The Creative Career

In 1946, Alfred’s father was sent to Vienna as a journalist and translator of the Osterreichische Zeitung newspaper, published in German for the locals by the Soviet command. Then, in June of the same year his wife and children moved to the capital of Austria.

Going to the opera and symphony concerts in Vienna, the future composer received his first strong impressions. There was a notable remark in his memoirs: “I liked especially Mozart and Schubert then. I guess, thanks to them I got a deep, lasting passion for music.” The Mozart influence in Schnittke’s work is evident, even without taking into account a number of his compositions with the transcribed designation “Moz-art”. Schubert’s influence was more indirect — in democratic fluids with their complex psychological content.

At one of the concerts Alfred listened to Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. “Somehow I liked it, but no one believed that I really did and that I wasn’t showing off. It was considered to be so sophisticated and strange.”

Two years spent in Vienna brought him not only the first real contacts with the world of great art, but were also the years of his first steps in learning music. And again, it all started totally by chance. “Through some merits at work my father was given a Hohner accordion with incomplete basses. But still I composed the melody.” The teenager tried to write nothing less than a concerto for accordion and orchestra. It was “a stupid idea, utter nonsense, ” but again, he initially showed a striving for large-scale music and towards the genre, which later became the most important for him.

Alfred was so eager to learn the accordion on his own that his parents, noting him taking interest in music, sent him to Frau Charlotte Ruber, the pianist living upstairs. She started giving him private piano lessons. Now he tried to find any opportunity to play the grand piano. So, he tried to compose music for the instrument as well.

In 1948, on returning to the Soviet Union, the family settled in the village of Valentinovka near Moscow, not far from Mytischi. At first, in Valentinovka, “all my relationships with music were limited to the accordion.” “However, in the spring of 1949 I was taken to a music school in Losinoostrovsky, where I was told I needed to study, but was too old and that I was expected to play the double bass.”

Thus, Schnittke’s music training began quite late, almost at the age of 15, when he entered one of the Moscow music schools, the choral conducting department, since he lacked adequate training to study at any other department. It was the School named after the Great October Revolution — now the College at the Moscow State Institute of Music named after A.G. Schnittke.

Since then, his artistic growth was fast and intense, aided by the fact that his parents bought him a piano as soon as he entered the music school.