Depths require nothing more than surfaces: nothing is more important for creating "depth" than the notion of a surface, and perhaps nothing is needed at all to create depths but a surface. "It is not the invisible that makes the world mysterious," Oscar Wilde once contended, "but the visible": appearance itself can raise suspicion, and the mask, even more than the living face, begs interrogation.

Alfred Schnittke's music has always been a world of uneasy play between depths and surfaces, but perhaps nowhere more than in his film scores. None of these over-60 works (written between 1962 and 1984) could comfortably count among the composer's best music, but their quality here stands strangely in opposition to the fascination they hold, the pregnancy of meaning. For often these scores end up inverting their function as a mere musical support or affective amplification for the images they accompany. Instead, in characteristic Schnittke-fashion, they end up subverting, even betraying the film; they can become—not the face of the film, but its mask. Or, in a more frequent trope, Schnittke's film scores force the film itself into a strange, subtle form of mask, in which the music now becomes the hidden face. Film and music become two different eyewitnesses, telling different stories, and in our instinctual discomfort we side with one or the other.

For instance, in Schnittke's 1976 score for the film The Story of an Unknown Actor, he employs a single trite and sentimental melody for almost all the music's 12 scenes. A kind of Berliozian idée fixé, it follows our angst-plagued protagonist, an aging thespian in a small Siberian troupe; in its constantly changing color and mood, the theme charts the actor's increasing anxiety and disenchantment. In this sense, Schnittke's score is classic film music, efficiently appending itself to a plot through single symbolic device, and "sticking with it."

But at the same time, the seams in Schnittke's score show; the melody's stylized, fake-Tchaikovsky "Russian" pathos in its opening incarnation may strike some as impossibly sincere, its saccharine swagger and soaring scope mismatched to the banal manner of its construction; likewise, its style cannot eclipse its own pastiche-like stylization—later on, when fake-Tchaikovsky becomes fake-Rachmaninov, the faking itself is brought to the foreground, to the surface.

In a sense, however, this quality in Schnittke's music (also endemic to his concert works) functions astonishingly well with the film at hand. Directed by Russian great Alexander Zarkhy, the film is fundamentally about disillusionment, the process of cracking the world of appearances and revealing the tragic depths. " Our unknown actor is a romantic in the best sense of word," Zarkhy admitted, but "romantic" is by no means an unambivalent term; as Schnittke's score demonstrates, romanticism is synonymous with an alienation between appearances and actualities, in which promising surfaces might at any time fall away to reveal terrible depths. The allegorical strength of such a vision couldn't have been lost on the Soviet intelligentsia of 1970s Russia.

© Seth Brodsky, All Music Guide