Chair on the Volga
– In 1941, new neighbors came to our house. When they began to unload the car with property, I was surprised how many books there were. It turned out to be unexpected that the neighbor’s boy, he was only six or seven years old, immediately took one of the books in the yard and began to read – this is how Engels resident Jayma Lebedeva-Loseva recalled her first meeting with Alfred Schnittke many years later.
The small city of Engels in those years was the capital of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Volga Germans. The father of the future composer Harry Schnittke is the son of emigrants from Germany who came to Soviet Russia to build communism. In 1930, the young man left his parents’ home for Engels and got a job at the German newspaper Nachrichten. Here, a few years later, he met a young girl, Maria Vogel, who became his wife.
Maria’s ancestors moved to Russia from Germany back in the 18th century under Catherine II, settled in the village of Kamenka, now it belongs to the Krasnoarmeysky district of the Saratov region, and were engaged in agriculture.
“Already in the lists of the first residents of Kamenka, the surname Vogel appears,” says Olga Suvorova, an employee of the state archive of the Volga Germans, executive secretary of the initiative group to perpetuate the name of Alfred Schnittke.
Maria’s father Joseph (Joseph) Vogel died on the Russian-Turkish front, where the Volga Germans were sent to fight in the First World War. Masha and other children were raised by their mother. When the young people decided to get married, she was against this marriage.
“You are a Jew, she is a Catholic, how can you live together?” – she asked. “But we love each other,” the young man objected. Afterwards, the mother, apparently, reconciled herself with her daughter’s marriage; when her grandchildren were born, she helped raise them. And the nationality of Schnittke’s father saved everyone: in 1941, during the deportation of the Volga Germans, such mixed families were not evicted. Together with her daughter and grandchildren, her grandmother remained in Engels. Her other children and relatives were sent to Siberia.
Two brothers
By the beginning of the war, the family of Harry and Maria Schnittke already had three children: the eldest Alfred, Victor – three years younger than him, and very little Irina. The brothers were already very different from each other in childhood. Alfred was an outwardly reserved, thoughtful boy; he could often be seen with a book in his hand. He had an excellent memory. As another neighbor Raisa Lokhova recalls, while her sister Valya was trying to learn a poem, four-year-old Alfredik memorized it by heart.
The younger brother Victor was, as Olga Suvorova says, a “pathfinder”, the leader in games, some stories always happened to him, he drowned in the Volga three times. He was the main protector of his sister and other children on the street and at school.
The older brother read fairy tales to his sister and worked on her mental development.
From left to right: Victor, Irina and Alfred Schnittke. Vienna, post-war years.
As Alfred Schnittke’s childhood friend Vasily Kolomychenko recalled, the boys first met at the stables, where neighboring children came to admire the horses. Then it turned out that they were studying in the same class and began to sit at the same desk. Both were engrossed in the novels of Jules Verne and Walter Scott.
Immediately after the deportation of the Volga Germans, the newspaper where Harry Schnittke worked was closed. From the first days of the war, he wanted to fight the Nazis, but the military registration and enlistment office refused him for a long time and only in 1943 he was sent to the front as a translator. Maria Schnittke remained with three children in Engels.
She worked as a German language teacher at school, after classes, like other teachers, she worked in public works, collected firewood for schools and hospitals, and checked students’ homework at night.
During the hungry war years, the Schnittke family survived thanks to their vegetable garden: on the plot next to the house, grandmother and mother grew cucumbers, tomatoes, and potatoes. Outside the city in the steppe, the residents were also allocated land, and there Maria, together with her sons who helped her, planted the same potatoes, pumpkins, and watermelons.
Victor Schnittke recalled: since his mother was always busy at work, caring for the garden fell mainly on the shoulders of the grandmother. Water was provided at a tap on the street only for a few hours a day in the morning and evening. To water the garden, my grandmother carried it in three buckets at once: two on the rocker, one more in her hand. The family did not eat early vegetables; they were sold at the market in order to buy flour and cereals with the proceeds.
Dedication to mother
As relatives said, even in infancy Alfred tried to play on the lids of saucepans. There were no musicians among the relatives, nevertheless, on the eve of the German attack on the USSR, the Schnittkes took their eldest son to Moscow to his father’s parents to enter a music school, but these plans were interrupted by the war.
The composer himself recalled how happy he was when, after the war, radios were returned to residents and he was able to listen to music. Then he acquired a harmonica, on which he tried to improvise and compose.
In 1946, Harry Schnittke, who remained in the army after the war, was allowed to take his family to a new duty station in Vienna. For a gifted boy from a remote Volga town, this was an extraordinary gift of fate. The two years spent by Alfred Schnittke in the European capital became decisive for his life’s purpose. Here he first attended concerts and opera performances, he acquired his first musical instrument – an accordion, and began taking piano lessons. It was Vienna that Alfred Garrievich later perceived as the place where his musical abilities were revealed. What trace did Engels leave in Schnittke’s memory?
There is a memorable scene in Victor Schnittke’s story “Return to Engels”. The house where the Schnittke family lived during the war has not survived. A five-story building was built here. In the early 80s of the last century, Victor and Alfred visited this place: “The brother turns his back to the street and steps on the snow-covered turf. He takes seven steps and stops: “porch.” Turns left, three steps parallel to the street: “corridor “. Three more steps, turns his back to the street: “our door.” He crosses the invisible threshold, turns to the right, stands with his arms spread to the sides: “grandmother’s bed.” Then, without turning around, with just one movement of the hand back: “stove”…
After Maria Iosifovna passed away, Alfred Schnittke wrote “Requiem,” which he dedicated to her memory. It is considered to be one of the composer’s most powerful emotional works.
“Several years ago, the Saratov Choral Music Theater performed “Requiem,” I was at the concert, and for me this was the answer to the question of how Engels was reflected in the composer’s work,” says Olga Suvorova.
Photo: Vladimir Yanchenko/RG
Guest from Japan
At the end of the 90s of the last century, an unusual visitor came to the Engels Museum of Local Lore. Japanese manager, music lover and admirer of Alfred Schnittke’s work, Rio Hoshi, asked for help to see places associated with the name of his favorite composer. At that moment, the museum staff could only tell us where the former building of school No. 25, where the brothers Alfred and Victor Schnittke studied, was located.
Much has changed since then. The Philharmonic Society in Saratov and the Musical and Aesthetic Lyceum in Engels are named after Alfred Schnittke. A musical and literary competition dedicated to the Schnittke brothers is being held. A memorial plaque was installed on the former school building, and a monument to the composer – sculptors Sergei and Andrei Shcherbakov – was opened in the park in the city center in 2018.
The houses on Sovetskaya and Persidskaya streets, where the Schnittke family lived in Engels, have not survived, but miraculously, the small house where the parents brought their first-born from the maternity hospital survived. The famous local historian and archivist Elizaveta Erina found a birth certificate for the future composer, which helped establish this address – Krasnaya Street, 80.
Source: rodina-history.ru
