ABSTRACT
The Moscow film industry provided Schnittke with a living from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and during the 1970s he wrote scores for three to five films a year. His earliest soundtrack score was for the 1950s radio play Mayakovsky's Debut. This was followed by scores for television transmissions of stage plays, One Ear is Not Yet Bread by Ignat Nazarov and The Rose and the Cross (1962) after Alexander Blok, all written while he was still a postgraduate student. These projects launched parallel careers in film and theatre music, film work beginning with Igor Talankin's Introduction in 1962 and becoming full-time around 1968.
