In one of the little ironies that life in operatic London throws at you, I attended this Festival Hall performance of excerpts from Schnittke’s 1994 opera on the same day as the General Dress rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki at Covent Garden, the former a concert performance of a flawed masterpiece receiving its belated UK premiere, the latter a brilliantly successful staging of a work scarcely meriting performance at all so consistently musically mere is it. ‘Twas ever thus. Confectionery rubbish gets given the five-star treatment, whilst something important and impressive languishes unperformed. All credit then to Vladimir Jurowski, the driving-force behind “Between Two Worlds”, a fortnight-long exploration and celebration of the extensive oeuvre of Alfred Schnittke, whose 75th birthday we would be honouring this year if he hadn’t died in 1998.

Like his other large-scale theatrical works – the ballet Peer Gynt, the opera Gesualdo - Historia von D. Johann Fausten is a late work, premiered in Hamburg in 1995 in a much-cut and altered version which Schnittke would have doubtlessly disowned had it not been for the fact that he was, at the time, hospitalised with a stroke that left him part-paralysed (another one carried him off altogether four years later). From his latter-day power-base in Hamburg, where in 1990 he had taken up the professorship of composition at the Hochschule, the expat Russian saw his reputation as the most eclectic and stylistically diverse practitioner of the high, post-Shostakovich manner burgeon, to the point that his concerts and appearances became media events in their own right, irrespective of musical content. For a man who had laboured as a fledgling composer under the lash of Stalinism, and had confected well over sixty film scores in Russia as his principal means of earning money, the late flowering of his fortunes came as a great surprise, though fate intervened to ensure that his enjoyment of it was short-lived.

If you heard Gergiev’s LSO Prom in the summer when they performed Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony, you may recall the first half, the local premiere of Schnittke’s Nagasaki, a large-scale cantata from the mid-1950s constructed along identical lines to Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, and not entirely dissimilar in terms of sound-world either, though it caused so much trouble at the time of its composition that it was banned from public performance, and only broadcast in 1959 following Shostakovich’s personal intervention. Schnittke subsequently moved on stylistically, and went through the almost obligatory flirtations with abrasive modernism before arriving at a compromise that was termed “polystylism”, an eclectic mix of pretty much everything from high abstract serial dissonance and tone-clusters to tangos, boogie-woogie and show-music. It is in this later vein of adventurous admixture that Schnittke’s Faust opera is set, the adventurousness extending to the choice of source-material, which is not – as one might expect – Goethe, but its source, the 1587 anonymous German chapbook Historia von D. Johann Fausten (which rapidly became the material of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus sometime before 1592). Schnittke had originally written the Faust Cantata in 1983, the year after he had formally converted to Catholicism (and two years before his first stroke) and it was re-cycled to form Act III of the new opera, written at white heat in 1994.

Because of its literary derivation, anyone familiar with Schnittke’s work would have no trouble recognising the striking similarity to the English play, or rather wouldn’t have in a performance of the whole piece that included the complete Act II, with the various visits to Hell, Paradise, Helen of Troy, the orgy up the Harz mountains, the drunken students’ revelry and the Walpurgisnacht, all alas omitted here. In fact, I am completely puzzled as to why, in its premiere UK outing, Jurowski and (very extensive) Co. should have gone to all the time and trouble to amass four soloists, a choir, an enormous orchestra, an elaborate concert/semi-staging and evidently adequate rehearsal, only to omit about 45 minutes of the work in favour of an entirely irrelevant and none-too-successful first half comprising Haydn’s “Philosopher” Symphony and Parsifal Act I prelude and Good Friday music. If the intention was to sugar the otherwise unpalatably modernist pill in order to attract an audience, it grieves me to say it failed miserably, with little more than a half-full house, who I suspect would have far more appreciated hearing the Schnittke in toto than hair-shirt, scrawny Haydn and ill-blended, accident- prone, melos-free Wagner. Still, looking on the bright side – as I from time-to-time have to force myself to do – what we did have was simply tremendous, as involving and powerful a theatrical experience as anything I’ve encountered, and far more effective and authentic than 95% of all actual opera house stagings one has to endure these days.

Jurowski is one of those conductors who, even if like me you entertain any number of reservations about his performances of some of his chosen repertory – Wagner and Mahler in particular - is nevertheless indisputably a technician of the front-rank, and coolly capable of steering a giant, runaway train of a score like this with aplomb and suave polish, scarcely breaking a sweat in the process. His LPO players tore into the piece as if their lives depended on it, unfazed by being plunged into sepulchral gloom, variously lit icy blue, lurid purple or blood-red, and with any amount of physical activity going on not only around but amongst them. Credit for all this furiously busy “semi-staging” – costumes, lighting, imaginative blocking, even God help us some evident Personenregie – goes to Annabel Arden, looking at the end like Struwelpeter’s twin sister, and clearly not afraid of the exquisitely manicured Festival Hall’s largely untapped potential as a theatrical space. The title role – originally announced as being taken by John Tomlinson – fell to Stephen Richardson, whose CV boasts an unusual degree of commitment to contemporary music, and whose rich, sonorous, and – yippee! – rock-solidly focussed lyric bass made a real meal of Faust’s three lamentations that were just about all we were left with of Act II (given that they are supposed to punctuate the various escapades he gets up to, rejuvenated, with Mephistopheles, stringing them all together virtually unbroken makes for the most bizarre dramatic effect of repetitive self-communing, far from Schnittke’s intention, but not without incremental musical impact, especially given that each is more intense and dejectedly self-abasing than its predecessor).

Andrew Watts sang Mepistophiles, a sort of seductive castrato, written for a counter-tenor with no concept of limits or fear, and here despatched with bravura flair and ear-shredding intensity in alt, to the point that I would certainly question why all the singers were amplified – albeit pretty discreetly – throughout. Perhaps the answer is Markus Brutscher’s narrator, who both introduces and participates in each of the ten scenes that comprise the three-act structure much as he would in Bach’s Passions, and who, though musically notated, effectively turned much of his utterance into a kind of not-quite operatic Sprechstimme, pitched but not fully supported, with a kind of Brechtian nasal nag to the rapid vibrato, and crystal clear German. To be honest, I thought he was actually an actor doing his best vocally, so it was with some chagrin and even more surprise that I later noted his extensive operatic repertory. Still, he was tireless in his efforts and shot around the whole place with precisely focussed energy (indeed, rather too much so for the follow- spot controller, who had the devil’s own job trying to keep up with him). Mephistophila was incarnated by Anna Larsson, primly business-suited and proper to start with, all white fur-coat, red basque and spike-heels by the end. Well as she sang, and good as she looked, she was rather outclassed on both fronts by Andrew Watts in the third act, who himself shed the bottom half of his natty Paul Smith grey suit and red tie in favour of six-inch stilettos and stockings, which, coupled with the crucifying tessitura, gave an impression of a deranged, drag dominatrix determining Faust’s fate. The two Mephistos’ duet was quite the highlight of an already thrilling Act III, the sinister, cumulatively juggernaut tango of which – think Bernstein’s Old Lady in Candide but quadrupled - clearly got the audience going big time. It seems to me that Schnittke’s acquired Catholicism, though typically theatrical and un-ascetic, must have taken a rather unusual, accommodating attitude to the dogma of damnation…

The organ – which gets plenty of exposure, as does the harpsichord and the wibbly-wobbly flexatone: ah, polystylism! – was in fully audible evidence (gratifying given that over two-thirds of the RFH’s vast instrument is still languishing in Durham, undergoing restoration); and its framing choir stalls played host to the Chamber Choir of the Moscow Conservatory, achingly youthful to behold and vividly communicative even in a language not their own (the excellent surtitles did duty for the rest). Ian Scott’s deliciously low lighting, vaguely brothel-esque, conjured up a fabulously atmospheric, seedy sense of moral decay which alas will not be much evident, I imagine, in the BBC Radio 3 relay on 24th November. That apart, I would strongly urge anyone with the merest vestige of musical curiosity to tune in, because though Schnittke’s work is in some senses very demanding, it is in others almost insanely pleasurable if you only give it a chance, and are prepared to meet it halfway. Would to God such considerations weighed more heavily with our opera houses, who might profitably abjure staging third-rate tat and oratorios in favour of the many masterworks of the recent past that go unperformed in the ever-backward UK (Messiaen’s St Francis or Henze’s L’upupa or Penderecki’s Paradise Lost or Schnittke’s Gesualdo, anyone? Or, indeed, Historia von D. Johann Fausten). Come on, boys….

Stephen Jay-Taylor
Opera Britannia

To watch a video made by the LPO in response to Schnittke's music, please click on the image below:

Alfred Schnittke - Between Two Worlds from London Philharmonic on Vimeo.