Alfred Schnittke - Story of an unknown actor, op. 125

I - 0:00 II - 2:24 III - 4:40 IV - 6:20 V - 9:33 VI - 11:15 VII - 13:08 VIII - 15:04 IX - 16:05 X - 17:46 XI - 19:11 (waltz) XII - 20:23 XIII - 22:30 “[...] In Schnittke’s 1976 score for the film The Story of an Unknown Actor, he employs a single trite and sentimental melody for almost all the music’s 12 scenes. A kind of Berliozian idée fixé, it follows our angst-plagued protagonist, an aging thespian in a small Siberian troupe; in its constantly changing color and mood, the theme charts the actor’s increasing anxiety and disenchantment. In this sense, Schnittke’s score is classic film music, efficiently appending itself to a plot through single symbolic device, and “sticking with it.“ But at the same time, the seams in Schnittke’s score show; the melody’s stylized, fake-Tchaikovsky “Russian“ pathos in its opening incarnation may strike some as impossibly sincere, its saccharine swagger and soaring scope mismatched to the banal manner of its construction; likewise, its style cannot eclipse its own pastiche-like stylization -- later on, when fake-Tchaikovsky becomes fake-Rachmaninov, the faking itself is brought to the foreground, to the surface. In a sense, however, this quality in Schnittke’s music (also endemic to his concert works) functions astonishingly well with the film at hand. Directed by Russian great Alexander Zarkhy, the film is fundamentally about disillusionment, the process of cracking the world of appearances and revealing the tragic depths. “ Our unknown actor is a romantic in the best sense of word,“ Zarkhy admitted, but “romantic“ is by no means an unambivalent term; as Schnittke’s score demonstrates, romanticism is synonymous with an alienation between appearances and actualities, in which promising surfaces might at any time fall away to reveal terrible depths. The allegorical strength of such a vision couldn’t have been lost on the Soviet intelligentsia of 1970s Russia.“