"Only here is suffering suffering...what in this world is called suffering in another world, unchanged and only liberated from its opposite, is bliss."—Franz Kafka

One of the more famous anecdotes in Russian music comes from the a member of the Borodin Quartet, recalling rehearsing Shostakovich's 15th and last quartet in the composer's presence. The music is unbelievably bare, and the performers feel they must add something to it, must compensate for this almost embarrassing emptiness with the supplement of direct, visceral presence. No, says Shostakovich: play it even more slowly, even less dramatically—so that "flies drop dead in mid-air from boredom."

If Alfred Schnittke is indeed the heir to Shostakovich—Russia's "last great genius of the twentieth century" as the obituaries proclaimed—it certainly owes something to Schnittke's late cultivation of a sublime musical boredom, a spiritual and expressive nakedness haunted by the spirit of Shostakovich's last works, and not quite by anything else. The Piano Sonata No. 3, one of Schnittke's own last completed works (finished in 1992), begins with an almost breathtaking absence of material, and refrains entirely from developing it in any dramatic fashion. Yet this is nothing like the elevated stasis of Morton Feldman: Schnittke's opening movement wallows in the spiritual mud of existence, unleavened by the purity of abstraction; ragged, bony lines wander chromatically with no hope of going anywhere; pauses testify only concentration's loss, a choking of the imagination. This is the sawdust of the mind, blueprints of ruins, and what astonishes is the composer's honesty with an art that has canceled out its own terms, and now only subsists, past etiquette, unoffended by its own boredom—a kind of weird arte povera.

Characteristic of late Schnittke, the following Allegro is not "form" but an "attempt," endeavoring and eventually failing to sustain some mode of continuity and momentum; leaps at some species of redemption (hinted at by passing allusions to a chorale) are half-undertaken, but always defeated by the nature of musical material—basically an unalleviated field of adjacent chromatic tones, stretched and contorted into all means of transposition, but stiflingly unbreakable. Only one brief passage in the movement's middle seems to transcend this harmonic straightjacketing—but it is merely an illusion (and an allusion, to Alban Berg's "earth-spirit" motive in his last opera Lulu). The following Lento is more eloquent than the opening movement in declaiming a hobbled, impoverished poetry; shards of chorale float in and out, and the shorn verse ends with a poignant self-curtailing, just at the moment of most direct speech.

The finale attempts to re-attain the bitter argument of the second movement, but almost immediately after its opening phrases (alluding to Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony?), it descends into absence and silence, into the falterings which would otherwise remain on the composer's cutting-room floor. Disintegration, itself barely a method, is more palpable than substance, and soon enough resolve to write seems to leave the score; distraction, a cracking of the voice, a final rest.

© Seth Brodsky, All Music Guide