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Dmitri Smirnov
Marginalia quasi una Fantasia:on the
Second Violin Sonata by Alfed Schnittke
The Second Violin Sonata for violin and piano
(1968), subtitledQuasiunaSonata,is one of Alfred
Schnittke's most popular works, and it is one of
my personal favourites among his pieces (alongside his FirstSymphony, FirstStringQuartet,First
Hymn, Second and Third Violin Concerti, Three
Madrigals,etc). I discovered Schnittke'smusic in
April 1969 at an underground concert given in
the Gnessin Institute in Moscow by Alexei
Lyubimov (piano), Boris Berman (piano), Lev
Mikhailov (clarinet) and a few string players.
This half-forbidden concert, organized by
Alexander Ivashkin, was all that remained of a
whole festival, which had been cancelled at the
last moment by the authorities. The concert
was split into three parts, the first two of them
dedicatedto the music of the Soviet avant-garde,
with compositions by the likes of Edison
Denisov, Tigran Mansurian,Valentin Silvestrov,
Viktor Ekimovsky and Kuldar Sink etc. At the
end of the second partthere was a performanceof
Schnittke's Serenadefor five musicians. This very
cheerfuland funny piece, entangledwith hundreds
of short quotations, sounded very differentfrom
the rest of the program. The final part of the
concert contained works of Schoenberg, Berg
and Webern, played for the first time in
Brezhnev's Soviet Union.
All of this music was a very important and
most influential discovery for me. After this I
tried to attend all events with music of this kind.
But these were very rare. However, it wasn't
long before I had the chance to hear Schnittke's
Second Violin Sonata played by Mark Lubotsky
and Liubov' Yedlina at another underground
concertin the Medicine Workers'Club. I remember that they also played the piece a little later in
the Maly Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.
The editor Evgeny Barankin, from the publishers SovyetskyKompozitor,managed to print
1000 copies of the Sonata as a separateedition.
This was a great achievement, given the quite
unfriendly atmosphere in 1976. At that time I
was working for Sovyetsky Kompozitorand I
remember Barankin saying that he would be
forbidden to print the piece if he was to leave
the dedication to Lubotsky and Yedlina, who
Butsko
'AlexanderIvashkin, Conversations
with Alfred Schnittke, ('Encounters with chamber music', ibid., 1970, no.8),
Moscow 1994,p. 49.
Karminsky ('Polystylistic problems in contemporary music',
diploma work, Moscow Conservatory, 1975), Savenko
('Portraitof the Artist in Maturity', SovyetskayaMuzika, 1981
See fordetails:AlexanderIvashkin,AlfredSchnittke
(London: no.9). I think that all of these sources, together with some
PhaidonPress,1996),pp. 110-111.
words by Schnittke himself, are summarized in this chapter.
Ivashkin, Conversations,p. 51.
tonic-dominant
contra-position
in tonal music.
DS:
(te
A
CKP"nKa
! I
sec.)
(-6 sec.)
V2"
b
se.)
(sio
v?
fe
m:
S/jis
Senza tempo
C -n.
uj
1-I?^
A. UJHTKE
'-
(3 sec.)
I
ff -
^:
sec.) sft
(~io
(3 sec.)
imr
itW
~-
i^
ill
-P
Andante
6Xi
-#0
J
.J-.
--
RP
I' tI
Moderato
i I
Coda
- Allegretto,
p.34
and
in sonataformwith an incompleterecapitulation,
the third part has a rondo-like structure with some
labelled
B-SECTION:
this is the
C-SECTION
RECAPITULATION
H-SECTION
pitulation
- overlap-
ping, as if two different shots are played simultaneously at the cinema. Recapitulation of the
opening
as the
'Principal Theme'.
J-SECTION(Senza tempo): bb.177-178. This is the
recapitulation of the B-SECTION. However the
theme and variation are now played simultaneously. Because it was transposed compare the
pitch of this recapitulation with the section in
the Exposition. There is now a strong leaning
on G in the violin part and we are therefore further convinced that it perfectly functions as the
recapitulationof the secondary theme.
K-SECTION(quasi Allegretto): b. 179. Fast 'cha-
Recapitulation
(Senza
tempo): bb.
of the E-SECTION
181-209.
developed
10
From
Russia
&the
Republics
GalinaUstvolskaya(b.1919)
EdisonDenisov (1929- 1996)
ValentinSilvestrov(b.1937)
NikolaiKaretnikov(1930-1994)
NikolaiKomdorf(b. 1947)
SofiaGubaidulina(b.1931)
DmitriSmirnov(b.1948)
RodionShchedrin(b.1932)
ElenaFirsova(b.1950)
AlexanderRaskatov(b.1953)
GiyaKancheli(b.1935)
Dmitri
Yanov-Yanovsky(b.1963)
FrangisAli-Zade (b.1947)
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