Overview
Introduction
Alfred Schnittke
Silent Night (Stille Nacht), for violin & piano
"No development from worse to better has ever been observed in all of mankind. But there would be no life without some hope for the better." -- Alfred Schnittke
Though it's well-reputed he had a wonderful affability in company, you still wouldn't really want Russian composer Alfred Schnittke singing carols to your kids on Christmas eve. He brings dark, disenchanted baggage into almost everything he writes -- historical baggage (like the disenchantment of a horribly failed Utopian political plan), spiritual baggage (like the absurd attempt to believe in a divinity amidst such profound evil and corruption), creative baggage (like how to write a symphony after the death of tonality), even familial baggage (like the burden of being born to Catholic and Jewish, Russian and German parents).
So it really seems a fait accompli when Schnittke takes one of the greatest lullabies in history -- F.X. Gruber's "Silent Night" -- and turns it in a skeletal nightmare. Some apparently value-free liner notes to one recording mention that Schnittke's arrangement effects a "lurking astringency in the harmonies which serves to create a strange, otherworldly atmosphere." But let's face it: it doesn't take much to destroy a placid emblem of sanctity for children everywhere, and if you end a violin-transcription of "Silent Night" with a de-tuning of the instrument's pegs, you're bound to create more than merely an "other-worldly atmosphere." Indeed, it seems that audiences got the message pretty quick, responding with fairly tumultuous protest to the subtle but terribly dark alterations Schnittke made to this classic: now phrases end with caustic major sevenths or seconds, and the piano often accompanies in the wrong the key, or lightly touches only lowest notes to create the palpable effect of a wasteland -- "Silent Night" tinkling away on some oblivious music box in a post-nuclear shed.
Why would Schnittke do something like this? Well, for one thing, it's funny: you've got to admit that the mind who savors fine art also shares a general antipathy to kitsch in all its forms, even the most seductive. There's something irresistible about messing with the classics, and Schnittke's humor, in this and other dis-arrangements and loving forgeries, does the needed work of re-vision -- of casting the familiar in a new perspective so we might not let it vanish into easy invisibility. But there's also a more serious side at work too: like many anthems to ideal states, "Silent Night" could represent reality's imposter, the fake "reality" whose impossible promises are so swaying that they eventually replace an actual reality which desperately needs tending to. Coming from a composer who suffered censorship under the guise of "Socialist Realism" (one of the most insidious impostors of the real), it seems this arrangement stems from a generally innate impulse in Schnittke. Artists often give us great illusions, and Schnittke is no different, just on the other side, sending out great dis-illusions.
