Schnittke’s musical imagination cannot be separated from his fascination with all forms of mysticism; the occult, in the sense of the hidden, became both inspiration and structure. Schnittke’s varying interests in theosophy, I Ching, kabbalah, and Gnosticism coalesced at the time of his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1982; his sacred choral works came to outnumber the secular. Schnittke believed his function as composer was more a medium, a conduit of hidden and magical messages from a transcendent realm.

The choral concerto refined and elaborated by the Ukrainian Dmitri Bortniansky (1751-1825) for the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox church, reached its apotheosis in Rachmaninoff, Grechaninov, and Rimsky-Korsakov. This uniquely Russian choral tradition was nearly snuffed out after Bolshevik Revolution; Schnittke resurrected the form after nearly one hundred years of neglect. I’ve chosen two qualities of the Concerto for Mixed Chorus to unlock its meaning in the context of the history of sacred choral music: the importance of the D major tonalities, and the setting of the ideas of suffering and universality in the text. The Armenian monk, mystic and philosopher Grigor Narekatsi (951–1003) wrote his Book of Lamentations as an offering of ecumenical prayers “so that my singing may become healing, curing the wounds of body and soul.” Schnittke had profound reasons to be drawn to this text, and similarly meaningful choices structuring setting. The work is composed of three movements determined by the divisions in Narekatski’s text, followed by a fourth that functions as a coda, recapitulating the tonal progression of the entire work from B minor to D Major. (I’m indebted to Melanie Turgeon’s analysis in Composing the Sacred in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: History and Christianity in Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Choir, 2008).

D major represented light to Schnittke; the Concerto was not the first or last time he would use its symbolism in a sacred choral music, often in coda. The coda to his Fourth Symphony (1983) resolves four disparate modes representing the liturgical traditions of Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Lutheranism into an Ave Maria in D Major. In the choral coda of Schnittke’s ballet Peer Gynt, Gynt (1986) escapes from the shadow world of illusion into transcendent dimension filled with light and the mysteries of eternities – a dimension that just happens to be D major.

It’s no mystery that since the baroque D major in choral music has represented the triumph of Christ’s victory over death and the affirmation of faith in the resurrection. The epitome of this structure is found in the Bach’s Mass in B minor, whose tonal progression from B minor to D major is echoed in the Concerto. The tradition was retained throughout the common practice period, with Beethoven’s masterwork Missa solemnis joining the Mass in B minor as its anchoring achievements. The Missa solemnis is almost entirely centered in D major, and concludes in D major. Another especially brilliant setting of D major is an ascending scale depicting a sunrise, found in Haydn’s The Creation following the recitative “And God said: Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven.” This D major as Fiat Lux surely must be a shadow-sound for Schnittke.

The D Major code can be found much closer to Schnittke’s home: in Arvo Pärt. Composed in 1982, Pärt’s St. John Passion ends in what one critic described as a “blaze of light,” a mighty crescendo as coda, set with the text “Qui passus es pro nobis, miserere nobis. Amen.” The Amen? D Major: the culmination of the tonal and textural music of Christ’s death, moving through suffering, mercy, and transcendence. Pärt’s De Teum (1984) likewise ends in D major, setting the word Sanctus, but as in the Concerto, with a diminuendo suggesting the endless and sublime. In both Pärt and Schnittke one can hear shadows of Faure and Durufle’s D major setting of In Paradisum that conclude – without ending, in a sense – each of their Requiems.

If one is beginning to suspect the ubiquity of D major tonality of transcendence, it’s fair to ask, what’s the big mystery? How could Schnittke think of such a blatant symbol as hidden or submerged? It was crucially important to Schnittke that audiences need not analyze or decode his music: he meant for its hidden meaning to be “intuited.” Even for his Soviet audiences, cut off from their thread of tradition of sacred choral music, the meaning of this tonality would have been hard to miss, despite the absence of text, as Soviet censorship sometimes demanded. Of course, many in Schnittke’s audience were fully cognizant of his symbol system. Perhaps the mystical leap Schnittke asked of them was in hearing these profoundly traditional sacred forms anew and from within an often radically hostile political and cultural climate, imbuing them with new and more intensely resonate meanings.

But the surface symbolism of Schnittke’s D major isn’t the whole story. The key of light also has deep roots in symbol systems of color and myth in Western music. In this way the Concerto for Mixed Chorus encodes one thematic gesture: D major-yellow light-Prometheus/Christ. The lynchpin for understanding these shadow-sounds is Alexander Scriabin, a composer of great importance to Schnittke. Inspired by the mysticism of theosophy and Gnosticism, Scriabin described the circle of fifths in terms of color; D major was golden yellow, a synesthetic perception shared with Rimsky-Korsakoff. Scriabin’s Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910) use an keyboard instrument he invented called the clavier à lumières that projected colored lights according to this scale. The myth of Titan hero Prometheus was often understood as allegory for the suffering of Christ and the salvation of humankind; the myth was a popular theme of Romantic composers, interested in creative/destructive genius and the universal Devine. Prometheus rises again in the final movement of Mahler’s First Symphony. The ever ambivalent Mahler labeled its D major coda “Dall’ Inferno al Paradiso,” before retracting all his programmatic notes. Mahler briefly named the symphony “Titan,” influenced by Jean Paul’s bildungsroman, but for Mahler, the hero’s maturation and victory over fate (the Paradiso chorale in D major) is tempered by ambivalence in the face of the knowledge of death (the F minor ppp of the Inferno). But unsurprisingly, Beethoven got there first: in the coda to his Third Symphony, the “Eroica,” Beethoven used fugal variations on theme from his ballet Creatures of Prometheus to depicting the hero’s journey towards creative self-fulfillment. Schnittke quoted this Prometheus theme in his Second Violin Concerto, Quasi Una Sonata (1968), a narrative of the passion of the Christ.

Scriabin’s theory of color and music influenced Wassily Kandinsky’s, who also identified yellow with the key of D major. Kandinsky muses:

“The soul poses a question and looks for an answer in the surrounding sensual nature. The Answer is given, but does not satisfy. Suddenly the supernatural answer comes that calls into higher realms. Accord D major is peacefulness, satisfaction after having received the answer.”

Kandinsky’s experimental one act opera The Yellow Sound was conceived as a multimedia expression of synesthesia in music drama; in 1973 Schnittke composed a score for Kandinsky’s libretto, premiering in a 1975 French production. Schoenberg concurrently explored these ideas in The Hand of Fate, with its “color crescendo” culminating yellow light and allusions to D. These theosophist-inspired symbol systems widely influenced musicians, artists and poets of the early twentieth century. The Russian Symbolist poets associated color and music; for Andrei Bely, colors perform a talismanic ritual, radiance of golden yellow symbolizing ecstatic unity of divine wisdom and humankind. Yellow naturally invokes notions of radiance, joy and light, intensified in the golds of Russian iconography.
Chasing Schnittke’s shadows in the Concerto, with its appeal to the unity of “Christians in all the corners of the earth” leads inevitably to the D major of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The European Community adopted the “Ode to Joy” as its anthem in 1985, the same year the Concerto was composed. Beethoven’s “spark of the gods” finds its shadow in Schnittke’s plea through Grigor Narekatsi not to “extinguish the revelation You have granted,” set in his key of light.

Schnittke’s evocations of D major in the Concerto take on a special poignancy where they underline texts of the Book of Lamentations that wrestle with suffering, illness, and death. By the time of its composition, Schnittke’s maternal grandmother, mother, brother had died of strokes, and his sister had her first stroke. Within a few weeks of finishing the Concerto, Schnittke, who also had high blood pressure, suffered the first of a series debilitating strokes that would eventually take his life. These themes find their great echo in Nietzsche contra Wagner. When Wagner converted to a kind of Schopenhauerian Christianity, to Nietzsche it was as though Wagner “suddenly fell helpless and broken on his knees before the Christian cross.” Nietzsche raged that Wagner’s audiences, seduced by the snake oil of repentance and redemption in Christian dramas like Parsifal, were lulled into smug complacency and malignant German nationalism and anti-Semitism. Something of Nietzsche’s attitude can be heard in Schnittke’s colleague Dmitri Smirnov:

“It was a real shock for all of us young Russian composers, when at the beginning of 70s Alfred Schnittke, whom we incredibly respected and trusted in everything he did, and who always has been a consistent follower of the radical avant-garde division in music, unexpectedly turned back to old conventional style and to the unjustified simplification of his musical language. It was difficult to accept, but it was the spirit of the times: tiredness and disillusionment with the structuralism and complexity, as well as the rolling back to the positions of so-called ‘new simplicity’.”

Schnittke’s Concerto resurrects a profoundly conservative, almost reactionary form. Audiences undeniably seek spiritual solace in that form, as did Schnittke himself. Yet Schnittke’s themes were a powerful form of political dissent and freedom of conscience, and were understood and valued by his audiences as such. Schnittke’s Christianity gave him strength to confront the past and make meaning, instead of turning his face away in resignation or retreat. His creative genius was employed in an almost Nietzschean, profoundly generative project of overcoming suffering and self-becoming, and inspired the same in others. This attempt could easily have ended in the pabulum of empty platitudes. Instead, as Kurt Masur proclaims, Schnittke became “one of the greatest humanists who ever worked in the art of music.” Richard Taruskin concludes:

“The wonder of it all, for those receptive to method, is how often Schnittke, like Shostakovich before him, manages to skirt the pitfall and bring off the catharsis – a catharsis a mere hairbreadth from blatancy and all the more powerful for having braved the risk.”

The Pärt is the easy one.  Vodka martini very cold.  Normally, I’m a gin girl, but this requires the crystalline cleanliness of vodka. I’m thinking it’s a twist, and not an olive this time.  Although then the mind starts to wander…  it has a softness too, so now I’m thinking cozy furs (the vodka is cold, but there’s a warmth inside) and a sleigh–taking us on a journey through a vast, spare and snowy landscape. Destination?  Perhaps we’re headed to  one of those super cool ice hotels!  The music is svelte, smart and sophisticated–think Bond girl with a PhD, but with a spiritual side–alone in a cool dark monastery (with her furs and her cocktail, naturally) surrounded by the warm light of many candles burning.  Another colleague of mine said it made him think of a cold spring pond. He specifically mentioned an Estonian pond, but since I’ve never been there, my mind immediately went to happy hours spent on the far side of Walden Pond, enjoying a solitary swim in  tranquil refreshing waters.

The Schnittke is a murkier issue–in many ways it’s just a deep feather bed of delicious harmony, spread out over several octaves–rich, deep, often favoring the sonority of the lowest basses.  So a rich velvety red wine comes to mind, one of those wonderful stinky french ones where you’re constantly seeking out the elements of the terroir (funky tastes like dirt and brussel sprouts and wait, is that a hint of licorice–or is it canteloupe?)  I love wines like that (especially with an equally “stinky” cheese or divinely grilled piece of meat).  I love waiting for them to open up as they interact with the air, the food you’re enjoying it with, and  as your palate comes into acquaintance with each flavor it expands to help you recognize a new element.  Complex, deep, nuanced.  But I think wine is not quite the right analogy.  Soft velvety manhattan with a liquor soaked cherry at the end?  Hmmm.

There’s a yeastiness to this music–a bubbling changeability as it weaves its way mercurially through major and minor with explosions of brilliant brightness.  Sourdough starter–dough expanding to the limits, and punched down to rise again.  So I’m heading in the direction of a gorgeous Belgian beer– but maybe with a gloriously astringent Negroni cocktail on the side?

My friend Majie also said it’s like being in an enormous Gothic cathedral with lots of voices all around you having their own conversations, and then all of sudden the sounds coalesce into a single coherent sound, and then wander again off into individual chatter.  Sometimes I feel like it’s the best shampoo you’ve ever had in a salon.  Lather, rinse, repeat. (With a soft angelic pillowy Amen at the end.)  Aaah.  Note to self–Book the spa day now.

My happiest hours are the time I spend living and breathing remarkable and challenging music.  I love the way this music sparks my imagination and speaks to my soul–what sort of a journey is it for you?

Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Mass is spare and crystalline, sounding at once ancient and modern.  Its spaciousness is that of the outdoors on a cold, crisp winter day in Estonia.  The horizon is endless.

Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Choir is also spacious, but it’s the spaciousness of a huge cathedral, with centuries of echoing voices trapped and overlapping each other, then coming together suddenly in a big, bold and painfully beautiful consonant chord.  It’s so Soviet, so Russian.

First, the set-up by David Hoose:

“The idea of pairing two such rarely performed and, frankly, bizarre works, one by Estonian Arvo Pärt, whose music is known and beloved by many, and one by Russian Alfred Schnittke, whose music is known and loved by some (mostly Russians), would seem merely strange and arbitrary if both compositions were not masterpieces in their own right,  measures of their composers’ highest achievement, and expressions so profound that each reaches down to the same well of human experience.”

Followed by the program notes by John Erhlich, “Searching Sublimity”:

Arvo Pärt’s music has touched many listeners’ hearts in recent years with its arresting amalgam of asceticism and ecstasy. There seems to be something inherent in his music’s expressivity that speaks directly and powerfully to today’s serious music listeners. Is it the music’s hovering stasis that so transfixes us? Is it the transparency of line? Is it the meditative spareness of the overall sound he conjures? A magical alchemy of all of these, it seems, in differing percentages that depend upon the material at hand, creates the aura that has become Pärt’s signature sound. 

All of these elements are heard in the course of Pärt’s Berliner Messe, first composed during 1990, upon a commission from the 19th Deutsche Katholikentag that was celebrated that year in Berlin. For that occasion Pärt had scored his Messe “for SATB choir or soloists and organ.” His revision of this original version was published in 1997. However, in 1991 Pärt produced a version of the Messe scored “for choir and string orchestra,” which he revised again in 2002. This performance will be of the chorus and organ version from 1997.

The text follows the standard church liturgy, with two notable additions: after the Gloria, Pärt first adds a set of “Alleluia Verses,” followed by a setting of “Veni Sancte Spiritus,” a sequence usually heard in the context of the Roman Catholic Mass for Pentecost. Known as the “Golden Sequence,” it is a spiritual poem of exceptional depth and beauty. While its author is unknown, recent scholarship points to the late (d.1228) Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton.

In general, the music of Pärt’s Berliner Messe is homophonic, with no counterpoint among the choral parts, and no word painting of the text, though shifting moods are discernible. The music is vertically constructed, with the vocal lines often in unison or octaves. The accompaniment offers grounding pedal points and high halos of sound, resulting in an overall spare sonority, and ascetic-sounding, haunting and inward feeling. One could suggest the image of music heard filtered through a nun’s veil or a monk’s hood.

A few things to listen for in this brief but moving work may be of interest:

• Pärt sets the Kyrie and Gloria texts in contrasting fashion, the two approaches creating an overall mood of undifferentiated and coolly glowing ecstatic contemplation and detachment, the Gloria offering a more forward-moving and energetic pace than the contemplative and beseeching Kyrie.
• The brief but affecting Alleluia verses have men’s voices chanting the text, set off by homophonic full-chorus alleluias.
• Veni Sancte Spiritus has men’s and women’s voices each in two parts calling and responding to one another, with occasional moments of conjoining vocal lines, all accompanied by sighing figurations and a grounding pedal tone. All the voices join for only one verse, the second-to-last, where the translated text is, “Grant to thy faithful/Trusting in thee/Thy sacred sevenfold mystery.”
• The Credo is of a quite different character, owing to its origins in Pärt’s 1977 Summa. The music is brighter, more fulsome, with the accompaniment existing within a circumscribed set of particular pitches and occasionally (almost) straying into commentary. The overall effect created is (again, almost) cheerful, though a dramatic pause after “…passus et sepultus est” (“…suffered, and was buried”) darkens the mood.
• Sanctus and Benedictus return to the more chaste, inward-looking and undeclarative setting of text heard earlier. Even both Osannas are quietly and briefly expressed without a hint of exultancy.
• High pitches sounded from the organ create an otherworldly calm for the ensuing Agnus Dei, and the voices, also quite high, sing in imitative phrases between the men and women. The third and final verse is set lower than the first two, with the four voice parts now asked to sing together, tellingly imploring peace: Dona nobis pacem.

If Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Messe is akin to a tart and cool limoncello, that which Alfred Schnittke presents us in his Concerto for Choir is a far richer fare indeed, a veritable varnishkes of deep and anguished Germanic-Russian soulfulness.

There is enormous contrast between Pärt’s Berliner Messe and Schnittke’s Concerto for Choir, though the two works eschew traditional counterpoint and are largely homophonic. Unlike Pärt’s Messe, there is abundant word painting in the Concerto. In addition, the Schnittke offers several moments when soloists or entire sections of voices spin out a soaring obbligato above and among the other voices.

Schnittke “…admired the ascetic beauty of Pärt’s music, but he told Alexander Ivashkin (Schnittke’s biographer): ‘I can’t be a saint!’ A revealing reply. Schnittke’s music is always formidably human.” (As quoted in Alexander Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke. Phaidon Press, London, 1996.)

The immense body of work that Alfred Schnittke left when he died in 1998 is daunting not only for its number of compositions but also for its myriad of stylistic approaches. To say he was all over the map in compositional style is accurate but insufficient. Perhaps this is why authors and critics, when attempting to describe Schnittke’s music, latched on to the term “polystylistic,” a term of limited usefulness, but accurate insofar as it goes. This characterization has little association with the composer’s rich and rapt Concerto for Choir. Written in 1984-85, it marked the composer’s return from the radical avant-garde he had so fully embraced earlier to a more conventional approach to composition. Gone were the aleatory and the improvised, gone also were the acidic and sardonic dissonances he had so fully exploited. No longer would his statement “I set down a beautiful chord on paper, and suddenly it rusts,” apply. Here was something new, so unexpected in light of his earlier music that many of Schnittke’s early adherents vocally complained that he had sold out his avant-garde credentials. Yet, “conventional” hardly suffices to begin to describe this Choir Concerto; so rich and multi-hued, so deep and searching, so surprising and unexpected are its sounds.

The profound influence of the Russian Orthodox Church can be heard throughout the Concerto for Choir, though typical of this composer, generalizations such as this are dangerous. But there is no denying that the rich chordal procession that characterizes the work’s opening and most lengthy
movement has the whiff of frankincense perfume. Schnittke was no stranger to spiritualism and ecclesiastical thought. He had long harbored a strong interest in God and religion, and in fact had written a Requiem with Biblical texts. However, having written such a work in 1975, the Communist authorities, with whom all Soviet composers of that time had to guardedly struggle, allowed this
religious work to be performed only as incidental music to Friedrich Schiller’s play Don Carlos! The music of his 1984 Fourth Symphony reflects characteristics of Jewish, Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic musical influences, as if he were searching for a religion or congregation to join. (Drawn from notes by Dimitri Smirnov, Hyperion CDA 67297, 2002.)

So, clearly, Schnittke’s ties to religion and its many subtle and not so subtle influences upon him had been in place for some time.

The Concerto’s texts are from the third chapter of The Book of Lamentations, by Grigor Narekatsi, an Armenian monk who lived from 951-1003. The texts were translated into Russian by Naum Grebnev (1921-1988), an author and composer friend of Schnittke. The strongly personal and internalized nature of these words clearly appealed to Schnittke, and his music is deeply reflective of this.

Calling upon the scholarship of Dimitri Smirnov, whose notes accompany a recording of this work:

The four movements of the Concerto reflect the four different sub-divisions and themes of Narekatsi’s chapter: (i) the rapturous praise and appeal to God; (ii) the list of those whom the lamentations might be expected to reach; (iii) the hope of redemption and deliverance for those who will understand the essence of these words and for the poet himself who wrote them; (iv) the humble prayer asking God to complete these songs and give them healing power. (Dimitri Smirnov, Hyperion CDA 67297, 2002.)

Of particular interest is how Schnittke’s music reacts to certain important words or ideas in Narekatsi’s text. Over and over again, an arrival upon these certain words releases a huge unfurling of the choir’s voices into large, many-voiced tone clusters. Heard within the context of otherwise straightforward homophonic style, these arrivals achieve an unmistakable and illuminative weight. In the first movement, listen to what Schnittke conjures up for “jedinstvennyj dl’a a nas radnik pakoja” (“our only fountain of peace”), shortly after that the extraordinary arrival on the word “klad” (“treasure”), and the wonderful color at “Tvoj sled nevidim, vidima lish milast’” (“Your imprint is invisible, we can only see Your favor”).

Yet there are so many moments such as these throughout this remarkable work it becomes an empty exercise to try to point all of them out. At the conclusion of this forty-minute masterpiece, one is left with a profound sense of having traveled in time and space to a more exalted place of plush richness, deep reverence, and fervent, prayerful contemplation.

Above Schnittke’s grave in Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow there is a marker which it is said he designed. A rough piece of dark stone has embedded in it a bronze musical staff of five lines with no key signature or meter. On the second staff line from the top a rectangular rest hangs suspended. Over this rest is a fermata, and beneath it is the dynamic fff.

Unending, crashing silence? One wonders, but this is not unusual for Schnittke. In his music, wonders abound.

—John Ehrlich

John W. Ehrlich, founder and Music Director of The Spectrum Singers, has been active as a singer and conductor in the Boston and Cambridge areas for more than thirty-five years. Son of a concert pianist and a microbiologist, Mr. Ehrlich was born in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, and attended Grosse Pointe University School and the New Hampton School. He studied music and conducting at the Hartt School of Music, at Trinity College, and at Harvard and Boston Universities. His teachers were Robert Shaw, Gregg Smith, G. Wallace
Woodworth, Nathan Gottschalk, and Vytautous Marijousius. Mr. Ehrlich has sung with Hartford Chamber Choir, Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Cambridge Society for Early Music, John Oliver Chorale, Boston Baroque, Cantata Singers, and Emmanuel Music. For eight seasons he was Music Director of the Master Singers of Worcester. This is Mr. Ehrlich’s thirtysecond season as Music Director of The Spectrum Singers.

I recently posted the picture above on my facebook page with the caption “Bach is the center of it all.” A brief discussion ensued about who really is the greatest composer–Beethoven gets center billing on the Symphony Hall proscenium, but Bach recently came out on top in the NY Times. I am not good at choosing favorites, whether it be my favorite color, book, or food (or sister! haha!), but I think I may have a favorite composer.

I had a quick little insight during rehearsals for the B-minor Mass this week–it may or may not be a strong analogy, but I thought it was at least amusing.

Beethoven, with his magnificent bravado is the Cowardly Lion, while Brahms wins my heart as the Tin Man.

Bach of the great intellect is naturally cast as Scarecrow.

The week following a wonderfully successful concert is always just a little bittersweet. As we leave the B-minor and Bach behind us this week, and move on to Howells, Bernstein, Ives and more Vaughan Williams, I’m feeling a little like Dorothy.

Scarecrow, I think I’ll miss you most of all…

–posted by Bonnie

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