BRAHMS AND BRUCKNER
Notes on the composers and the pieces
Johannes Brahms
Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny)
Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 7
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Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E Major, WAC 107
“…half genius, half simpleton” —conductor Hans von Bülow
“[Bruckner’s] life doesn't tell anything about his work, and his work doesn't tell anything about his life...” —Bruckner biographer Karl Grebe
Austrian composer Anton Bruckner was a friendly but awkward man more comfortable in rural Austria than in metropolitan Vienna. He had an obsession with numbers and later with death and dead bodies (leading to his demands regarding his burial at the St. Florian monastery). He was a religious Catholic who never married, though he proposed in vain to several teenage girls. Many people conflated his personal awkwardness with what they presumed to be musical awkwardness. Not only was Bruckner’s music considered by some to be clumsy, repetitious, and crude, he was also involuntarily caught up in the clash between the progressive Wagnerians with whom he had became associated in the Viennese mind and the more conservative Brahmsians led by Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick. He was also one of the greatest composers who ever lived.
Josef Anton Bruckner (1824–1896) was born in Ansfelden, Austria (near Linz). His music teacher father was his first instructor, and by age ten the boy was helping him with his teaching duties. He also studied with his godfather, composer Johann Baptist Weiss. After his father died, young Bruckner became a choirboy at the St. Florian monastery, where he played the organ often and well enough for it to eventually become known as the “Bruckner Organ.”
After teaching in the Austrian towns of Windhaag and Kronstorf, Bruckner moved back to St. Florian in 1845 where he served as teacher and organist for ten years. In 1855, he became organist at the Linz Cathedral and began lessons in harmony and counterpoint with composer Simon Sechter at the Vienna Conservatory. Next came studies of orchestration with Linz cellist and conductor Otto Kitzler, who introduced him to the music of Richard Wagner. After Sechter died, Bruckner took over his duties at the Conservatory in 1868, remaining until 1875 when he accepted a post as lecturer at Vienna University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate of philosophy in 1891. Among Bruckner’s students were Hans Rott and Franz Schmidt. Gustav Mahler also attended some of his lectures.
Bruckner’s music can be heard as a combination of orchestrated organ music and cathedrals of sound. He is commonly linked with Wagner and Mahler, though both associations are overstated. He greatly admired Wagner, but aside from some stylistic similarities and gestures he was a very different composer.
Like Mahler, Bruckner wrote symphonies that are long, Romantic, and Austrian, but his Romanticism was of the Nineteenth Century with an element of religiosity, whereas Mahler’s looked forward to the Twentieth, and was mainly secular. Both wrote for a large orchestra, but Bruckner’s less adventurous scoring falls more within the traditional Romantic ensemble, though he did add four Wagner tubas to the brass section in his Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symphonies, triple winds in the Eighth and Ninth, cymbals and triangle in the Seventh and Eighth, and three harps in the Eighth.
Listing Bruckner’s symphonies is tricky because in several cases there are different versions and sometimes different editions of the same version. He is best known for Symphonies One to Nine, but he wrote two earlier, more classically constructed symphonies: No. 00 (“Study Symphony”) and No. 0 (“Die Nullte,” reflecting Bruckner’s opinion of the work). Symphonies One and Two are a little more powerful and weightier, and Three expands upon that style. The Fourth begins the series of symphonies with building-block construction, full textures, melodies that flow like hymns or long rivers, passages of heavenly beauty, vigorous rhythms often dominated by the fateful 2+3 “Bruckner rhythm,” and harmonies blending the traditional with dissonance, chromaticism, and unprepared modulations.
Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 (1883) was premiered in Leipzig under Arthur Nikisch in 1884. (Bruckner chose Leipzig over Vienna to avoid the disdain of the music critic Eduard Hanslick.) Its reception was mixed, but prospects improved after Hermann Levi led a well received performance in 1885, making the Seventh Bruckner’s best received symphony up to that point. In a way it launched his popularity. That same year A.J. Gutmann published the official First Edition of the score that Bruckner had produced under the influences of Nikisch and Bruckner students Franz Schalk and Ferdinand Loewe. It differs slightly from the original with a few changes in tempo and orchestration, revised expression marks, and the addition of a triangle and cymbal. (It is not clear if Bruckner wrote that cymbal crash for musical reasons or at the urging of friends, particularly Arthur Nikisch. Nowadays, it is treated as optional.)
In 1944 Robert Haas produced a version of No. 7 that removed the influence of Nikisch, Schalk, and Loewe and, he claimed, returned to Bruckner’s original. Haas used some material from the 1883 score, but even that one included changes from an earlier score so his “original” claim is debatable. The most prominent feature of Haas’s edition is his removal of percussion from the Adagio based on his (disputed) claim that Bruckner planned to omit the percussion but never got around to it.
Leopold Nowak’s 1954 edition of the Seventh is part of the New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition (2016) published by the International Bruckner Society. It retains most of the changes in the 1885 Gutmann edition, reprints Gutmann’s tempo modifications, and reinstalls the percussion.
Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs produced his “source-critical edition” of the Seventh for the Anton Bruckner Edition Wien in 2015. There is also a new edition by Yale professor Paul Hawkshaw sponsored by the Austrian National Library and International Bruckner Society with the patronage of the Vienna Philharmonic. The Nowak, especially, and Haas are the editions usually performed and recorded, but that could change if the Cohrs and/or Hawkshaw edition(s) catch on. The edition played tonight is the Nowak.
The Seventh is the most flowing, lyrical, and eloquent of Bruckner’s symphonies. It is even religious in places. The strings produce long, sweeping, often winding melodies with breadth and depth. Bruckner was not known for his woodwind scoring, but the Seventh has a variety of wind solos and colors, particularly for the clarinet. The brass are blended in their big utterances, exuding warmth and expressiveness in the horns, soprano-like sheen in the trumpets, eloquence in the Wagner tubas, and power in the low brass.
The symphony begins with a slowly rising arpeggio-like melody in the solo horn, cellos, and later violas that reaches for the heavens. The idea allegedly came to Bruckner in a dream where it was played by an angel. The second idea is a jaunty “traveling” line suggesting a journey that continues until it encounters a brass fanfare. After a slowdown, the horns and low brass darken the atmosphere, and the strings sound a hymn that slows the tempo and turns inward. The journey resumes until a brass pronouncement signals a return to the beginning and draws to a halt. A long melody follows under a string tremolo. The music pauses and heads for an ending that resembles a rising sun or a grand procession.
The Adagio begins with a prayerlike lament in the low strings and Wagner tubas. It is followed by a long uplifting passage, a broad climax, and a reappearance of the Wagner tubas followed by a flowing section in triple time. The Wagner tuba-low string passage returns later, then gives way to a down-to-earth melody followed by a lyrical section, again in triple time. The movement’s opening measures return and build to a climax that includes the above-noted triangle and cymbal crash. A heartbroken horn ensemble, probably related to Wagner’s imminent death haunting the composer at the time, concludes the movement--“in memory of the blessed, much beloved and immortal master,” Bruckner wrote. Also included is a reference from Bruckner’s Te Deum (“non cunfundar in aeternum”) that he was composing while writing the Seventh.
The rustic Scherzo is light-hearted and dancelike. A springy octave leap and theme in the trumpet sets off a section based on a dotted triple rhythm over motoric strings. (One description of that leap compared it to the crowing of a rooster!) The long, nostalgic, yearning trio is one of Bruckner’s finest.
The Finale begins with a light, lilting theme in the strings. A warm hymnlike passage in the strings and then a bold dotted-rhythm marching statement follow. Winds and horns intone a more solemn section, alternating with the lighter opening music and a march in the brass, leading to a fanfare-like grand conclusion ending with the original main theme.
—Roger Hecht
Roger Hecht plays trombone in the Mercury Orchestra. He is a former member of Bay Colony Brass (where he was also the Operations/Personnel Manager), the Syracuse Symphony, Lake George Opera, New Bedford Symphony, and Cape Ann Symphony, as well as trombonist and orchestra manager of Lowell House Opera, Commonwealth Opera, and MetroWest Opera. He is a regular reviewer for American Record Guide, contributed to Classical Music: Listener’s Companion, and has written articles on music for the Elgar Society Journal and Positive Feedback magazine. His fiction collection, The Audition and Other Stories, includes a novella about a trombonist preparing for and taking a major orchestra audition (English Hill Press, 2013).
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