Postludio

Abstract

Using its final movement, Postludio, as an anchor, the book’s final chapter discusses the Soviet reception of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1. It focuses on the comparisons the music evoked with Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker and the 1986 postapocalyptic Soviet film Letters from a Dead Man (Pisʹma mertvogo cheloveka, dir. Konstantin Lopushansky). The chapter also traces Schnittke’s life and works into the 1980s and 1990s, with emphasis on his later compositions that continued the trail marked by the Concerto Grosso no. 1, particularly the sequence of six concerti grossi he wrote until the end of his life. The chapter concludes by examining the reception of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 in the recent past, when it was allied with the Holocaust, zombies, and the macabre.