Alfred Schnittke and the End of Russian Classic Music

Abstract

The article surveys the ideological and cultural situation in Russian music in the 1970s. It was the period when the most important traits of Alfred Schnittke’s work became apparent, which marked his transition from the images and themes of the Russian “Grand Style” to more complicated sound structures of modern music. Having inherited the intellectual and ethical traditions from Shostakovich, Schnittke brought to music a new perception of reality including a different understanding of a person’s state of mind. Thus, Schnittke’s film scores did not only reflect the shift of modern artistic paradigms, but became a form of philosophic self-consciousness in the context of post-modernist global changes. Schnittke’s music opened the stage of “indirect statement” in film music, which enriched and transformed the meaning of the screen image