Pianissimo, for large orchestra

• Date: 1967 -1968
• Composer: Alfred Schnittke
• Period: Contemporary (1950- )

Review

"Kafka has one problem and one problem only...and that was the problem. He was terrified by the thought of the empire of ants..." -- Bertolt Brecht.

If writer Franz Kafka was a prophet of the twentieth century, it was perhaps in this aspect: he seemed to reveal, with often astonishing commitment and eloquence, how truly terrifying order could be. Rather than celebrating high organization and elevating control and mastery into the greatest goals, he went on in story after story to show how control and mastery could debilitate and dehumanize, and how order, even in the hands of the best intentions, could precipitate a tragic dehumanization.

So it's no surprise that a twentieth-century composer like Alfred Schnittke, having lived through perhaps Russia's most dehumanizing years, would write a piece based on a work of Kafka. Composed in 1967 - 1968, Schnittke's huge orchestral work Pianissimo takes its inspiration from one of Kafka's most unforgettable stories, In the Penal Colony. Schnittke's score is an experimental endeavor, clearly the work of someone who is "searching for his voice." But the sentiments at work -- a sublime vision, a black-hole pessimism, and an extremely elaborate mechanism with which to execute both -- are entirely Schnittke's own, and would continue to develop in his music for the remainder of his career.

Kafka's story provides a fascinating link in this regard. Its bizarre plot centers around an explorer who comes upon a penal colony; the colony's commander has devised an inventive, particularly gruesome means of punishment, in which a prisoner is "corrected" by having his own sentence tattooed on his entire body by a million-needled machine of unimaginable complexity and intricacy. The commander's demonstration of course results in a terrible malfunction, and leaves the commander dead with a great iron spike through his forehead; the story, half-parable and half-paradox, thus paints both an obsessive portrait of foreboding technological progress, and a condemnation of that progress in one fell-swoop.

Schnittke had no interest in writing a program piece or tone poem actually portraying the story's events; instead, in a brilliant move, he converted the story's process into abstract musical terms. Thus, in Pianissimo, a large orchestra is split up into a gargantuan amount of independent lines, each played as quietly as possible, and each rigorously controlled by a microscopic serial process. This technique and disposition creates a predestined situation for the myriad lines, which gradually assemble into a huge unison -- advanced technology as a means of achieving a utopian order. But, just as the entire orchestra unites in this single note, things take a terrible turn, and those same processes which thus far ordered the score now catalyze a horrendous explosive cluster. The 11-minute work so becomes its own executioner, through its own elaborate machinery. ~ Seth Brodsky, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Alfred Schnittke: Sinfonie No. 5 "Concerto Grosso No. 4"; Pianissimo	1998

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