"The work is the death mask of conception."—T.W. Adorno

In many ways the music of Alfred Schnittke is one grand "fait accompli"—a doomed spell cast to ward off its own death, brutally abbreviated by the death itself. And in this sense, philosopher Adorno's words—disconcertingly applicable to many twentieth-century scores—are a kind of mantra for Schnittke's orchestral and chamber works. They are, among other things, imprimaturs of their own downfall, their music like bottled records, black boxes, replaying the repressed contents of some past catastrophe.

In the case of Schnittke's Piano Quartet, however, we're privy to a joltingly literal take on Adorno's formula. This brief, single-movement work from 1988 is a strange reworking of the second movement of Gustav Mahler's Piano Quartet, written some 110 years earlier. Mahler's only surviving piece of chamber music, only the quartet's first movement, an extended sonata-form in the minor, was actually finished; the second movement was barely even sketched, Mahler leaving behind only the opening accompaniment figures and the skeleton of a melancholy "beklemmt" melody.

Schnittke's work was hence more pointed than a mere attempt to restore the unfinished (as if the sketches had been burned up of misplaced)—rather, as the composer himself put it, it was an attempt "to recall something which had never been accomplished." At first, Schnittke hoped to exploit his brilliant facility with stylistic pastiche and parody, and in so doing to meticulously lay out an "painted corpse" (to use a phrase dear to Schnittke). But in the process, Schnittke appears to have slammed hard against the tragic absence of an original; the pathos of the endeavor itself distorted Schnittke's intentions, already equivocal at best—Schnittke himself once confessed that "I set down a beautiful chord and it rusts. . . ."

Hence Schnittke's own Piano Quartet begins with the rocking ostinato-figures of Mahler's own sketch, but quickly wobbles into more precarious territory; lines agglomerate and congeal upon each other to create glaucomic clouds of dissonance. Each attempt to expound the original theme is trapped by its own zeal, as the violin, viola, and cello smother one another with canons at the second and seventh; lyrical threads are gnarled into hobbled trills, the piano's accompaniment ever-threatening to implode into hammered chromatic clusters. An uncannily "phenomenological" music develops—not "music" at all, but rather the sound of a psychological process of introspection, increasingly hindered by anxiety and error. Thrice the music helplessly swings itself towards a climactic moment of purge-like clarification, finally descending into monolithic explosions of noise, devoid of contour, better yet memory.

Only after this mini-apocalypse does the original Mahler, birthed into its pre-natal state, materialize to end the work.

So Schnittke's quartet is not merely a "death mask" but scene of decomposition, and what we hear is likewise a brilliantly disquieting palimpsest, in which the faded handwriting of one composer is covered over by the handwriting of another, only to bleed through after all.

© Seth Brodsky, Rovi