A Russian composer of German ancestry, Alfred Schnittke was born in Engels, on the southern bank of the Volga (today part of the Saratov Oblast), on 24 November 1934. His origins are complex: he was born to multilingual parents (his mother, a Volga German, was a teacher and contributor to the local newspaper; his father, a Russian-Latvian, was a journalist and translator whose family had historical ties to Frankfurt) and grew up surrounded by different faiths (his mother was Catholic and his father Jewish, while Engels was predominantly Russian Orthodox). From the early 20th century, his extended family regularly moved between Germany and Russia.

Schnittke began studies of music in 1946 in Vienna, where his family was based from 1945 to 1948 for professional reasons (his father was working as an editor for a German-language newspaper published by the occupying Soviets). During this time, the young Schnittke played accordion, studied piano with Charlotte Ruber (who lived in the same building as Schnittke and his family), and composed his first works. Moving to Moscow in 1948, he first studied piano with Vassili Chaternikov and theory with Iosif Rizhkin at the “October Revolution” Academy of Music, and then from 1953, orchestration with Nikolai Rakov, counterpoint and composition with Evgueni Goloubev, and composition (albeit in an informal capacity) with Philippe Herschkowitz at the Conservatory. All three professors discouraged Schnittke from pursuing a career as a pianist, supporting instead his aspirations as a composer. Schnittke’s Opus 1 is the Concerto No. 1, composed 1956-1958 and revised in 1962-1963. Following his graduation from the conservatory (for which he composed the oratorio Nagasaki), his first large-scale work, an oratorio for mezzo-soprano, choir and orchestra (composed in 1958), was premiered in 1961. In the same year, he became a member of the Union of Composers and married pianist Irina Kataïeva (born in 1941).

From 1962 to 1972, Schnittke taught orchestration at the Moscow Conservatory while also composing regularly for theatre and cinema (fields in which he would remain active until 1984). During this time, he also wrote numerous essays on contemporary music and participated in conferences on 20th century composers with whom he felt a creative rapport (e.g., Bartók, Berio, Shostakovich, Ligeti, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Nono, who he met in Moscow in 1963). Throughout the 1960s, Schnittke also experimented with twelve-tone music. He went on to develop an idiosyncratic “polystylistic” approach, about which he wrote extensively in essays from the early 1970s, and which first crystallised in his manifesto work, Symphony No. 1 (1969-1972), premiered in Gorki. This new “polyvocal” and ironic conception of music drew the ire of the Soviet authorities on multiple occasions until 1985, despite support from, and high profile performances in the 1970s by, esteemed instrumentalists including Iouri Bashmet, Guennadi Rojdestvenski, Mstislav Rostropovitch, and Gidon Kremer, the latter of whom premiered Concerto Grosso No. 1 in Austria and West Germany in 1977.

Starting in 1973, Schnittke dedicated the majority of his time to composition and lecturing. In 1980, he taught at the Vienna Musikhochschule, and in 1981 became a member of the East German Academy of the Arts at the Academy of Bavaria in Munich. In 1982, he converted to Christianity; this gave rise to a new, spiritual dimension in his subsequent works.

In 1985, Schnittke suffered a stroke that left him in a coma. He would suffer subsequent strokes in 1991, 1994, and 1998. As a member of the West Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, and following repeated invitations from his publisher, Sikorski, he moved to Hamburg where, despite his ailing health, he taught at the Musikhochschule and continued to compose. Notable works from this period include the ballet Peer Gynt, composed for the John Neumeier Dance Company, and three operas: Life with an Idiot, Gesualdo, and Historia von D. Johann Fausten.

An honorary member of the Berlin, Munich, New York and Stockholm Academies of the Arts, and the recipient of numerous international awards (Austria, 1991; Japan, 1992; Germany, 1992 and 1994; and Russia, 1993 and 1998), Alfred Schnittke died in Hamburg on 3 August 1998. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, where many other Russian musical luminaries are interred.