A NEW NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Composer Alfred Schnittke talks to David Nice

Alfred Schnittke and Mstislav Rostropovich [photo: Sony

IT is the last night of Life with on Idiot at Amsterdam's Music The atre, and the serpentine queue for returns that twists around the foyer is something that no one expected at the time of the premiere. Word of mouth has spread the news as effectively as the critical response. People know that conductor Rostropovich leaves the pit to take UI) his cello in a theatrical interlude; that the idiot Vova of the title, who wreaks longterm havoc in the household of the hero 'I' and his wife, bears a curious resemblance to Lenin; and that, in short, it's the first major piece of music-theatre in the post-Glasnost era to deal, albeit in oblique parable form, with over 70 years of communist-dictated life.

When I meet Alfred Schnittke in London six months later, he's surprised and gratified to learn about the queues, and doesn't seem at all worried that response to his music may have got lost somewhere in the enthusiasm. He credits the "rare combination of performers" and the writer Viktor Erofeyev— whom he won't hear called 'librettist'; he stresses that "the plot itself is a unique happening that can occur only once in history". Inevitably, outside events played their part in persuading Schnittke to abandon work in progress on his Faust opera and dictated the course of Life with an Idiot—though I'd like to emphasize that the connection with reality only happens when no one consciously thinks about the reality". As for the interplay with the Faust project, "as far as I'm concerned Life with an Idiot has a big question-mark over it, because I was working, and am working now, on a different plot, and now that it's been staged this opera isn't me any more."

He clarifies. "I often feel that I was used to write something rather than that I wrote something, and by that I mean that it's like someone picked me up like a pen and wrote it with me—using me." So the unconscious impulse has a lot to do with it? "Very much so." Schnittke stands back from the success of the opera in much the. same way as he now looks on his first real triumph in the West, the knife-edge Concerto grosso No. I of 1977—now a repertoire piece all over the world. A beautiful smile lights up his frail features: "I refuse to understand what's going on with this piece. All I know is that this work exists on its own, it has a separate life."

Schnittke will say little about the individual style of the opera, which strikes me as much sparer than many of his purely instrumental works. "I only tried to do what I have done before—that is to spread widely the small orchestra. I could have taken three or four times more musicians. But it's not important how many I'm writing for but where they Sit." As with his other compositions, a genuille modesty prompts him to talk less about his own composing and more about the inspiration of friends, Here, of course, it's the dominant presence of Rostropovich, for whom he also wrote his Second Cello Concerto (the First is dedicated, no less gratefully, to Natalia Gutman). Did his personality play an important part in the writing of the opera? "Yes and no. When I was composing it, I didn't think exclusively of Rostropovich, but the fact that it got into his hands was a decisive moment, The opera was written at the same time as the concerto, but Rostropovich didn't know it. I'd just finished the First Act and was working on the instrumentation of the Second, but I had to stop because of my illness"—the heart attack which has left him physically weak but intellectually as strong and forceful as ever. "At that same time I had a sort of distant contact with Rostropovich, meaning that we met enough to talk things over."

What of the interlude in which Rostropovich vividly participates as cellist? "There are some parts of the opera that are not part of the score, as it were, but quote from some of my earlier works, and this is one of them. In this case it was difficult to resist the temptation of having Rostropovich simply play the cello." Other friends are fondly remembered. When I ask Schnittke which of his compositions is closest to his heart, he cites the First Symphony, "which I dedicated to Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, and I still remember the feelings I experienced when he made it happen."

Rozbdestvensky wasn't the only musician who supported Schnittke during those difficult years in the Soviet Union when every new performance meant a battle with the authorities. Was that the most important thing, to have such friendships? "Absolutely—to have people like that and musicians like Rozhdcsvensky, because the kind of ties we had went beyond words. Apart ui'oni verbal contacts in such friendships there are other contacts which one can't specify or describe but only guess at. Those were the kind of links that went far beyond questions like, 'Are you the People's Artist of something or-other, or not?' I should also mention, as well as Gidon Kremer and Tatyana Grindenko, the violinist Mark Lubotsky and Natalia Gutman." He is often willing, too, to talk or write about the feelings which lie behind many of his works; I was moved to read an interview in which lie mentions the death of his mother as the starting point for In memoriam (quoted in the accompanying-note for the Sony recording), and notes that the emotions behind the third and fourth movements run too deep for words. He confesses that he'd be "most interested in the interaction between the intellectual and emotional aspects of each work, as far as expressing them in words is concerned" but cautions that "one has to be quite careful when one talks about these matters, because there are certain things which will never be clear to anybody including the author".

What he remains absolutely clear about is the logic that connects quotations, or stylizations, of music spanning the centuries throughout his work: polystylism, collage, call it what you will. "I can only say that I like the whole of music. For me there is no music which exists today or which existed 300 years ago. For me, music is the whole. So the connection between the different elements just goes on." And does it work so well because, like Stravinsky, he loves the music he quotes? "Excuse me, these aren't just quotes—there are pseudoquotes when you might be sitting there trying to think where the quote comes from. But honestly, I don't know the reasons. I only know that's how it is. These things aren't easy to categorize. For example I've written a great deal of music for films—but often it isn't the clichCd version of what people think of as film music, it has a life and a reason of its own. For example the Passacaglia of the Second Cello Concerto you referred to was originally the music for Agony, Elem Klimov's film about Rasputin. But it doesn't mean that ljust pick up the film music and insert it into other works. I change and I change a lot. But at the same time the contexts are related from the start."

Any thoughts on a development in his style Schnittke is happy to leave to others; he only thinks about the subject in hand. The Third Act of his new Faust opera takes the 1983 Faust cantata, Seid niichte,'n und wachet, as its centrepiece. At the time of our conversation, he had just completed the First Act and wasn't at all sure about the progress of the Second. So is Act I a further reflection on the music for the cantata, or something altogether different? "If it were simply a reflection of the Third Act, I would be very offended with myself. I understand that it's different, but I'm just trying not to think about that when I write." In the meantime, L/ with an Idiot awaits its Russian prernière in a Bolshoi staging. Can he say whether the public will appreciate the message--in which, in spite of talk about a Russian comic tradition stretching back to ()ogol, he denies any humour? "Maybe yes, maybe no": the concluding answer comes with the most Russian of shrugs and the broadest of grins. i''1 19