JOSEPH ANTON BRUCKNER WAS BORN IN ANSFELDEN, UPPER ... Anton
Bruckner spent almost eight years working on his never-to-be-finished Ninth ...
Anton Bruckner Symphony No. 9 in D minor JOSEPH ANTON BRUCKNER WAS BORN IN ANSFELDEN, UPPER AUSTRIA, ON SEPTEMBER 4, 1824, AND DIED IN VIENNA ON OCTOBER 11, 1896. HE BEGAN CONCENTRATED WORK ON HIS UNFINISHED NINTH SYMPHONY IN APRIL 1891, THOUGH SOME OF THE MATERIAL GOES BACK TO SKETCHES MADE IN 1887 AND 1889. HE COMPLETED THE FIRST MOVEMENT ON DECEMBER 23, 1893, THE SCHERZO ON FEBRUARY 15, 1894, AND THE ADAGIO ON NOVEMBER 30 OF THAT YEAR, BEGINNING SKETCHES FOR THE FINALE ON MAY 24, 1895. THE SYMPHONY WAS PERFORMED FIRST IN THE POSTHUMOUS FALSIFICATION BY ONE OF BRUCKNER’S SELF-PROCLAIMED ASSISTANTS, FERDINAND LÖWE, AN ARRANGEMENT DESIGNED TO MAKE THE WORK MORE “WAGNERIAN”; THIS TOOK PLACE IN VIENNA ON FEBRUARY 11, 1903, WITH LÖWE CONDUCTING. THE PREMIERE OF THE ORIGINAL VERSION AS BRUCKNER ACTUALLY LEFT IT DID NOT TAKE PLACE UNTIL APRIL 2, 1932, AT A SPECIAL CONCERT FOR AN INVITED AUDIENCE IN MUNICH, WITH SIEGMUND VON HAUSEGGER CONDUCTING FIRST THE LÖWE VERSION, THEN BRUCKNER’S ORIGINAL. THE FIRST PUBLIC PERFORMANCE OF BRUCKNER’S ORIGINAL VERSION WAS GIVEN ON OCTOBER 23, 1932, BY CLEMENS KRAUSS AND THE VIENNA PHILHARMONIC. THE SCORE OF BRUCKNER’S SYMPHONY NO. 9 CALLS FOR THREE FLUTES, THREE OBOES, THREE CLARINETS, THREE BASSOONS, EIGHT HORNS (FOUR DOUBLING WAGNER TUBAS— TWO TENOR AND TWO BASS—IN THE ADAGIO), THREE TRUMPETS, THREE TROMBONES, BASS TUBA, TIMPANI, AND STRINGS. Anton Bruckner spent almost eight years working on his never-to-be-finished Ninth Symphony. Three completed movements and hundreds of pages of sketches for the finale attest to the passion with which he approached this work. But by the time he had reached the finale, his artistic self-confidence had been drastically undermined by the refusal of Hermann Levi, one his strongest proponents, to conduct his Eighth Symphony, and he spent most of his last years fruitlessly trying to revise older works to make them “acceptable” to performers unable to comprehend his unique style. This work of revision drained away essential time as it sapped his belief in his own abilities, depriving us of what might well have been his greatest work. But even as it stands, a torso of three movements lacking its finale—which would, as with Beethoven’s final symphony in the same key, have attempted to reconcile or harmonize its diverse expressive elements, its emotional extremes—the Ninth remains one of Bruckner’s greatest achievements. A product of the Austrian countryside who remained essentially a bumpkin, at least as far as the cosmopolites of the capital were concerned, Bruckner moved to Vienna in 1868, to take up the professorship of harmony and counterpoint at the Conservatory. At that time he was forty-four years old and had attained some renown as a composer of Masses (all three of his works in that genre were already behind him), as a superb scholar of musical technique, and as one of the greatest organists of his day. (Reports of his magnificent improvisations on the organ make us wish that recording technology had been invented earlier.) His professorship was a position of great prestige in the elegant and fashionable capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it had been bestowed on a man of peasantlike simplicity in his personal life, a man who had little real understanding of the “proper” way to get ahead in the capital. He must have been a strange apparition in the simple costume he always wore, characteristic of his native Upper Austria: baggy black pants (ending above the ankles so as not to interfere with his pedal-work when playing the organ), a loose coat of notably unstylish cut, and comfortable white shirt with an unfashionably broad collar. With his short and stocky build and his hearty appetite, he could easily have been taken for a peasant farmer. Bruckner’s real difficulties in Vienna came because he was utterly unable to understand the political aspect of the city’s musical life, its division into armed camps representing the Brahmsians and the Wagnerians. No quarter was given, so a partisan of one side was automatically attacked by the partisans of the other. Vienna was basically conservative, and its Philharmonic Orchestra spearheaded that conservatism. The press, too, supported Brahms against Wagner and his adherents. So it was difficult enough for a composer allied in any way with “the music of the future” even to get a hearing; and once he had gotten it, it was
difficult to find a review that provided even the minimum standards of fair reporting (such as wildly enthusiastic audience response, which sometimes occurred without being mentioned by Eduard Hanslick and other critics in their intensely pejorative reviews). Bruckner was known to be a strong admirer of Wagner—and that was quite enough to damn him in the eyes of the Brahmsians. His large symphonies were thought of as “Wagnerian” (which they are not, in anything but relatively minor details of scoring, such as his use of the brass instruments), so, from the time of the Third Symphony, which Bruckner dedicated to Wagner, Hanslick’s powerful reviews inevitably attacked Bruckner’s newest works. For many years Bruckner’s symphonies had to find their way against the will of the entrenched critics who were confident that they knew what a symphony was. Yet Bruckner’s symphonies are an utterly personal treatment of the form inherited from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, and they must be approached in their own terms. Until quite recently Bruckner’s name was always linked in the same breath with Mahler’s, and both were promoted as rarely heard and underrated masters of Viennese late Romanticism. But Mahler has for decades now become a central figure in our symphonic life, while Bruckner still stands on the periphery. In any case, the two composers had little in common. To be sure, both wrote lengthy and demanding symphonies, sometimes lasting an hour or more. (If Bruckner had finished his Ninth with a finale on the scale of the other movements, it would have been by far his longest work.) But their music looked in opposite directions. Mahler’s symphonies involved (as he himself said) the creation of entire worlds, filled with existential doubt and anguish. Bruckner, on the other hand, was a devout Catholic whose symphonies ring with the absolute conviction of his faith; each seems from the beginning to be aiming for a predestined conclusion of grandeur and almost heavenly glory, the embodiment in tone of the massive, ornate Baroque churches in which he had served as organist. If Mahler’s symphonies are some kind of self-psychoanalysis, Bruckner’s symphonies are liturgical acts. Perhaps this is why today, in an age of endless questioning of values following a century of mass annihilation on a scale hardly known to history heretofore, Mahler’s symphonies seem more attuned to our world view than Bruckner’s. After arriving in Vienna, Bruckner devoted almost his entire creative energy to the composition of symphonies. The years 1871 to 1876 saw the pouring out of symphonies 2, 3, 4, and 5 in quick succession. Hanslick, who had been enthusiastic about Bruckner’s early Masses, turned harshly vindictive after the composition of his “Wagner symphony,” and it became nearly impossible to obtain a Philharmonic performance of his works until his reputation began to grow elsewhere, particularly in Germany. The real start of his international fame came with the great success of the Seventh Symphony at its world premiere in Leipzig under the direction of Arthur Nikisch (later a conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) at the end of 1884. A hugely successful performance in Munich the following year was the high point of his life. He was then in the middle of work on his Eighth Symphony, and, given the recent events, he was proceeding in a mood of contented assurance. That mood evaporated, though, when, after completing the Eighth in August 1887, he sent it to Hermann Levi, who had led the Munich performance of the Seventh. Levi had truly loved the Seventh but found himself, to his great embarrassment, unable to comprehend the Eighth, and though he tried to soften the blow of his rejection as best he could, it was devastating to Bruckner. As Bruckner’s pupil Joseph Schalk reported to Levi, “He is upset and in despair and has lost all confidence in himself.” The loss of confidence affected not only the Eighth Symphony. Levi’s rejection revived Bruckner’s earlier doubts about his ability and cast a pall over many of his earlier works. In fact, he spent most of the rest of his life revising older, already finished works instead of writing new ones. Though he lived another nine years, he wrote only a few small pieces and never completed another symphony. By the time he had completed yet another revision of the Eighth (with the sometimes misguided help of Schalk) he had already begun sketching the Ninth. But though the first three movements progressed well enough, he spent the last three years of his life trying to create a finale he was never to finish. The Ninth was planned as a four-movement symphony in which—as in Beethoven’s Ninth—the scherzo came second and the slow movement third. Both of the first two movements—again, as in the Beethoven work—constantly emphasize and reaffirm the home tonality of D minor, though during the course of the movements they cover vast harmonic distances, reflecting the development of musical chromaticism during
the course of the seventy years that had elapsed between Beethoven’s work and Bruckner’s. Bruckner had completely internalized the music of Wagner’s Tristan and had shown even in his earliest compositions that he was comfortable with a very chromatic language. By the time of the Ninth, his harmonies occasionally border on the edge of atonality and approach the brink of that harmonic crisis that only a few years later forced Schoenberg to address new ways of finding coherence in a language in which every pitch seemed to have become as important as every other. Of course, Bruckner still remains firmly tonal in large matters. However far his musical voyage may take him, he ends the movement in the home key. And it is a foregone conclusion that the unfinished finale would have, in some way, brought together the threads of the three earlier movements and—again as in the Beethoven model—found some way to achieve a confident and ringing affirmation in D major. The word “scherzo” means “joke” in Italian, but Bruckner’s scherzo is, rather, a gigantic nightmare, frenzied almost throughout, and by turns brutal and fantastic. In some ways its sardonic character feels closer to Mahler than anything else Bruckner ever wrote. A repeated-note figure, sometimes softly plucked in the strings, sometimes loudly asserted in the full orchestra with brass and percussion, is the main gesture, the continuing backdrop of the movement. It has a concentrated sonata form, and unlike many of Bruckner’s scherzos, there is almost no hint of tunefulness. The Trio is in F-sharp major, which would normally effect a brightening and perhaps a relief from the scherzo’s pounding D minor (it also is surely a hint of the D major that Bruckner would have intended to close the symphony as a whole). But other Trios to Bruckner scherzos are a kind of relaxation, often in a slower tempo, from the scherzo. Here the Trio is faster and, though quieter, icy and slithering, yet another aspect of the movement’s nightmarish quality. The scherzo returns with its old ferocity. The Adagio takes Bruckner to the farthest extremes of chromatic harmony that he ever reached, and it is by all odds his most tortuous music. Though the key signature claims it is in E major, and the opening pitch is the dominant of the E major scale (a perfectly normal starting point), what follows moves through far worlds without a firm footing. This twisting and desolate opening theme, beginning with large leaps up, then down, followed by a series of rising scale passages, grows and develops through stretches in which we are never entirely sure of being in any key for very long. The first firm sense of tonality comes with the presentation of a new melody in A-flat, very slow, rather consoling in mood. Much of the rest of the movement unfolds with elements of the first theme, sometimes turned upside down, sometimes fragmented, but always seeking something not apparently defined. Only when the second theme is finally restated are we clearly in the long-intended key of E major. This inaugurates a great crescendo to a culminating point, though it is not an affirmation. Its climactic moment is a shockingly violent dissonance (so shocking that Bruckner’s “helper” Löwe rewrote it after the composer’s death and published and performed it without ever revealing what he had done; only in 1932, seven years after Löwe’s own death, was Bruckner’s original form heard). The climactic dissonance is on a chord that leads us to C-sharp minor—the key that shares its scale with the home E major and is known as its relative minor. Here begins the wonderful coda of the movement, which quotes the second phrase of the movement, but then, instead of repeating the earlier torments, moves into a serene realm for the moving close, which seems to recall somewhat the opening of the Seventh Symphony, whose success had been the high point (in the composer’s mind) of his life. Steven Ledbetter
