In our medievalism discussions this semester, we’ve often asked a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to “use” the medieval past? Sometimes the past is reconstructed. Sometimes it is stylized, or put to a political agenda.
And sometimes it becomes something stranger: a set of sonic materials that can be rearranged, fragmented, and reimagined.
Alfred Schnittke’s Minnesang (1981) belongs very much in that last category. Rather than reconstructing medieval song, Schnittke treats it almost like archaeological fragments – pieces of melody, pieces of language, pieces of texture that can be layered together into something new.
What he tells us is that the past can be fully present, and yet sound nothing like the past at all.
Before looking at how the piece works, it helps simply to hear it.
Stefan Parkman and the Danish National Symphony Choir ℗ 1992 Chandos Records
Alfred Schnittke and the Past
Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) was one of the most distinctive composers of the late Soviet period. His music is often associated with what he called polystylism. He enjoyed the mix-and-mingle of different genres’ conventions, with Renaissance and Romantic language butting up against popular music styles, in a vertiginous swirl of sound. As he put it,
“The goal of my life is to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my neck in doing so.”
His life was complicated by the fractious and often oppressive cultural environment of the late Soviet Union. During the Brezhnev era (1964–1982), artistic life was shaped by political surveillance, ideological expectations, and a leadership culture that prized stability over reform. Schnittke himself experienced travel bans after abstaining from a Composers’ Union vote in 1980, and Minnesang was created at exactly that moment in his career. As a student of Shostakovich, the question of politics’ potential influence on his personal safety, let alone his musical reception, must surely have been on his mind.
At the same time, he cultivated an unusually deep relationship with the musical past. As a teenager studying in Vienna in 1946, he later recalled a key and abiding insight that was to influence his musical choices throughout his life:
“Every moment there was a link in the historical chain… the past represented a world of ever-present ghosts.”
That sense of the past as ever-present becomes crucial for our understanding of Minnesang.
The Piece: Minnesang (1981)
Schnittke wrote Minnesang for 52 vocal parts, dividing the choir at times into dozens of independent lines. The work draws on around twenty medieval German songs, including material by:
- Walther von der Vogelweide
- Neidhart von Reuental
- Wolfram von Eschenbach
- Heinrich von Meissen
- the Monk of Salzburg
Yet Schnittke insisted that
he was not “composing” with these songs in the traditional sense. Rather,
he took a mosaicist’s approach:
“I set the task to limit myself with only montage work without changing any note of these songs.” (Schnittke Program Notes, as quoted in Smirnov)
Even the texts themselves are treated differently than one might expect. The Middle High German language, largely opaque to modern listeners, becomes part of the sonic texture, transformed, as Schnittke claims, into simple phonemes which help to create a particular mood.
In other words, the medieval material becomes sound matter.
What Is Schnittke’s Medievalism Doing?
This piece belongs to a broader cluster of works in which Schnittke explored spirituality and historical memory, including:
- Requiem (1975)
- Der Sonnengesang des Franz von Assisi (1976)
- Symphony No. 2 “St. Florian” (1979)
- Minnesang (1981)
- Faust Cantata (1983)
Scholars sometimes frame this group as exploring tensions between intuition and rationality, or what Zhanna Lehmann calls gnosis – direct experiential insight rather than theoretical knowledge. All of the works have medieval(ist) themes, and all were written before his formal conversation in 1985. At one level, these could be seen as an exploration of faith. At another, they are also a dabbling in what history means to the present day.
That perspective matters for Minnesang, because the piece does not attempt to reconstruct medieval music historically. Instead, it asks what happens when medieval fragments become objects of contemplation.
Seeing the Music
Because the work involves so many voices and overlapping layers, it can be hard to hear the structure on first listening. This gave me a good excuse to learn a bit about spectrograms, which show sound visually:
- bright dense regions = many voices / louder passages
- thin bands = fewer voices or sustained tones
- vertical streaks = consonants, rhythmic entrances, or sudden dynamic changes
The spectrogram makes the piece’s structure unusually easy to see: expansions appear as widening bands of color, while the exploratory passages show thinner textures in which individual melodic fragments briefly emerge.
Structural Overview of Schnittke’s Minnesang
I combined my assessment from Sonic Visualiser with my own close listening to generate the analysis provided here. (This assessment draws on acoustical markers, not score analysis.)
| Time | Layer | Label |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 | STRUCTURE | Intro w/canon |
| 1:57 | STRUCTURE | X (melodic/textural exploration) |
| 1:57 | EVENT | fragments of tunes |
| 3:24 | EVENT | contrary motion |
| 3:42 | STRUCTURE | first build |
| 3:42 | EVENT | sudden reduced texture |
| 4:54 | STRUCTURE | Y (melodic/textural exploration) |
| 4:54 | EVENT | rising |
| 7:22 | EVENT | unison |
| 7:53 | STRUCTURE | full texture |
| 7:53 | EVENT | blocks of sound |
| 10:51 | EVENT | pile up |
| 11:39 | STRUCTURE | climax |
| 11:59 | EVENT | start collapse |
| 13:11 | STRUCTURE | last build |
| 13:11 | EVENT | reduce then build |
| 13:53 | STRUCTURE | Z (melodic/textural exploration) |
| 13:53 | EVENT | fragments of tunes |
| 15:20 | STRUCTURE | END |
An assessment of Schnittke’s structure
I. Introduction (0:00–1:57)
0:00
— Intro w/canon
1:56
— “X”
The opening establishes the material contrapuntally, with fragments surfacing within a relatively transparent texture. There is an emphasis on paired voices in canon, but in the context of a thick texture in which individual gestures retain attention only briefly before dissolving back into the mass of sound. If you look at just the first 90 seconds, you can see these canons clearly:
Short fragments will start in a lower voice, to be paired directly with a voice slightly higher in the texture. These two-voice groupings are more prominent than the (softer and higher) voices which sing aligned, also in a fragmented, disconnected smattering of phrase-fragments.
Gradually, the texture widens out – a pattern that will repeat twice more over the course of the piece – in order to set up a new section (“X”) devoted to exploration of fragments of the various Minnesang tunes.
Exploratory Cycle 1 (1:57–3:42)
1:57
— Section X:
fragments of tune emerge
3:24
— contrary motion
3:42
— sudden reduced
texture
Here the choir begins to play with melodic fragments more explicitly. Individual gestures emerge momentarily before giving way to others, producing a shifting field of brief melodic appearances rather than sustained thematic statements.
Exploratory Cycle 2 (3:42-7:22)
3:42
— texture widens
out
4:54
— Section Y:
exploration of melodies: rising
melody at first, later
“Ich habe” (5:26); and a dotted rhythm melody (6:26) each emerge
briefly for attention
7:22 — unison reset
After this section’s expansion of tessitura, this cycle moves through a series of fragments, some with surprisingly clear profiles. It ends by drawing to a unison, which acts as a structural pivot, resetting the texture before a broader expansion.
Central Expansion and Climax (7:53-11:59)
7:53
— full texture, with blocks of sound
10:51 —
accumulation begins
11:39
— climax
11:59 — start of collapse
From the unison, Schnittke quickly
rebuilds the choral mass. The texture expands through alternating
blocks of sound, shifting between low and high registers and
increasing in dynamic intensity. The spectrum gradually
widens – particularly upward – before the addition of a low pulsating
foundation.
At 10:51 a more continuous accumulation
begins, leading to a sustained and prolonged climax centered around
11:39. At this point the spectrogram shows the maximum spectral
saturation of the entire piece: full tessitura with sustained soprano
intensity.
Dissolution and reconfiguration (11:59-15:20)
11:59
— thinning / collapse
13:11 — reduction
then renewed build-out of the texture
13:53 — Section Z: medieval lyrics re-emerge as a focus
After the climax the texture thins but retains strong harmonic bands. Rather than dissolving entirely, the music reorganizes itself, preparing one final gesture: a final rapid expansion of the texture leading into a renewed lyrical exploration of the Minnesang fragments.
This final cycle might perhaps be considered a coda, but to me it serves more as a reframing, turning back to those earlier exploratory sections, reconsidering what these medieval fragments can do for us as pieces of sound.
Schnittke’s compositional process
Just a few observations, and those derived largely from listening rather than from such things as sketches and interviews:
CANON: First, several scholars, including Mark Jennings (2002), note that the work pays homage to the medieval period through canonic writing. Groups of voices enter one by one or in imitation; they often enter as voice groups. This mirrors medieval compositional practice, but here it becomes a generator of texture rather than counterpoint to be heard clearly. The example above shows how Schnittke deploys this writing, particularly in the introduction to the piece, orienting us to an imitative allusively "medieval" style, but not one which will drive the remainder of the piece. His primary technique, to my ear, is not so much canonic writing but rather that of textural design.
TEXTURAL DESIGN: The piece operates through repeated two-stage cycles:
1) There is a rapid expansion of the texture (shown on the spectrogram with those curving lines that show the basses expanding downward to claim a full tessitura).
2) We move to what I think of as exploratory play, with thinner textures revealing a variety of treatments of the fragments that Schnittke uses as mosaic tiles.
Each cycle increases the spectral density and register width until we come to the climactic plateau at 11:39, after which the texture dissolves and reforms for the final expansion.
If I am right, this assessment shows is that Schnittke’s form in Minnesang is governed primarily by textural dramaturgy rather than harmonic progression or melodic recognition.
FLICKERING: For a piece nominally “about” medieval tunes – and a whole host of those, at that – the presence of any one tune is remarkably fleeting. Melodies emerge briefly from the texture and then vanish. Or, in imitation passages (e.g. 4:54) we might have a cascade of rising lines as one voice, and then the next, and then the next take over our attention as they work through their canonic exposition. But these fragments operate at the level of the phrase, or even half-phrase. We never sit long enough to “have the tune.” For a piece designed around Minnesang, the fragments flicker, but do not linger long enough to become a focus:
a fragment appears
it dissolves
a new
fragment appears
The past is never stabilized – it winks in and out.
What the Past Becomes
Taken together, these features – canonic writing, cycles of expansion and exploratory thinning, and the fleeting appearance of melodic fragments – shape the way the medieval material functions in Minnesang.
One of the most striking things about the piece is that it does not attempt to restore medieval song as something historically intact. The tunes themselves rarely stabilize long enough to become recognizable musical objects. Instead, they surface briefly within the texture and then dissolve again, reappearing later in altered contexts. It is the textures and treatments that guide our listening, not the tunes.
In this sense, the medieval songs operate less as themes than as sonic artifacts. They provide the raw material for canonic cascades, for textural expansions, and for the exploratory passages where fragments briefly step forward before yielding to the next gesture. What drives the listener’s experience of the piece is therefore not melodic recognition or harmonic progression, but the unfolding of textures and the shifting ways those fragments are deployed.
This distancing of the melodies is reinforced by the way the work treats its texts. The Middle High German texts are largely unintelligible to modern listeners, and Schnittke himself tells us that he treats them primarily as phonetic sound. The melodies appear only in fragments, rarely long enough to stabilize as recognizable tunes. Even the stylistic gestures – canon, imitation, layered voices – function less as historical reconstruction than as textural devices. The result is that none of the usual grounds for musical judgment quite apply. The text cannot quite be interpreted, the melodies never quite become themes, and the style never quite settles into historical pastiche.
The medieval material is therefore present, but at a remove – circulating within the piece as sound rather than as historical artifact. Minnesang does not attempt to recover the medieval past so much as to place it into motion again. The old songs flicker through the texture, briefly audible before dissolving back into the larger choral complex. The past is not restored here. Instead, it is rearranged, reframed, and reimagined. What remains is not “pastness,” but sound itself: a field of textures through which the medieval fragments briefly pass. The medieval does not carry inherent meaning; we cannot quite hold it in the ear. Yet for Schnittke it becomes a palette of color, applied here and there until recognizable shapes and patterns emerge.
The result is a paradox that lies at the heart of Schnittke’s medievalism: the past may be fully present, even the sole source of melodic material, and yet sound nothing at all like the past we imagine.
WORKS CONSULTED
Mark D. Jennings, 2002. “Alfred Schnittke's Concerto for Choir : musical analysis and historical perspectives.” PhD Diss, Florida State.
Zhanna Lehmann, 2018. “Alfred Schnittke’s quest for a universal musical language in the Penitential Psalms (1987–88).” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dmitri Smirnov, 2002. Liner notes to Schnittke, A.: Choir Concerto / Minnesang / Voices of Nature (Holst Singers, Gledhill, Layton), Hyperion 00602448807229.
