BRUCKNER BICENTENNIAL BLOG / PART 1 OF 4
Sacred Music of Anton Bruckner, Part 1:
A Blog of Personal Reflections
Sacred Music of Anton Bruckner, Part 1:
A Blog of Personal Reflections
Introduction & Overview
by Donald Beagle
In 2018, BBC Music Magazine sent a survey to 151 of the world’s “most important” conductors asking them to list the greatest symphonies of all time. The total votes were then compiled to publish their composite list of the “20 Greatest Symphonies of All Time.”
No surprise that Beethoven took five spots on the list, including the top two. Brahms placed all four of his symphonies in the top 20, while Mahler snagged three spots. With eight slots left, however, some may be surprised that the only other composer to have two works ranked among the 20 was Anton Bruckner, whose Eighth Symphony placed #13, and Seventh Symphony placed 20th.
Had a similar survey been done in the early 1970’s, when I was a young music student perusing the vinyl record library at the California Institute of the Arts, I suspect the top 20 would have looked quite different. In many critical reviews, Bruckner and Mahler were still dismissively joined at the hip as misguided monumentalists. A few critics seemed intent on banishing both from the pantheon of classical music altogether. Through the advocacy of Leonard Bernstein and others, the conventional wisdom about Mahler was finally upended. Mahler’s belated entry to the standard repertoire happened fairly suddenly, like one of those dynamic outbursts in his own music. Bruckner’s ascension has happened more gradually, rather like one of his characteristic codas.
No surprise that Beethoven took five spots on the list, including the top two. Brahms placed all four of his symphonies in the top 20, while Mahler snagged three spots. With eight slots left, however, some may be surprised that the only other composer to have two works ranked among the 20 was Anton Bruckner, whose Eighth Symphony placed #13, and Seventh Symphony placed 20th.
Had a similar survey been done in the early 1970’s, when I was a young music student perusing the vinyl record library at the California Institute of the Arts, I suspect the top 20 would have looked quite different. In many critical reviews, Bruckner and Mahler were still dismissively joined at the hip as misguided monumentalists. A few critics seemed intent on banishing both from the pantheon of classical music altogether. Through the advocacy of Leonard Bernstein and others, the conventional wisdom about Mahler was finally upended. Mahler’s belated entry to the standard repertoire happened fairly suddenly, like one of those dynamic outbursts in his own music. Bruckner’s ascension has happened more gradually, rather like one of his characteristic codas.
But his absence from the canon had been problematical from the beginning,
dissenters notwithstanding. As one musicologist blogged: “Historically
he [Bruckner] is the missing link between the Beethoven tradition and both
Mahler and Sibelius, which may at first seem strange since Mahler and Sibelius
wrote very different symphonies, and indeed the two composers met once and had
a lively discussion in which they disagreed about what a symphony should be.”
Perhaps
this was not so surprising, in light of the fact that both Mahler and
Sibelius made pilgrimages to the elder composer. Mahler attended Bruckner's lectures on harmony at the Vienna Conservatory, did an arrangement of the Third Symphony for keyboard (four hands),
and years later, as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, conducted the
U.S, premier of the Sixth Symphony. (Late in his career, Mahler also reached an agreement with his own publisher to bring out-of-print Bruckner scores back into print). Sibelius also found his way to Vienna to attend
the premier performance of the newly-revised Third Symphony. He found a seat in
the audience as close to Bruckner as he could, and wrote to a friend back in
Finland that he regarded Bruckner as “the greatest living composer.” (We also
now know, from a recent archival discovery, that in a tavern following that
concert, the opinionated young Sibelius suffered a minor injury in an
altercation with a Brahms enthusiast!).
As accolades for Mahler's music grew from the 1960's through the 1970's, there seems to have been an effort by some Mahler enthusiasts (far more in the U.S. than in Europe) to disassociate the latter symphonist from the earlier composer (whom Mahler himself once described as "my forerunner"). As an advocate for both composers, I've always welcomed analytical studies that help delineate how Mahler took Bruckner's innovations and moved in new original and creative directions. But I find attempts to minimize or trivialize their underlying linkage in the late romantic symphonic tradition utterly unpersuasive.
The extent of Mahler's debt to Bruckner is ironically evidenced by an orchestral work whose quality has been overshadowed by controversy surrounding its origin: the Symfonisches Praeludium in C Minor. Was this a neglected late-career work by Bruckner, or a youthful work by Mahler? In the 1970's, Mahler scholar Paul Banks discovered an unattributed copy of the score in a private collection, noted elements of orchestration that seemed Mahleresque, and published an article in due course ("An Early Symphonic Prelude by Mahler?" in 19th Century Music 3/1979, p. 141ff). Banks well-deserved reputation persuaded the classical music community, and the score was republished, performed, and even recorded with "authorship" credited to Mahler.
But unknown to Banks, a far older autographed score had lain undiscovered in the archives of the Munich Philharmonic, bearing the cursive inscription "Rudolf Krzyzanowski cop. 1876" on the first page, and on the last page, in large letters, "von Anton Bruckner." Krzyzanowski had been Mahler's contemporary, and a pupil of Bruckner. In fact, he had assisted Mahler in his work on the 4-hand keyboard arrangement of Bruckner's Third Symphony. Upon the rediscovery and authentication of this archival evidence, Wolfgang Hiltl published a detailed analysis in 2004, and reached the conclusion that Bruckner was indeed the original composer of the Symfonisches Praeludium. The combination of archival and stylistic evidence has persuaded even the Mahler Foundation to state in an essay on its own website: "From stylistic comparison and analysis it seems to be clear that at least the entire musical substance is by Bruckner himself." Legitimate questions remain about whether Bruckner's original composition might have been re-orchestrated by another pupil who was influenced by Mahler (perhaps Krzyzanowski?), or even (conceivably) by Mahler himself as an exercise in re-orchestration.
YouTube does have one of the early recordings made in the aftermath of Bank's initial article, showing an album cover crediting Mahler, but with the YouTube video now captioned underneath: "--probably by Anton Bruckner."
Symfonisches Praeludium in C Minor
https://youtu.be/JiRdgFLEn8M
A solid case can now be made for Bruckner’s 20th century influence having gone well beyond Mahler and Sibelius, to include a surprisingly divergent range of accomplished composers. My focus will be on Bruckner’s choral works in these early posts. Later on I may (if academic schedules permit) return to further explore the symphonic works and their influence. But this is a layman’s appreciation, not music theory, so I’ll simply offer one small example to hint of that influence with minimal academic and technical commentary.
Here I’ll digress a
moment to note Bruckner’s influence with a layman’s description of a very brief
passage from Philip Glass’ celebrated Violin Concerto #1 as compared to an
equally brief passage from Bruckner’s Symphony #4.
Glass’ longtime collaboration with the Bruckner Orchester Linz,
and their Music Director Dennis Russell Davies (Julliard Ph.D. and Grammy Award
winner). is widely known. Perhaps less well known is that their
collaboration has grown from the mutual awareness that Bruckner’s “climactic
process” involved a transformation in melodic modal progressions in the romantic era
symphony that played some role in the development of (or at the very least anticipated) key elements of the modernist movement we think of as “minimalism.”
That transformation is more easily demonstrated than described.
So I recommend beginning with the opening notes of the Glass Violin Concerto #1.
Almost immediately, at the 12 sec mark, we hear a descending 3-note motif in the
lower-register strings (cello). That motif gives way to a series of typically-intricate
minimalistic repeating arpeggios. But then again at 54sec. mark, the 3-note
descending motif returns in the lower-register, but this time (I think) in the
brass. All this overlays a relative plateau of emotional tension. But then a
drumbeat begins at the 1min 25sec mark which begins our first sense of a
potential approaching crescendo, accentuated by a rising 4-chord sequence at
the 1min 37sec mark. The volume and emotional tension rise as the crescendo
approaches. At the 2min mark, the solo violin begins voicing that central 3-note
descending motif, but here immediately followed by the first appearance of a
corresponding ascending motif, which finally reveals and completes the main
theme’s full melodic line. This revelation serves as the culmination of the initial
climactic process. But Glass is not done with his 3-note motif; it reappears at
the 2min 37sec mark but using slightly modified intervals. By the 2min 46sec
mark the crescendo has fully lapsed, leaving the flute to reinstate the 3-note descending
motif in its original form, followed by its balancing rising refrain, thereby leaving the concerto to shift into a subsequent developmental phase.
Philip Glass: Violin Concerto #1 – 1st movement
My point now is not analysis, but to simply compare the role this 3-note
descending motif plays in the Glass concerto to the very similar role played by a
very similar 3-note motif in the final movement of Bruckner’s 4th Symphony. This YouTube video contains the full symphony, but my link
is cued to start at at 51min 39sec mark, just before the 4th movement begins.
We hear the corresponding 3-note descending motif only 4 seconds after the movement starts, at the 51min 43sec mark, in mid-register brass. We hear it again, with modified intervals, at 52min 58sec, and then with increasing frequency by
which time we realize that Bruckner is clearly beginning one of what musicologist
A.C. Howie refers to as his mountain-climbing crescendos. Where Glass crowns
his crescendo with the solo violin voicing the motif (apropos to a concerto),
followed by the first appearance of that motif’s counterbalancing refrain, Bruckner
has his 3-note descending motif thundered out full orchestra (apropos to a
symphony), but then inevitably also followed by the first appearance of its own
counter-balancing refrain.
As appreciation of Bruckner’s music has grown, the
image of his personality remains mired in a composite caricature drawn largely from
a handful of endlessly recycled anecdotes. While these anecdotes are doubtless
true, they often fail to acknowledge basic context: Bruckner’s career was a long
migration from impoverished rural roots to the music capital of Europe. Having finally
found his way to ultra-cosmopolitan
Vienna, he too often committed the unpardonable sin of being insufficiently
polished and urbane. Whatever the quirks and peculiarities of Bruckner’s outer
social interactions, his music reveals an inner creative persona that, to a
surprising degree, directly contradicts most of the personality traits implied
by those anecdotes. One goal of this blog is to highlight those contradictions,
and argue that the time is long past to shift focus away from a superficial
obsession with his obsessions. Tales of his awkwardness amid the social whirl
of Vienna have fully saturated the literature, yet have yielded essentially
nothing useful in helping us understand his unique originality and creativity
as a composer. I think we need to simply reach a point of tacit acceptance of his quasi-obsessive oddities, similar
to that which we have long accepted about Vincent van Gogh’s inner demons and severed
ear. Whatever his image as a social misfit, Bruckner's career ended crowned with triumphs: by middle age he had achieved the improbable leap from being an assistant elementary teacher in rural Windhaag (early 1840's) to a professorship at the Vienna Conservatory (1868). Following that, he then became a lecturer at the University of Vienna, where he also received an honorary doctorate of philosophy (1891).
We
can say this much with certainty: just as Mahler was more than a symphonist, whose
wonderful songs (and song cycles) only gradually
emerged from the long shadow cast by his symphonies, Bruckner was also a multidimensional
composer of symphonic, vocal and choral music. Yet his body of choral music remains underappreciated. I think the reason for that is that his sacred choral works contradict the convenient clichés and conventional wisdom that constrain full appreciation of his achievement. Contradiction #1: Bruckner became characterized as a sort of lowly acolyte of Richard Wagner. Yet Bruckner composed many superb choral works before his first exposure to Wagner (e.g., the Magnificat). And even in those few choral works that followed soon after (e.g., Mass #3 in F Minor), we hear precious little evidence of Wagnerian influence. To my ear, the only sacred choral works significantly influenced by Wagner are the Psalm 150, Trosterin Musik, and the Te Deum. Contradiction #2: when we move
from his symphonies to his thirty-plus motets, Bruckner the monumentalist suddenly
(and unexpectedly) becomes Bruckner the accomplished miniaturist. And there is yet another dimension. Between these
two extremes of 3- to 6-minute motet miniatures and monumental sixty-minute
symphonies, we find some of Bruckner’s most profound masterworks among his mid-length
settings of the liturgy, such as the Te
Deum and the three numbered settings of the Mass: #1 in D Minor, Mass #2 in E
Minor, and Mass #3 in F Minor. Assessing this “middle” aspect of Bruckner’s musical
achievement (for which there seems to be no real counterpart in Mahler’s
oeuvre) remains difficult, however, because there are good reasons to believe that
a few works, such as the Requiem, have
never been definitively interpreted, performed and recorded. For sake of convenience,
all the recordings referenced in this blog will link directly to YouTube music
videos. I won’t be attempting any survey of vinyl or CD recordings.
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