Little Tragedies, score for television feature

• Date: 1980
• Composer: Alfred Schnittke
• Period: Contemporary (1950- )

Review

Alfred Schnittke the television mini-series composer? Believe it. Unlike composers in the west, those in Soviet Russia were expected, if not to marginalize their concert-works, at least to compartmentalize them to make room for other modes of music-making. Hence Schnittke and his fellow "kindred spirits" Sofiya Gubaydulina and Arvo Pärt had to drill out quite a few scores for both film and television; in some cases they loathed the work, which could easily make "sausage" (as Pärt put it) of otherwise decent music; in other cases, like Schnittke's scoring of the 1979 multi-installment tele-movie Little Tragedies, the process has preserved quite an objet d'art in pragmatic disguise.

Little Tragedies was conceived as a three-part television miniseries by well-known Soviet film director Mikhail Shveitzer; the title came from the "three brilliant and philosophical 'little tragedies'" (as he called them) by the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Shveitzer's slightly surreal take on things, incorporating material from another Pushkin work Egyptian Nights, is less a distortion than an extension of Pushkin's original material: as one writer put it, we "fly through the power of the poet's imagination from nineteenth-century St. Petersburg to medieval times, witnessing the 'stingy knight,' the 'Stone guest' -- Don Juan! -- and a 'feast in the Time of Plague.'"

While the film does not appear to be widely available, Schnittke's music was dutifully arranged by the younger Russian composer Yuri Kasparov, and his work has revealed one of Schnittke's more brilliant film scores. Like the composer's music to Elim Klimov's Agony or Sport, Sport, Sport, Schnittke's score to Little Tragedies maintains its own autonomy amidst accompaniment and representation, not least by undercutting that very process it initially appears to support. And to this degree, perhaps Schnittke's film work, with its demands for an almost immediate, atemporal symbolism, could be seen as a kind of sharpener for the knife-edged "art music" for which he is better known.

The opening waltz, for instance, has that same equivocal demonicism, that same acerbic quotation-marking, as the much more chromatic waltzes of his 1976 Piano Quintet or Third Symphony; of course, here the waltz is much less distorted, but for those familiar with Schnittke's general aesthetic, the music's impeccable prettiness may seem all the more insidious. After the richly atmospheric mood-music of the second number, the barcarolle of the third develops into almost Berliozian swagger, edging just a shade into the realm of the cheesy. The following "St. Petersburg" movement pursues a chromatic, spine-chilling little violin melody almost worthy of one of Schnittke's serious works; its cascading, sweeping arpeggios eventually begin to pick up an almost bluesy flavor. There follows the perfect pastiche of "Mozart's Improvisation" and the ridiculous cartoon romp of the Polka, with the fiddle's Lisztian devil-gestures (open strings), the brass raspberries, the knee-knocking xylophone, and a harp-cadenza coda that's just too damn long. And the whole score is signed off with an echt-Viennese waltz (with a slightly overzealous trumpet: one always hears Schnittke struggling to be sincere). ~ Seth Brodsky, Rovi

Albums with Excerpt Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Schnittke: Dialogue/Serenade/Hymns I-IV/Little Tradegies

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