Purifying Through Failure, Uniting Through Defeat

Abstract

In this article, we suggest that Schnittke creates imaginative paraphrases of sonata form which are concealed in the whole movements of his works and are supported by a network of reversals. By codifying common threads of thematic, functional, gestural, and developmental logics, in combination with theories which concern the sonata-tonality duet as well as the ideological reflections of pivotal patterns of modern western culture, we argue that the composer, driven by a fierce desire towards wholeness, creates a structural edifice which negates itself through an ambiguous language “where nothing is as it seems”. We use four case studies to suggest that, beyond Schnittke’s inherently representative aspects, imprints of ambiguity, stress, and failure are totally absorbed by the material, the processes, and structure themselves. Extreme heterogeneities provoke the sustainability of the sonata’s limits, setting crucial questions about preservation, renewal, continuity, and belonging. By discerning a thorough exploitation of the sonata’s two-and-three dimensional aspects as well as its narrative and dramatic potential, we support that the composer outlines a “reversed success-story” moving from Enlightenment’s drama to cultural trauma. The internalized ideological discontinuities and the violent externalizing of his predecessors’ techniques, filtered by Adorno’s musical aesthetics and the composer’s inner imperatives, reveal gaps that nurture cultural and ontological anxiety, alluding both to late capitalism’s and the Soviet regime’s antinomies. Following a path of agony, where “consonance is tested through increasing dissonance,” the ideological disillusionment gets inscribed on the sonata’s narrative and constitutional framework, where failure is sovereign in different levels, offering hermeneutic, ontological reflections as well as prophetic problematizations about the futural sounding world.