"One means that evil has is the dialogue."—Franz Kafka

With the title of Alfred Schnittke's Monologue from 1989 for viola and strings, one of the composer's most persistent fears and fantasies is made particularly bald: even at one's most private moments, someone else is listening in. More specifically, the general anxiety that we are "not alone" is transformed in Schnittke's oeuvre into the anxiety of an unseen and unheard music, or, conversely, a phantom ear which intercepts confessions meant only for oneself. And there's almost always a disquieting moral or political implication, a hint that this insidious double is, we shudder to think, "evil itself," beadily baring down on us, humiliating our sincere monologue into a dialogue with a heartless, unconquerable opponent.

Hence the beginning of the Monologue isn't really a monologue at all: the viola's opening cipher-like motto, voiced in stone-faced half and whole notes, is quietly trailed and tracked by the orchestra one note at a time. In a common trope among Schnittke's concertante works, they catch and compile the soloist's melody into dissonant pools of harmony, almost the sound of accruing anxiety itself. This simple process, of almost classical balance, controls the Monologue through its remaining 15 minutes with an uncompromising rigor which almost seems antithetical to the work's brooding, spontaneously emotional tone.

Indeed, compared to Schnittke's three-movement Concerto for viola and full orchestra from four years previous (a work frequently regarded as the composer's masterpiece), the Monologue has an almost curious air of privacy about it. Where the earlier concerto was so full of color, swagger, and vicious pomp, this work is painfully withdrawn, its material imploringly abstract and at the same time prosaic; in this sense the latter score is characteristic of Schnittke's music after the viola concerto—a space of finely textured but mostly unrelieved expressive darkness, a gnarled fantasy-world of black-on-black where harmony, melody, and rhythm achieve only a tortuous, totally chromatic semi-distinction. And amidst this spiritual mud, an archetypal dramaturgy ensues: the subject tries, first meditatively, then desperately, to articulate itself; but eventually, it is aped, then overwhelmed, then stifled by the bog from whence it first came.

Astride this model, the false or undermined monologue becomes a particularly eloquent allegory, especially through the notion that the primal voice is, tragically, not at all primal—not the soloist's own tongue, but "only a reflection of the soloist's activity, since voices and events from the outside keep affecting the lonely world of the viola monologue over and over again." This perfectly uncomfortable condition reminds one of Schnittke's theatrical inclinations, especially through the plays of Samuel Beckett; the latter's late Not I is superficially for solo monologist—actually a lone mouth surrounded by complete darkness—but Beckett requests an "auditor" as well, who merely stands in the shadow and listens. Schnittke's score also includes such an auditor in the form of string orchestra, but his is not so silent—is indeed fatally vocal.

© Seth Brodsky, All Music Guide