MOZ–ART À LA HAYDN: MOZ–ART FOR 2 VIOLINS

Alfred Schnittke
(b. Engels, USSR, November 24, 1934; d. Hamburg, Germany, August 3, 1998)

Composed 1976; 6 minutes

This is the earliest of four versions of Schnittke’s Moz-Art, his ‘game with music,’ a piece based on the sole surviving violin part from Mozart’s otherwise lost pantomime suite, K. 416d, originally composed for the pre-Lenten carnival week of 1783. It is treated in a playful manner as a musical joke, a humorous collage of Mozart’s music via Schnittke’s polystylism. Together with Gidon Kremer, Schnittke provided tonight’s version of Moz-Art with the following dedication, written with an appropriately antique pen: “Loose pages from an almost lost score by the Viennese Court Composer, Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. Composed by the same, by his very own hand, in February of the year 1783, and after almost two hundred years of neglect, heard in wondrous fashion in a dream by his most faithful pupil and most devoted admirer Alfredus Henricus Germanus Hebraeus Rusticus of Moscow, on the night of 23rd / 24th February 1976, and committed to paper from what he heard with the greatest precision, and ornamented by means of small additions in accordance with the taste of the present time.”

Russian composer Alfred Schnittke was born in the USSR without Russian parentage, to a Jewish, German-speaking father and a German mother. “I am tied to Russia, having spent all my life here,” he said. “On the other hand, much of what I’ve written is somehow related to German music and to the logic that comes out of being German, although I did not particularly want this.” A prolific composer, Schnittke draws from the Viennese tradition and a city where he first studied, while his roots simultaneously run deep in Russian culture. His catalog includes three operas, nine symphonies, ballets, concertos, concerti grossi and sonatas for various instruments, mostly composed while he was not creating music for 60 films. His probing, widely successful music continued to probe further towards what he called the ‘even tension’ of the tonal fabric itself, even when a series of strokes left him without speech for the last four years of his life and writing with a non-dominant hand.