Carved into Alfred Schnittke's gravestone in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery is a fermata over a whole rest marked fortissimo: an infinitely loud silence. This episode explores how a composer born in 1934 to a German Jewish father and a Volga German mother, a foreigner everywhere he went, turned displacement, trauma, and spiritual yearning into one of the most original sounds of the late 20th century.

We trace Schnittke's formative years in post-war Vienna, his studies and teaching at the Moscow Conservatory, and the nearly 70 film scores that became his laboratory for abrupt stylistic collisions. That cinematic splicing grew into polystylism, a mashup of Baroque, popular, folk, and modern music that Soviet authorities banned as subversive, even as musicians like Mstislav Rostropovich and Gidon Kremer carried his scores to the West. We follow ...