Friday 3 July

Alfred Schnittke
^1934–98

Alfred Schnittke coined the term ‘polystylism’ to describe his musical philosophy. Put simply, polystylism refers to the use of different (and sometimes contradictory or jarring) styles and themes in one piece of music. His Symphony No 1 is a perfect example of this practice, a collage of motifs and themes taken from Haydn, Tchaikovsky and jazz. The clash of sounds and styles energises the music, with each disparate element coming together to form one cohesive whole. This experimental aesthetic was not favoured by Soviet officials.

Schnittke was born in the Soviet Union to German parents. His German origins would influence his work for much of his career. Between 1945 and 1948, he studied piano in Vienna, returning to the Soviet Union to study and then teach at the Moscow Conservatoire.

Much of his early work was composed in the Socialist Realist style, an easily-digestible style that was expected of all composers in the country. He was hugely prolific, and over the course of his career, composed seven symphonies, string concertos, six ballets, choral music, and scores for over 60 films. He came to international attention in the 1980s, and responded to fame by becoming more withdrawn, moving away from polystylism to an intensely personal style. He died after a long illness in 1998.

_{Profile by Joe Hardy}

Johann Sebastian Bach
^1685–1750

Bach was orphaned by the age of ten, and was subsequently raised by his elder brother, with whom he studied organ and composition. At 18, he became organist of St Bonifacius’ Church in Arnstadt. Bach swiftly outgrew the musical demands of Arnstadt, moving in 1707 to the wealthier church of St Blasius for whose choir and orchestra he wrote his first dateable works.

The following year Bach was invited by the Duke of Weimar to become court organist, and in 1714 was promoted to the post of Konzertmeister. With the support of the duke’s nephew, he was offered the vacant post of Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. Here he devoted much of his time to instrumental composition, from organ showpieces to his Brandenburg Concertos.

Following his first wife’s death in July 1720 and re-marriage the following year to Anna Magdalena Wilcke, Bach accepted the post of Kantor at Leipzig’s respected St Thomas School and director of the town’s music on 23 May 1723. As well as working as an organist and composer, he was expected to be a schoolmaster, a choir-trainer, and the director of music at two town churches (and supervisor for two others!). Additionally, Bach set about producing a new cantata to be performed at the main Sunday service and other important church feasts, a Herculean task that yielded more than 60 works a year over a five year period. During his lifetime, Bach gained wide recognition as a virtuoso organist and keyboard player, and gifted teacher, although only a handful of his compositions were published.

_{Profile by Andrew Stewart}

Dmitri Shostakovich
^1906–75

Following early piano lessons with his mother, Shostakovich enrolled at the Petrograd Conservatory in 1919. He supplemented his family’s meagre income from his earnings as a cinema pianist, but progressed to become a composer and concert pianist following the critical success of his First Symphony in 1926 and an ‘honourable mention’ in the 1927 Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw.

Over the next decade, he embraced the ideal of composing for Soviet society and his Second Symphony was dedicated to the October Revolution of 1917. Shostakovich announced his Fifth Symphony of 1937 as ‘a Soviet artist’s practical creative reply to just criticism’. Acclaim came not only from the Russian audience, who gave the work a reported 40-minute ovation, but also from musicians and critics overseas.

With the outbreak of war against Nazi Germany in June 1941, Shostakovich began to compose and arrange pieces to boost public morale. He lived through the first months of the German siege of Leningrad, serving in the auxiliary fire service. In 1948, Shostakovich and other leading composers, Prokofiev among them, were forced by the Soviet cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov, to concede that their work represented ‘most strikingly the formalistic perversions and anti-democratic tendencies in music’, a crippling blow to Shostakovich’s artistic freedom that was healed only after the death of Stalin in 1953.

A few years before the completion of his final and bleak Fifteenth String Quartet, Shostakovich suffered his second heart attack and the onset of severe arthritis. Many of his final works – in particular the penultimate symphony (No 14) – are preoccupied with the subject of death.

_{Profile by Andrew Stewart}

Igor Stravinsky
^1882–1971

The son of the Principal Bass at the Mariinsky Theatre, Stravinsky was born near St Petersburg in 1882. Through his father he met many of the leading musicians of the day and came into contact with the world of the musical theatre. In 1903 he became a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, which allowed him to get his orchestral works performed and as a result he came to the attention of Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned a new ballet from him, The Firebird.

The success of The Firebird, and then Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913) confirmed his status as a leading young composer. Stravinsky now spent most of his time in Switzerland and France, but continued to compose for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.

Stravinsky settled in France in 1920, eventually becoming a French citizen in 1934, and during this period moved away from his Russianism towards a new ‘neo-Classical’ style. Personal tragedy in the form of his daughter, wife and mother all dying within eight months of each other, and the onset of World War II persuaded Stravinsky to move to America in 1939, where he lived until his death. From the 1950s, his compositional style again changed, this time in favour of a form of serialism. He continued to take on an exhausting schedule of conducting engagements until 1967, and died in New York in 1971. He was buried in Venice on the island of San Michele, close to the grave of Diaghilev.

_{Profile by Andrew Stewart}