Alfred Schnittke

Alfred Schnittke developed polystylism as a method of combining different musical styles. Born in Engels on the Volga to a Volga German mother and a father who had come east from Frankfurt, he had part of his schooling in Vienna, where his father worked after the war, then studied and later taught at the Moscow Conservatory while earning his living from film scores — dozens of them, which he used to experiment with compositional and orchestral techniques. In the First Symphony and the First Concerto Grosso, Baroque gesture, Classical form, popular music, serial writing and sacred allusion are combined within individual works. His output includes concertos, symphonies, string quartets, the Requiem and the opera Life with an Idiot. He settled in Hamburg in 1990 and went on composing there until his death in 1998. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory until 1972, when he left at his own stated request, and it was performers, among them Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Gidon Kremer, Mstislav Rostropovich, Yuri Bashmet, Tatiana Grindenko and Natalia Gutman, who carried his music beyond the Soviet Union. In Hamburg he taught at the school of music and theatre; the catalogue also holds nine numbered symphonies, the last left unfinished, six concerti grossi, the ballet Peer Gynt, the Poems of Repentance and the operas Historia von D. Johann Fausten and Gesualdo.