CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 PM

“a true maestro, a powerful musician”—New York Times

Conductor Bernard Haitink’s performances of Bruckner symphonies are unparalleled occasions. “Spacious, visionary, powerfully executed … The instrumental detail was proportioned with masterly perception,” wrote London’s Daily Telegraph of a March 2009 performance by this legendary conductor. This concert is devoted to Bruckner’s last completed symphony, the monumental, moving, and visceral Eighth.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink, Principal Conductor

BRUCKNER Symphony No. 8

Program Notes:

ANTON BRUCKNER (1824–1896)
Symphony No. 8 in C Minor

When Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony received a tremendous ovation at its Leipzig premiere in 1884, it looked as if the tide had turned at last. Bruckner, now 60, was enjoying his first taste of success after years of neglect, rejection—the Vienna Philharmonic refused to play his first three symphonies—and repeated failure. With this work, Bruckner found an important new champion in conductor Hermann Levi, who led the Munich premiere a few months later to great acclaim. Even Vienna, Bruckner’s normally unsympathetic hometown, was won over by the new symphony: The composer was called to the stage four or five times after each movement. Success followed success as the symphony was performed in major music centers over the next several months. (The American premiere was given in Chicago by Theodore Thomas and his orchestra on July 29, 1886, at the Columbian Exposition Building.)

In October 1887—after more than three years of work—Bruckner sent a new C-minor symphony to Hermann Levi, certain that he would agree that this was even more impressive than the Seventh Symphony and that he would be honored to conduct the first performance. But Levi did not know what to make of a work so vast and daring, and he sent word through Bruckner’s student Josef Schalk that it needed to be rewritten. Bruckner was devastated—Levi’s rejection threw him completely off balance.

The joys and successes of the previous three years were quickly forgotten, and the composer plunged into a serious depression. Bruckner had known crippling insecurity throughout his life, but he was now consumed by a new wave of doubt: Unable to continue work on the projected symphony that would posthumously become his ninth, he began to rip apart the C-minor symphony instead, and he also revamped several earlier works, including his first three symphonies. It can be argued that much of Bruckner’s revision of his Eighth Symphony made for a better piece of music, but there is no telling how deeply he suffered in the process. Furthermore, if he had left the Eighth alone, he might have finished the Ninth.

Serious renovation of the Eighth Symphony began in March 1889, starting with the Adagio, and continued for the rest of the year. The comments Bruckner added to the last page of the score tell the tale: “First movement finally revised from November 1889 to January 1890. Last note written on January 29.” And then, “Vienna, February 10, 1890, entirely finished.” And still again, “March 10, entirely finished.” And even though the work actually was “entirely finished” at that point, Bruckner probably still didn’t really believe it.

The first performance was to take place in Mannheim, under the baton of Felix Weingartner, who began rehearsals in March 1891. Bruckner was apprehensive. “How does it sound?” he wrote from Vienna. “I do recommend to you to shorten the finale severely as is indicated. It would be much too long and is valid only for later times and for a circle of friends and connoisseurs.” Weingartner got cold feet, and the premiere was canceled. The Eighth Symphony was finally performed for the first time in Vienna in December 1892, under Hans Richter. The critic Eduard Hanslick, who seldom had a good thing to say about Bruckner, wrote a predictable review, full of phrases like “unrelieved gloom,” but he also reported “tumultuous acclamations, waving handkerchiefs, innumerous calls, laurel wreaths, and so forth. No doubt whatever, for Bruckner the concert was a triumph.”

The Viennese had never known what to make of Anton Bruckner, with his country manners, severe Prussian haircut, and perilously baggy suits. (Bruckner favored wide pant legs because they made it easier to reach the organ pedals.) Beethoven, once mistakenly arrested as a vagrant, had already proved how little appearance has to do with musical greatness. But Bruckner was a more serious misfit in Viennese society. He lacked the necessary skill for chitchat, and when he spoke he often said the wrong thing. Music was his real language. When, at 67, he was named a doctor of philosophy at the University of Vienna, he told the rector magnificus: “I cannot find the words to thank you as I would wish, but if there were an organ here, I could tell you.” When Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony was played in Vienna, the same people who had often snickered behind his back now listened, as he spoke to them with an almost inhuman eloquence, and this time they did not laugh.

Bruckner’s Eighth is the largest of his completed symphonies. It begins quietly, in the same rhythm that opens Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, although Beethoven would never have dreamed of starting so far from the symphony’s announced key of C minor, nor would he have made the journey last so long. Getting used to the pace of a Bruckner symphony was hard even in leisurely 19th-century Vienna, where stopping for afternoon coffee sometimes actually took all afternoon. There are first movements by Beethoven as long as this one, but they are so full of energy and so tightly packed with events that they pass like lightning. Bruckner writes music that takes its time and demands that we submit ours to it. He would not understand the person who, finding himself in a great Gothic cathedral, buys a postcard rather than take the 30-minute tour.

The first movement of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony suggests the architecture of sonata form—three big themes are exhibited, developed in a masterful way, and returned later somehow fresher for the experience. At the beginning, Bruckner approaches C minor from the odd perspective of B-flat minor and then settles into a series of holding patterns from which C minor is visible but not yet accessible. There is a powerful stillness at the center of Bruckner’s music, something for which Beethoven and even Wagner have not prepared us. The development section, for example, begins from a point of almost total silence and inertia, and Bruckner generates momentum slowly. A number of big, brassy climaxes merely collapse, as if from a loss of nerve. After the last flare of chords, the music stops, leaving a few desolate reminders of previous themes and the repeated beat of the timpani. Bruckner called this the Totenuhr, the clock in a room where someone is dying—a deathwatch.

Bruckner did not explain why he placed the powerful, driven Scherzo next, contrary to custom, and one cannot guess his plan until he lays out the extraordinary expanse of an adagio just before the finale. The Scherzo, in the meantime, is brilliant dance music of the most serious kind, achieved by ingenious repetition and a bold use of color. The trio, in contrast, is lyrical, tender, reflective, and delicately scored (Bruckner uses the harp here and in the following Adagio for the only time in his career).

The Viennese who sat spellbound by this great, noble Adagio surely never looked at Bruckner the same way again. They must have been shocked that this undistinguished man, utterly at a loss in the world they so stylishly inhabited, understood things which cannot be put into words.

The Adagio, the longest slow movement in symphonic music at the time, is one of Bruckner’s most remarkable creations, and it strides confidently into a world where music rarely ventures. Bruckner had little to say about this eloquent and expressive music, having said it all in the notes on the page, but he did admit to occasional echoes of the Siegfried leitmotif from Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung.

Bruckner shakes us firmly by the shoulders at the start of the finale, and then launches a fierce and powerful theme for the brass. From there the finale moves steadily, but not without difficulty, toward the moment when C major slowly emerges. A number of episodes and themes intervene, including a warmly lyrical melody in the strings and an eloquent chorale tune. The music frequently comes to a total stop, not from inertia, but to gather strength. As Bruckner himself once told conductor Artur Nikisch: “I must take breath when I am about to say something of importance.” Finally the horns, remembering the opening notes of the Scherzo, announce the imminent arrival of C major. That moment is crowned by the simultaneous reappearance of the main themes of all four movements, which blend together, united at last by the notes of the C-major scale.

—Phillip Huscher

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Adapted from comments written for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink, Principal Conductor
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s distinguished 118-year history began in 1891 when Theodore Thomas, then the leading conductor in America and a recognized music pioneer, was invited by Charles Norman Fay to establish a symphony orchestra in Chicago. Thomas served as music director for 13 years until his death in 1905—just three weeks after the dedication of Orchestra Hall, the Chicago Orchestra’s permanent home.

Thomas’s successor was Frederick Stock, who began his career in the viola section in 1895 and became assistant conductor four years later. His tenure at the Orchestra’s helm lasted 37 years, from 1905 to 1942. Three distinguished conductors headed the Orchestra during the following decade: Désiré Defauw was music director from 1943 to 1947; Artur Rodzinski assumed the post in 1947–1948; and Rafael Kubelík led the Orchestra for three seasons from 1950 to 1953.

The next 10 years belonged to Fritz Reiner, whose recordings with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are still considered performance hallmarks. For the five seasons from 1963 to 1968, Jean Martinon held the position of music director.

Sir Georg Solti, the Orchestra’s eighth music director, served from 1969 until 1991. He held the title of music director laureate and returned to conduct the Orchestra for several weeks each season until his death in September 1997.

In January 1989, the CSO began a new collaboration with Daniel Barenboim as he was named music director designate. Mr. Barenboim assumed leadership as the Orchestra’s ninth music director in September 1991, a position he held until June 2006.

On May 5, 2008, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association announced the appointment of Riccardo Muti as its tenth Music Director. Muti became Music Director Designate in January 2009, and he begins a five-year contract as Music Director in September 2010.

Two of the world’s most celebrated conductors assumed titled positions with the Chicago Symphony beginning with the 2006–2007 season. Eminent Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink became the Orchestra’s new principal conductor, and French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez—the CSO’s Helen Regenstein Principal Guest Conductor since 1995—became the Orchestra’s Conductor Emeritus.