Piano Quintet (Schnittke)

Rozhdestvensky later heard a recording of the Piano Quintet, which he felt needed to be transcribed for orchestra in order to fully realize its potential.

She met journalist, translator, and CPSU member Harry Viktorovich Schnittke [ru], the composer's father, in 1932.

In an interview the composer gave in 1980, he said that his desire to write a "simple, but earnest" musical memorial for his mother posed "an almost insoluble problem" to him.

[4]By the time Schnittke resumed work on the quintet's subsequent movements in autumn 1975,[7] he had already completed and premiered his First Symphony; his attitude towards composition had altered significantly in the interim.

[8] During the composition of the Piano Quintet, Schnittke began turning to Catholicism for comfort;[9] he eventually converted on June 18, 1983.

In addition, they contain various references to events and dates in the life of Schnittke's mother, as well as unrealized ideas that would have incorporated the musical monograms of Dmitri Shostakovich and Arnold Schoenberg within the quintet.

[17] Schnittke called the Requiem an "offshoot"[18] or the "waste matter"[19] of the Piano Quintet and that the latter work turned out "rather different" than he had anticipated.

The impact of the music was so powerful that I immediately phoned [Schnittke] at home and told him that, in my opinion, the work required a symphonic solution.

[26] Alexander Demchenko [ru] described the second movement as sounding like a "frankly sentimental and old-fashioned 'waltz' ... conjur[ing] up a haze of fragile memories from the days of 78 RPM gramophone records and touchingly heartfelt outpourings, spiritualized in this instance by the tracing of the BACH motif.

He said the finale was a "mirror passacaglia" with a theme that is repeated fourteen times while other musical events occur as "only ... fading shadows of a tragic sensation that has already fled".

[32] A critic for the Star Tribune said the work was full of "striking touches" and that its "heavy wit" were indebted to the music of Shostakovich and Gustav Mahler.

[33] Some of Schnittke's friends and colleagues disapproved of the Piano Quintet, including Sofia Gubaidulina and Edison Denisov.

The latter referred to it as a "bad work" that allowed Schnittke to obtain official support, although he maintained that he was "still a very good composer".