ANTON
BRUCKNER
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor
Anton
Bruckner: His Life
Anton Bruckner was raised in the small Upper Austrian
village
of Ansfelden as a devout Roman Catholic, a faith he would ardently follow for
the rest of his life. He was a skilled organist, working first at St. Florian
(a monastery near Linz), and finally in Vienna, to which
he
moved in 1868. Not only did his writing begin to overtake his activities as an
organist, but his increased exposure to the most important and progressive
music
of the day—Beethoven, Liszt, and above all, Wagner—strongly influenced his
work. Though he composed motets and masses (neither surprising, considering his
faith and employment), his symphonies are the works that have secured his
reputation.
The
Symphony Before Bruckner
Bruckner’s symphonies can best be
understood by considering the
150-year tradition of Austro-German symphonies that came before him. The
symphony, or sinfonia as it was
initially known, had in Italy by the 17th century come to mean a brief
instrumental overture to larger vocal works. Over the next hundred years, the
form migrated north where the first great symphonist, Joseph Haydn, completely
transformed it into today’s received meaning: a long-form composition, usually
in four movements, scored
for orchestra. The symphony grew larger and more ambitious with each
generation; Haydn’s pupil Beethoven spurred the next watershed developments. In
his nine symphonies, he created longer works in which multiple movements are harmonically
and thematically linked, transforming the symphony from a potpourri of discreet
pieces into a unified statement. Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, and Brahms built
their grand statements on Beethoven’s framework.
By the time Bruckner came of age, the form had grown louder, larger, and longer
still; in the process, it had become the preeminent
genre for composers of the Austro-German school. Another composer who loomed
large over Bruckner was not a symphonist at all, but an operatic master—Richard
Wagner. In pursuit of a new musical language for his gargantuan stage
dramas—particularly Tristan und Isolde and
the Ring cycle—Wagner’s oeuvre
juxtaposed harmonies in strange and distinctive ways, complementing his
intensely expressive dramatic forms. Bruckner took those harmonic techniques
into the symphony hall. Often over an hour in length (most of Haydn’s
symphonies were only around 20 minutes), Bruckner’s symphonies utilize Wagner’s
chromatic textures along with a unique feel for instrumental writing, inspired
in part by his experience as an organist.
Bruckner:
Revisions, Versions, and the Lost (and Found) Finale
Bruckner compulsively revised his
symphonies, in some cases several times over, with the result that scholars now face a plethora of questions as to
his true compositional intentions.
According to musicologist Richard Taruskin, “In an effort to secure
easier access to performance, some of [Bruckner’s] pupils began making
simplified versions of his works and publishing them with their teacher’s
reluctant approval, thereby creating a nightmare of ‘versions’ through which
performers today have to chart their course.” For years, therefore, published
editions of Bruckner’s works were poor representations of the composer’s
intentions.
The case of the Ninth Symphony is particularly egregious, since it was widely
known that Bruckner died before completing the fourth movement,
but
few realized how far advanced the movement’s composition actually was. Many of
Bruckner’s sketches and score pages for the finale were stolen after his death; the bulk of this material was
quietly kept in private hands until well into the 20th century. As a result, the
work has almost universally been performed and
recorded as a three-movement work—with a long, dramatic and moderately-paced
first movement; an intense, demonic Scherzo; and the impassioned, at times tortured “Farewell to Life” of the Adagio. We now know these movements were to
be crowned by a majestic finale. Not until recently was it discovered through
assiduous scholarship that Bruckner not only sketched, but nearly
completed a full score of the Finale. One-third of the movement
was
completely orchestrated, with some pages even marked
as finished. The rest included
completed string sections, as well as notes and indications of Bruckner’s
intentions for the rest of the orchestration. As such, it has been possible for
the team of musicologists (Nicola Samale and Giuseppe Mazzuca, later joined by
John A. Phillips and Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs) to reconstruct this long-lost masterwork without resorting to
the What might he have intended?
questions often required to complete composers’ unfinished works.
A Closer
Listen
Bruckner’s symphony is pointedly cast in the key of D minor—the key of
Beethoven’s Ninth—and opens similarly: ominous, rumbling strings playing
tremolo, in this case on a unison D. The sustained notes in the basses and low
brass bring to mind the organ pedal tones Bruckner would have played
with
his feet. As the movement slowly builds to its initial grand statement (the
full orchestra playing in octaves) and
to a series of subsidiary themes, these long organ tones are never far away,
held long beyond their expected duration to create a sense of anticipation.
Resolution finally arrives with an enormous, intense recapitulation; one can’t
help but admire, with our modern ears, the sonic power of a massive brass
section, backed by strings and winds; before the advent of amplification, this
was as loud as music got. And few works since can match the magnitude (or
amplitude) of the coda. The opening of the second movement, a quick and lively
Scherzo, is another prime example of the influence of Bruckner’s knowledge of
the organ. The strings, quickly and delicately plucked against a sustained and
slowly evolving chord in the winds and brass, are reminiscent of an organist
playing a sustained chord while continually coloring it with different stops.
After this introduction, the movement jumpstarts with pulsating rhythms,
driving the movement into distant keys. The central Trio section, animated by
strings in counterpoint with wind melodies, is in the remote key of F-sharp
major (almost as distant from
the opening as functional harmony allows) before returning to the propulsive
opening material.
After the second movement savagely beats its rhythm into near-oblivion, we are
given the elegiac third. Unlike its model—the Adagio from Beethoven’s Ninth—this
movement is not a pastoral reprieve from more intense subjects; rather, it is
among the most heartrending works of Bruckner’s oeuvre, his own “Farewell to
Life.” It contains some of the most expressively dissonant music written to
that date. Fleeting, contrasting sections—bucolic and occasionally
ecclesiastical in tone—only seem to emphasize the searing return of the opening
material. Pushing the expressive potential of chromatic music to its limits,
the movement drives inexorably to an enormous climax, following which the coda
dissolves into an atmosphere of profound peace.
All of this leads us to the newly completed Finale. Bruckner, in failing health
and well aware that the work would be his last, wanted to infuse its conclusion
not only with what came before, but also with the intense spirituality that
filled his life. The Finale is in the composer’s customary sonata form, which
has three (rather than two) theme groups. An enigmatic introduction builds into
a massive statement of the Finale’s principal theme,
followed
by a second or subsidiary theme group that uses much of the same motivic
material quietly and in unison, as if completely hollowed out. All of this
music is dominated by a persistent dotted
rhythm that only breaks its hold as Bruckner introduces a glorious brass
chorale, a theme he prefigures in the Adagio.
This
leads to a quotation, in the flute, from his own Te Deum—an earlier work for chorus and orchestra composed and
dedicated “to God in gratitude for having safely brought me through so much
anguish in Vienna.” The further course of the movement reveals that the angst
that pervades the first three movements and much of the fourth
was
intended to be set in relief against a triumphant resolution, as the orchestra
joins together, after so much rumination, for Bruckner’s concluding
“Hallelujah,” a grand climax in—what else?—D major.
—Chris Cerrone