Life and work come together in a particularly disturbing way in Alfred Schnittke's Sixth Symphony. Schnittke wrote the work in 1992, after sustained his second major stroke; he suffered his first in 1985, would suffer another in 1994, and, eventually, a fourth in 1998 would take the composer's life. While Schnittke's debilitation was constant and cruel, his fortitude was more astonishing, and his post-1985 "late period" bore a tremendous spring of new music: 3 operas, 4 symphonies, 6 concerti, and many smaller works.

Platitudes abounded of Schnittke's "race against death," and surely Schnittke's last efforts, the Sixth among them, carry a certain heroic. But what renders these late works most poignant is their relationship to Schnittke's lifelong obsession—with evil, in all its deceitful and destructive mask—and his lifelong method—a direct, unremitting unveiling of that evil.

In works such as the Sixth Symphony, one hears the staggered notation of confessions and confrontations, a relentless "season in hell" unrelieved by even briefest repose. The formal has almost entirely disappeared, the structure feels splintered and shambled, every idea chokes itself into silence. Especially in the Sixth, Schnittke lives without the lyric line, that cumulative, tidal development which had been for centuries the life-support of the symphony; instead, every event begins anew at ground zero. The Sixth Symphony is the sound of Schnittke working in the dark, dammed and damned but equally unwavering.

The first movement, for example, begins with a single incisive chord that quickly spread, diffuses, and balloons in a hair-tearing haze. Every movement from the orchestra, often in groups of only one or two instruments, sounds its own arduous achievement and subsequent exhaustion. A confounding climax near movement's end quakes into muteness before looping back to the beginning. The remaining three movements—a wizened, clownish Presto, an Adagio of lachrymose shards, and an angry, blunt Allegro vivace—make many equal attempts, but remain steadfastly in a still, silent darkness.

This darkness has an incarnation in late Schnittke, in the figure of Faust—in many ways the mythic shadow of Schnittke's fascination and struggle with evil. Faust was for Schnittke a man doomed to irresolution, "at least an 'evil' Christian"; simultaneously, he was (perhaps like the composer) obsessed with acquiring knowledge, feeding an insatiable curiosity. His fable became for Schnittke a moral and aesthetic life-symbol, whether in the guise of Johann Spies's 1557 didactic tract "History of Dr. Johann Fausten, the Well-Known Magician" or Thomas Mann's 1946 novel Doktor Faustus, whose "Faustus" was fictional composer with a polystylistic, anarchic style.

At the Sixth Symphony's composition, Schnittke was indeed orchestrating the first two acts of his Faust opera, a work still uncompleted when the composer died. In many ways, however, the opera's myriad motives, colors, harmonies and gestures contaminate the Sixth; Symphony can be heard as a kind of instrumental fantasy upon the opera.

And yet, beneath the more deliberate "themes" of the Symphony lies a disquietingly direct experience of Schnittke's own difficulties. Schnittke once remarked that he wanted the Sixth to convey the sound of a struggle with concentration, a sonic transcript of mental confusion and fatigue-hence the countless grand pauses for full orchestra and the stuttering attempts to repeat even the homeliest musical ideas. In a strange way, this is the sound of "bad" music, the very stuff that bespeaks musical failure. But expression as direct as Schnittke's Sixth often has little to do with the well-made. It inhabits a second-level eloquence, that eloquence that comes from an almost complete lack of words.



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