Born in Engels, an autonomous region for ethnic Germans on the Volga
river, Alfred Schnittke trained as a pianist in Vienna, Austria, where
his father served as a correspondent for a Soviet newspaper. In 1953,
he moved on to the Moscow Conservatory and served on its faculty from
1962 to 1972. Schnittke wrote over 60 film scores between 1961 and
1984, but they were in popular styles dramatically different from his
serious music, which was influenced strongly by Mahler, Ives, and
Pousseur and was usually atonal. His music is often despairing, with
surprising witty touches, including musical quotations from well-known
works.
