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Paul E. Robinson
When I was a young
music student growing
up in Toronto in the
1950s, the music of Anton Bruckner
was alien territory. The problem was
that it was rarely performed, and
everything about his music—the
melodies, the movements and the
symphonies—was too long.
Furthermore, the music seemed to
be continually stopping and starting.
Of course the real problem with
Bruckner was me; I was too young
and immature to appreciate it.
Enlightenment began with a
recording of the Fourth Symphony
by Steinberg and the Pittsburg
Symphony. I loved the horn fanfares
in the scherzo and the massive
sounds from the brass section. A
live performance on November 17,
1959, at Carnegie Hall of the Eighth
Symphony by Karajan and the
Vienna Philharmonic cemented my
UNDERSTANDING
BRUCKNER
appreciation. Karajan’s hypnotic conducting was
just what the music required. Right from the mysterious
opening bars, through the searing trumpet
calls, the otherworldly Adagio, the hair-raising
march opening the last movement, and right
through to its triumphant conclusion, I was under
Bruckner’s spell. In the final pages, Bruckner, a
master contrapuntalist, combines themes from all
four movements of the symphony in a magnificent
ments were in sacred choral music—above all the
Te Deum and the Mass in F minor—and in symphonic
music. Bruckner wrote 11 symphonies, but
he didn’t consider the unnumbered Symphony in F
minor and the Symphony No. 0 in D minor on the
same level as his later, numbered symphonies.
The remaining nine symphonies are all glorious
pieces but some of them exist in various editions
and versions. This is a minefield for conduc-
peroration. I felt as if I had lived a lifetime in tors trying to determine Bruckner’s real
the 85 minutes it took to perform this great
symphony.
Some detractors have dismissed Bruckner as a
country bumpkin, an Austrian peasant, a mere
church organist and much worse. It is true that
he spent much of his life in small, rural communities
near Linz, that for much of his career he
was a teacher and church organist, and that he
intentions and final thoughts. The problem was
that Bruckner was insecure about the value of his
work; bad reviews often drove him to months of
rewriting, and friends and acolytes could all too
easily persuade him to make ‘improvements.’ The
Bruckner Problem, as some scholars have called
it, involves sorting out what is really Bruckner
and what is not. You can read more about it in
was a devout Catholic who even kept a daily written
Deryck Cooke’s “The Bruckner Problem
record of his prayers. But it is also true that he
taught at the University of Vienna, attended the
premieres of all the works of Wagner’s maturity
in Bayreuth, and gave organ recitals at the Royal
Albert Hall and the Crystal Palace in London.
Bruckner may not have been a ‘man of the world’
but in his mature years he was widely recognized
as a fine and beloved teacher, an organist
renowned for his improvisational skills and an
important composer
For a major composer, his output was surprisingly
small and he wrote almost nothing of significance
for his own instrument. His great achieve-
Simplified”, first published by The Musical Times
in 1969 and also included in a compilation of
Cooke’s articles under the title Vindications
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
and Hans-Hubert Schönzeler’s Bruckner (New
York: Vienna House, 1978).
Bruckner’s music is profoundly expressive in
its slow movements, joyous in its scherzos and
magnificent in its climaxes. There is nothing
quite like it. And yet in hindsight it can be seen to
grow naturally from what came before. All the
qualities I have attributed to Bruckner, including
length of melodies and movements, can be found
in embryonic form in Schubert’s “Great”
Symphony No. 9 in C major. Some of Franz
Lachner’s later symphonies and
Mendelssohn’s “Lobgesang” and
“Reformation” symphonies could also be
described as Brucknerian. The point is that
Bruckner grew out of the mainstream of
German Romantic music to become one of
its greatest symphonic exponents.
Bruckner was a product of his musical
training and the culture in which he lived.
But his profound Catholic faith also found
expression in his music. This is not only true
of the liturgical works but also of his symphonies.
Does this mean that one must be a
Catholic to appreciate his music? In his BBC
booklet Bruckner and the Symphony Robert
Simpson gave a persuasive answer to this
question: the religious elements and the
characteristically Austrian tone in much of
Bruckner’s music have sometimes been
quoted as barriers to his acceptance by non-
Catholics and foreigners. This is false counsel;
one need not be Austrian or Catholic (or
even religious) to find one’s imagination
stirred by the vast power and sweep of
Bruckner’s greatest music. Majesty is a quality
eminently recognizable in itself.
BRUCKNER IN CANADA
Yannick Nézet-Séguin has become our
Bruckner man in Montreal and is intent on
recording all the symphonies with the
Orchestre Métropolitain. Released so far
are the Seventh and Ninth symphonies on ATMA.
Meanwhile with the Toronto Symphony, Peter
Oundjian has entered the Bruckner sweepstakes
with the Symphony No. 4 on the orchestra’s own
label, TSO Live. Although Kent Nagano is a recognized
Brucknerian in Europe, he has yet to bring
this to Canadian audiences.
BRUCKNER FOR THE AGES
There have been many fine Bruckner recordings
made over the years: Furtwängler, Karajan, Wand,
Jochum, Böhm and Giulini come to mind. But there
are several recordings that would provide the neophyte
with a formidable introduction. The first is a
2-DVD set issued just last year by Deutsche
Grammophon. It contains Symphonies 8 and 9 and
the Te Deum conducted by Karajan in live performances
with the Vienna Philharmonic from the late
1970s. Each of the performances is spellbinding
from beginning to end but the Eighth is in a special
category altogether. It was given in St. Florian, the
church near Linz where Bruckner lived and worked
for many years.The composer is buried in the crypt
beneath the great organ there.
The other recordings are part of a 4-DVD set by
Decca under the title Sir Georg Solti: the Maestro.
Solti and the Chicago Symphony at the very peak of
their relationship in 1978-79, giving stunning performances
of the Sixth and Seventh symphonies,
the latter while on tour at the Royal Albert Hall. ■
12 Juin 2009 June