Conference Morsel: Schnittke’s “Penitential Psalms”

(An excerpt from the poster session “Musical Realization of an Ancient Poetic Prayer Form in the Penitential Psalms by Alfred Schnittke,” presented by Zhanna A. Lehmann during the 2015 ACDA National Conference.)

 

       The texts of Alfred Schnittke’s Penitential Psalms appeared in a 1986 publication of the sixteenth century’s manuscripts of the ancient Rus’.1 These eleven poems represent a genre of ancient Russian, lyrical poetry commonly referred as penitential poems that are not “Psalms” in the Biblical sense, but penitential, spiritual poems, mostly anonymous, that draw their inspiration and some of their imagery from various biblical, liturgical, and paraliturgical sources. Schnittke intuitively followed the poems’ poetic structure – prayer poetic form that is characterized by the syntactic parallelism, anaphora, vocative and imperative forms. As in works in other genres, Schnittke utilized a polystylistic method to set the texts of the Penitential Psalms’. He also persistently applied the rhetorical devices throughout all the Psalms for word painting or to underline a strong expressive accentuation of the imperative and vocative forms.

       The primary way of organizing the text within the prayer form is by means of syntactic parallelism – the same or similar ordering of parts or words of the sentence in strophes within a poem. This parallelism creates coherence and an expectation of rhythmical repetition. Along with anaphora, the presence of syntactic parallelism tends to link the prayer poems with Biblical poetic forms. Syntactic parallelism is present in all of the eleven Psalms, and one of the primary methods Schnittke used to accentuate this poetic element was to follow the textual model and repeat the musical material either without any changes or vary it melodically or rhythmically. Thus, the textual and musical intensive repetition in this unified manner stir the emotions of the poems.

 

(1 Lev Dmitriev and Dmitry Likhachev, eds. Pamyatniki Literatury Drevnei Rusi: Vtoraya Polovina XVI Veka [Monuments of Literature of Ancient Rus’: Second Half of the XVI Century], (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1986), 550-563.

 

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