Three Approaches to the Mystery of the Human Person through Schnittke’s Music

The human person is always “under construction”. 

 Rafael Jiménez Cataño*

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Il prof. Jiménez, insieme all'articolo, propone brani di Schnittke rappresentativi e, in generale, particolarmente facili da ascoltare. E' tuttavia molto difficile fare esempi dei fenomeni di cui parla nell’articolo, perché sono strutturali e richiederebbero tempi molto lunghi e a volte il confronto fra tutti i tempi di un’opera. 

Concerto grosso n.1, mov. 5, Rondo - Agitato 

Concerto per violino n.4, mov. 2, Vivo 

Peer Gynt (ballet) - Ingrid’s burial
Tango polifonico
Da un film: Dichiarazione d'amore
Scena del film

The human person is always “under construction”

The human person is always “under construction”. In the field of the spiritual life this has received different formulations, all of them more or less based on St. Paul. For example, St. Gregory of Nyssa writes: “They [those who go towards the Lord] never stop rising, moving from one new beginning to the next, and the beginning of ever greater graces is never limited of itself”. Secular thinkers have pointed out this feature of human being as well. Octavio Paz explored it in his poetics as a type of otherness, enlightened by the analogies with the otherness of love and that of religious experience. This poetics focuses poetry in the first place, but in fact is suitable for the entire field of artistic creation. The basis for all three directions of otherness is the human condition: “Otherness is above all the simultaneous perception that we are others without ceasing to be what we are and that, without ceasing to be where we are, our true being is in another place."

On this idea of otherness Paz based vital aspects of human life and of artistic experience, such as inspiration. Of course similar formulations can be found in many authors, including Schnittke. He stated that it was not him who actually wrote, and in a description of the process of composition, he spoke of a division of the artist in two spheres: “One of them is your self in the narrow sense, the other is what is revealed to you through your self—what is considerably larger than you are. And it is this larger sphere that is in control, not the narrow sphere of your self. In fact, a person’s whole life is an attempt to be not oneself but an instrument of something outside the self. This is what dictates form, words, and your conditioned response to what is outside you. It is as if you do not belong to yourself. As long as you have this feeling, your work is never a burden. You are not the one prescribing, you are doing something prescribed for you by someone else. ‘Someone else’ is to put it very crudely: it is something more important than you are.” Very important horizons are opened by these words. What is immediately relevant for our second approach to mystery is the extension of the self over time. What any one of us calls “I” is his/her entire biography; this means that we cannot possess ourselves all in one go, but through the whole of life. (Therefore, we cannot totally give ourselves all in one go, but subject!) This means also that we are an open reality, something similar to what in the field of arts is called “incompiuto”, unfinished. Good examples of this are the unfinished sculptures of Michelangelo.

Every musical work is an incompiuto, at least because a performance is still needed, but in many works by Schnittke there is another incompleteness that belongs to another dimension, as “all often disappears with the dots of suspension”; the musical work and its understanding are “a process in perennial evolution, open like life itself.” The correspondence between these open-ended finales and the incompiuto michelangiolesco is very clear.  (...)

Two very representative human dynamics that don’t end with fireworks: Christian liturgy and conjugal love

The third approach is a special case of the second. I will focus on two very representative human dynamics that don’t end with fireworks: Christian liturgy and conjugal love.

André Léonard considers the Eucharistic liturgy as having a parallel structure with the conjugal union. In both cases there is a) an initial phase of listening, dialogue, play, followed by b) a culminating time of communion, of deepest fusion, and, at the end, c) “a period of rest, of simple mutual presence in the common gratefulness for the pleasure and the joy given and received”, or “the time of the thanksgiving, of the mutual rest of Jesus in us and our rest in Jesus, in which we thank Him for His presence,” in other words, a time in which the evocation of what was done and received is enjoyed, a time in which the remembrance of what was shared is shared.

* Rafael Jiménez Cataño - Profilo Accademico
* Retorica & Antropologia