Alfred Schnittke

In 1985, he suffered a brain stroke and went into a coma. On several occasions, he was declared clinically dead but he recovered from it. His health remained poor, however, for the rest of his life.

He died on August 3, 1998, in Hamburg, at the age of 63, after suffering a series of strokes. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow with state honors.

He was born on November 24, 1934 in Engels, in the Volga-German Republic of the Soviet Union, to Harry Viktorovich Schnittke and his wife, Maria Iosifovna Schnittke.

His father, a Jewish man of Latvian descent, worked as a journalist and translator of Russian to German language. His mother was a Volga German who served as a school teacher.

In 1946, his family moved to Vienna where his father was appointed to work for a newspaper. He began his musical education in Vienna where he took piano lessons from Charlotte Ruber and attended opera performances and concerts.

In 1948, his family moved to Valentinowka near Moscow where he attended choral conducting lessons and took classes in music theory from a music school. Thereafter, he attended the Moscow Conservatory where he studied counterpoint and composition with Jewgeni Golube and instrumentation with Nikolai Rakow.

In 1961, he completed his post-graduation and joined the ‘Union of Composers’ the same year.

In 1956, he performed his 1st Violin Concerto while studying at the Moscow Conservatory.

After his post-graduation, he was appointed as the instrumentation instructor in the Conservatory from 1962 to 1972. During his tenure, he wrote many theoretical papers on new music and conducted trips to Poland and German Democratic Republic.

In 1966, he produced his 1st String Quartet while he composed the First Symphony in 1969–1972 which was highly praised by everybody.

Thereafter, he composed music independently, including film scores, and earned his living through it. He composed nearly 70 scores in 30 years of his music career.

From 1975 onwards, his music was played at all the important contemporary music festivals, and in the 1980s it was included in the concert programs of leading orchestras throughout the world including Moscow, Stockholm, London, Vienna, Berlin and many other cities.

He is best known for his hallmark ‘polystylistic’ technique of composing music over a wide range of genres and styles. His first concert work to use the polystylistic technique was the Second Violin Sonata, Quasi una sonata (1967–1968).

He continued to develop the polystylistic technique in works such as the epic First Symphony (1969–1972) which became a great success.

His best-known works include the Concerto Grosso No. 1 and the Violin Concerto No. 4, for which the violinist was instructed to mime the cadenza rather than actually play it.