th century. This music doesn't sound very Russian to me at all, with the exception of some symbolic things, like a clock at the end, and the overall extramusical idea of disaster, which you can obviously feel in the concept of this music."
Schnittke himself, says Ivashkin, was usually dismissive of his own work. "I remember him, when I was congratulating him on the success of a new composition, he said, 'Well once again nobody noticed that this is real shit, but perhaps next time everybody will be aware of this'. He was very critical of himself. Seriously, I think he actually understood sometimes that he did something really significant, but whenever it happened, in the Faust Cantata, which he liked, and the Symphony No 1, he always said, 'It's not me, I'm just writing whatever I hear from I don't know where'. He kept saying this. 'I'm not a composer. I'm just a medium for someone who dictates. That's it'."
The West Cork Chamber Music Festival opens today and runs until July 6th. The Schnittke concerts take place tomorrow (Alexander Ivashkin, cello, Irina Schnittke piano - Schnittke Cello Sonata No.1); Monday, June 30th (Irina Schnittke, piano - Schnittke Piano Sonata No.2) and Tuesday, July 1st (Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin, Alexander Ivashkin, cello, Irina Schnittke, piano - Schnittke Piano Trio, 1992). For full festival details see www.westcorkmusic.ie