Gogol Suite

The complicated story behind the incidental music to the play The Revision List of Nikolai Gogol began in 1976, when Yuri Liubimov, director and producer of the Moscow Taganka Theatre, commissioned Schnittke to write incidental music for an unusual Gogol spectacle. Schnittke had by then earned a high artistic reputation, especially as a composer of film and stage music (music to over 40 films and to plays by Shaw, Schiller, Pushkin and Brecht). At that time, Liubimov was apparently chaotic in his mixing of numerous Gogol subjects (The Nose, The Reviser, The Dead Souls, The Coat, The Portrait, etc.) into a grandiose theatre piece, although his subtle feeling for the passing of time and the simultaneous intertwining of plots led to an ingenious dramaturgy. This way of working corresponds to Schnittke's formal principles; he uses his own as well as foreign material, genuine and fake quotations, newly composed material and parts from older pieces in his music. A change in leadership at the Taganka Theatre led to Gennady Roshdestvensky's conducting the incidental music to the play The History of the Reviser. Roshdestvensky had already been active in performing premieres of numerous Schnittke orchestral works since 1963. He later had the idea of compiling essential portions of the incidental music into a Gogol Suite.