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Schnittke has been a resident of Hamburg since 1990, but his music remains inseparable from his native milieu in its anxiety, its foreboding, its confusion and its fury. The cacophonous, almost pugnaciously eclectic First Symphony stunned Soviet audiences in 1974 with its melange of Gregorian chant, jazz, Baroque and Romantic references. The ominous Fifth Symphony (1988) is sufficiently Baroque in form that Schnittke also calls it his Concerto Grosso No. 4, although its content is stark, nearly tragic. And the 1992 opera, Life with an Idiot, is the most potent satiric Russian opera since Shostakovich's The Nose.
The comparison with Shostakovich points up the reason for Schnittke's appeal. Like his great forebear, Schnittke has dealt with unremitting horror by creating an internal, personalized musical world in which salvation, though elusive, remains possible. Unlike Shostakovich, who was finally ground down by Stalinism and had to express his rebellion in a private musical code, Schnittke has lived to see the end of overt artistic oppression. Grim as his . music can be, it is never hopeless; relentless as it sometimes is, it is never despondent. Schnittke's compositions are a challenge to modern Central European history, one man's potent protest against not only the ugly present but also the even uglier recent past. As the century staggers to a conclusion, Schnittke suddenly seems to speak for us all.