Schnittke once stated that the music of Alban Berg was dearest to him "above all others'." So when the Alban Berg Foundation commissioned Schnittke in 1985 to write a work celebrating Berg's centenary, it was bound to be an especially personal work for the composer. But the sad, deeply introspective String Trio which materialized also marked a kind of memorial for Schnittke's own life. The work is a tribute to one of the composer's "primal scenes," as Freud called them—formative, often traumatic moments in childhood which inscribe themselves deep in the consciousness. For Schnittke, that primal scene was a three-year stay in Vienna from 1946 to 1948, when the composer was in his early teens. Along with the the sight of the bombed-out State Opera and the scene in Everyman in which Death himself appears, Schnittke recalled "a certain Mozart-Schubert sound which I carried around for years." Within the darkness of post-World War II Vienna, the now bombed-out cultural center where classicism and the Enlightenment had reached their pinnacles, Schnittke must have experienced this Mozart-Schubert sound with a kind of built-in irony—not the sneering irony of a skeptic, but one infused with compassion.

Schnittke used this Mozart-Schubert sound again and again in his works, though seldom with the completeness and intensity realized in the String Trio. Cast in two large movements, the entire work flows from a simple, six-note cadential figure straight out of a Schubert piano sonata. Freud remarks that the individual constantly returns to the "primal scene" in an imaginary space, constantly replays the scene, tries new if ineffectual solutions. In the wandering, pathologically restless opening Moderato, Schnittke seems to enact such a scenario. When the movement begins, the "Schubert" figure has already aged; it carries the weight of two centuries on its weary back and fails to actually achieve its cadence. The entire Moderato makes an obsession of this opening figure; it starts, halts, starts again, stammers in spaces tonal and atonal, fast and slow, confessional and clamorous. New, derivative themes splinter off, old ones become crushed under the attempted recovery of ultimately illusory repose. Twice, a fantastical Valkryian gallop rends the musical fabric. The movement resolves through exhaustion, spinning from the opening cadential figure a hobbled three-part minuet.

The following Adagio offers a peculiar response to the scenes of failure in the first movement. It presents no new material, but rather an alienated, reconfigured view of the opening, as if removed in both space and time. Things are slower, sparser, and more reflective. Dirge-like chorales of Russian character mix with a late Romantic lyricism; individual instruments sing out longer lines, now as laments rather than attempts. At the moment of utmost interiority, the wild gallop returns with previously unheard fury. After this final cathartic seizure, Schnittke again returns to the opening cadential figure, this time in canon above an oscillating bass. The concluding minuet from the Moderato also returns, but with a new clarity; its newly poignant nature has changed from that of a wound to that of a replica, a museum model. But the imagination, even at the extremes of its limits, still houses only images, and so this last vision sublimates into thin air.



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