BRUCKNERSymphony No. 7Queensland Symphony Orchestra • Tang

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ANTON BRUCKNER 1824-1896

Symphony No. 7 in E major (1881-83)(Edition: Haas)

1 I. Allegro moderato 19’282 II. Adagio. Sehr feierlich und sehr langsam 21’123 III. Scherzo. Sehr schnell 8’484 IV. Finale. Bewegt, doch nicht schnell 11’02

Queensland Symphony OrchestraMuhai Tang conductor

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I.They want me to write in a different way. I could, but I must not. Out of thousands, Godgave talent to me...One day I shall have to give an account of myself. How could theFather in Heaven judge me if I follow others and not him?

Anton Bruckneras quoted by August Göllerich

Anton Bruckner was a mass of contradictions. Perhaps this, above all other reasons, explains whyappreciation of his music was slow to come, and Bruckner was made to join the abundant ranks ofhistory’s misunderstood composers. Possessed of a striking imagination, he wrote one of the 19th century’s most important sets of symphonies – the first important symphonic achievement afterBeethoven, it has been claimed. He was a diligent and careful musician, who studied the craft ofcomposition all his life, not ready to produce his Symphony No. 1 until the age of 42. By that timehe had amassed a formidable store of knowledge and, in having already composed orchestralmasses, the experience of using it. Yet Bruckner’s personality was strangely matched with hissophisticated musicianship. Though he had relocated to the cosmopolitan culture of Vienna by thetime he wrote most of the symphonies, Bruckner retained all his provincial mannerisms – the UpperAustrian dialect, the rural dress habits, the ingenuous attitudes towards religion and authority. Hisinelegant ‘bumpkin’ ways – the source of so many endearing anecdotes – coloured the way hismusic was received, and consequently the newness of symphonic form, bold chromaticity ofharmonic language and profundity of expression were misunderstood as clumsy idiosyncrasies of an unoriginal and unaware mind. The dichotomy between man and artist was too contrasting and,ultimately, irreconcilable for so many listeners and critics of his day. But now that the music can bereceived without the accompaniment of entertaining but finally malevolent tales about the man,Bruckner’s music stands a chance of assessment within its historical and musical context – but acontext that must not, as it turns out, ignore the character of the man.

This essay takes Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 as the point of departure for discussing the impulsesbehind the music – the twin influences of Beethoven and Wagner, the obsessive-compulsivedisorder, the persistent self-doubt and the constant search for external approval. Symphony No. 7 is special within Bruckner’s output, for it was the work to bring him his long-sought public acclaim,occurring only in 1884 when he was sixty. Many conductors have since given this work a special

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place in their careers; Herbert von Karajan made no fewer than three recordings of Bruckner’sSymphony No. 7, the third being in fact his final recording. Maestro Muhai Tang, a Brucknerianwhose association with the music dates back to his contact with Karajan and the Berlin PhilharmonicOrchestra, has chosen this symphony to celebrate his long-standing and successful partnership withthe Queensland Symphony Orchestra.

II.Perhaps it was a vision of how Beethoven’s Ninth befriends Wagner’s Valkyries andfinishes up trampled under their hooves.

Eduard Hanslick, reviewing the premiere of Bruckner’s Third Symphony in 1877

Symphony No. 7 contains Bruckner’s great tribute to Richard Wagner, a man Bruckner always called‘Master’; the monumental Adagio is a memorial to the older composer, news of whose death on 13 February 1883 reached Bruckner as he was at work on this composition. It was twenty years tothe day since Bruckner’s first contact with an opera by Wagner.

Wagner’s significance to Bruckner has been both overstated by his detractors and understated by hischampions. The former dismiss his music as mindless imitation – ersatz Wagnerian music drama withthe words removed; the latter take pains to point out the bits of ‘Wagnerian’ instrumentation andharmony that predate his acquaintance with Wagner’s music, arguing that Bruckner’s music wouldhave evolved in the same direction nonetheless. Given all this, it is crucial to verify what Wagnerian,and indeed other, influences actually exist in his music.

Bruckner first heard a complete work of Wagner’s on 13 February 1863. This was Tannhäuser, in aperformance at Linz where Bruckner was then living and working as a cathedral organist. Thediscovery of Wagner was a cataclysmic event. Bruckner later said he felt like a watchdog that hadsnapped off its chain, now free to explore new territory. His next major composition was the 1864Mass in D Minor, a sudden and brilliant emergence of the characteristic mature composer. While stillmodelled on the symphonic masses of Haydn and Beethoven (the Missa Solemnis comes to mind),this mass deploys enharmonic key relationships and an advanced chromaticism new to Bruckner. Thesudden appearance of a virtually fully-formed composer, but at the age of forty, is curious – how

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can he have grasped and disciplined for his own purposes the Wagnerian language so quickly? The biographer Robert Simpson has put forward an interesting theory: Bruckner was, after all, anorganist famous for his improvisations. It has to be remarked that Bruckner left no compositions ofnote for his own instrument, despite an obvious mastery of extemporisation that gained him hisposition as cathedral organist at Linz. It is possible that Bruckner had evolved a daring style in hisimprovisations, but did not risk notating it. When asked to comment on the bold newness of theMass, he simply said, “I didn’t dare before.” Perhaps what was new in the Mass was not so muchthe language itself, but the courage to express it.

Nevertheless, Bruckner’s adulation of Wagner was real. His relationship with Wagner himself – more master-disciple than friendship – began when he attended the premiere of Tristan und Isoldein Munich in May 1865. There he made Wagner’s acquaintance, and in fact had the opportunity tospend a greater amount of time with him because the Tristan premiere was postponed for twoweeks owing to the ill health of Malvina Schnorr, the first Isolde. But Bruckner was too timid toshow Wagner any of his compositions, and it wasn’t until he had completed the Second Symphonyand nearly finished the Third that he journeyed to Bayreuth in September 1873 with the intention of dedicating one of them to Wagner. Wagner accepted the incomplete Third; not coincidentally,therefore, the completed symphony contains direct quotations from Tristan und Isolde and DieWalküre – quotations that were simply fodder for the Viennese Classicist critic Eduard Hanslick,champion of Brahms and hater of Wagner, who wrote the vituperative review quoted above.Bruckner was to excise the Wagner quotations in one of his several revisions of this embattledsymphony, but immediately following that Bayreuth trip of 1873 Bruckner joined the AkademischerRichard Wagner-Verein and declared his support for the ‘Master’.

The hero-worship notwithstanding, Bruckner was already a developed composer and therefore knew to process and assimilate the raw substance of Wagner’s music in making his own. Hence in the final analysis it is not easy to define exactly ‘the Wagnerian influence’ present. Bruckner took from Wagner his harmonic language but virtually none of the philosophy. The notion ofGesamtkunstwerk – the total art-work, integrating words, music and spectacle – is nowhere to be found. Bruckner wrote not a single opera or music drama, and in fact stories abound aboutBruckner being oblivious to the words in Wagner’s operas – his score of Tristan being a copy without

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the text, or his bewilderment at the end of Die Walküre, wondering why Brunhilde was beingburned. But Bruckner found useful Wagner’s tonal idiom and melodic contours as well as the large-scale orchestra – although even here it is essential to point out what Bruckner did not adopt.Instruments like the cor anglais, piccolo, bass clarinet and double bassoon, so essential to the subtleshading of Wagner’s music, show up in none of Bruckner’s symphonies. Even some conventionalinstruments like the harp, cymbals and timpani show up sparingly – the harp once only, in thescherzo of the Eighth Symphony, and percussion in just the slow movements of the Eighth and –with questionable authenticity – the Seventh. The notable exception is Bruckner’s use of the‘Wagner tuba’ from the Seventh Symphony onwards, that instrumental being one designed byWagner and used in the Ring cycle after encountering the new horns designed by Adolph Sax.

Whether he knew it or not, Hanslick’s mention of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is quite significant. If from Wagner came the immense scale and advanced harmony, then from Beethoven’s NinthBruckner took over what Deryck Cooke calls the ‘metaphysical challenge’. The Ninth Symphony ofBeethoven was transcendental – in form, style and content it was a symphony that attempted thingstried by no symphony before, and consequently threw down a challenge to all who would composesymphonies. Subsequent composers like Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms and Dvořák shied awayfrom the challenge, while a few, like Berlioz, posed one of another kind. Wagner and Bruckner werethe first to respond resolutely to this metaphysical challenge, and Bruckner the one to do so in itsoriginal symphonic genre. Wagner seized on Beethoven’s use of the verbal in a symphony, declaringit the irrevocable final step of music towards the union of artistic media: “The last symphony ofBeethoven is the redemption of Music from out of her own peculiar element into the realm ofuniversal art. It is the human evangel of the art of the future. Beyond it no forward step is possible;for upon it the perfect artwork of the future alone can follow, the universal drama to whichBeethoven has forged us the key.”

Bruckner, whose discovery of Beethoven’s Ninth in 1866 postdated his acquaintance with Wagner’smusic, achieved the same but within the genre of the symphony itself. His vast, unorthodox forms –so often dismissed as shapeless, awkward and repetitive – are no less than the engenderment of thissame ‘universal drama’ by the very transcendence of received form. Bruckner’s conception ofsymphonic structure is wholly related to another legacy of his rural upbringing, his Austrian Catholicpeasant faith. It is not the organic and humanistic evolution of the basic music towards some goal

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or higher state, that is at the heart of conventional sonata form. The fact that it lacks, on the whole,thematic development, motivic manipulation and a sense of advancement is precisely the point.Bruckner’s form is majestically static, the huge slabs of music fully formed from the beginning andthe themes more unfurled then developed. There is no conflict, no doubt. The components ofsymphonic form for Bruckner are simply there as statements, not questions – the icons of a resoluteman, not the struggle and search of humanity wondering about the will of God. In Deryck Cooke’swords, “Experiencing Bruckner’s symphonies is more like walking round a cathedral, and taking inevery aspect of it, than like setting out on a journey to some hoped-for goal.”

But to simply say that the Bruckner symphony is a product of religious faith is an oversimplification.Some of the characteristics of his symphonies should also be viewed in the context of his complexcharacter, in particular his neurological condition. It appears that Bruckner was plagued by a kind ofobsessive-compulsive disorder. The subject of his obsessions were many and varied. The mostobvious was his numeromania, which caused him to ceaselessly count objects around him – hewould count cathedral gables, statues in a park, and kept a diary of the number of dances he hadwith girls at parties; a friend of Bruckner’s found she could never wear a certain dress around himbecause he would count the petals on the flowers of the print. Musically this numeromaniamanifested itself in his numbering of bars and phrase lengths in his manuscripts. Bruckner was alsoobsessed by the idea of marriage – his innumerable crushes on young girls were a recurring featureof his whole adult life, from the aborted affair with the 16-year old Antonie Werner in 1850 to thechamber maid Ida Buhz in 1895. More bizarre were his obsessions with corpses and far-off lands –he hastened to the mortuary after a town fire to view the charred bodies; he requested officialpermission to view the body of Emperor Maximillian after the assassination, and was extremelyeager to view the bodies of Beethoven and Schubert as they were being exhumed for reinternment.Bruckner was obsessed with Mexico and the North Pole, places which he never visited, but to which,in moments of depression, he would express a desperate desire to flee. Significantly, Bruckner wasalso obsessed with doubt in his own ability, and this doubt showed up in his constant taking offormal scholastic examinations and – probably the most important manifestation for those interestedin his music – his frequent revisions of his symphonies. But Bruckner’s obsessive-compulsive disordermay in fact explain even something of the form of his symphonies; it is tempting to hear theinsistent, unrelenting repetition of phrases and motives in a Bruckner climax as an obsessiveness,assuaged only by the explosiveness of the climax itself. Particularly at the ends of movement

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sections, the unyielding reiteration of a single motif over periods of up to 60 bars is inescapably thework of an obsessive mind. With one exception, these musical manifestations of his neurologicalcondition, as well as the Wagner and Beethoven influences, show up strikingly in the SeventhSymphony. The exception is that the symphony underwent virtually no revision, and this wasbecause it was received right away by public and critic alike with acclaim – the first Brucknersymphony to be so treated.

III.Bruckner is the greatest living peril, a type of tonal anti-Christ. The violent nature of theman is not written in his face, for his expression indicates at most the small soul of aneveryday Kapellmeister. Yet he composes nothing but high treason, revolution and murder.His work is absolutely devoid of art or reason... His music has the fragrance of heavenlyroses, but is poisoned with the sulphurs of hell.

A Viennese critic, reviewing the 1885 premiere of the String Quartet

The premiere of the Seventh Symphony on 30 December 1884 unlocked doors in Bruckner’s path.Significantly the performance took place not in Vienna but in Leipzig where Bruckner, then 60 yearsold, received an ovation lasting a quarter-hour. A Leipzig critic wrote, “His homely, honestcountenance beamed with a warm inner happiness such as can appear only on the face of one whois too good-hearted to give way to bitterness even under the weight of crushing circumstances.”And the conductor of the performance, Arthur Nikisch, said afterwards, “Since Beethoven there hasbeen nothing that could even approach it. From this moment I regard it as my duty to work for therecognition of Bruckner.” Within a year the symphony was heard in Dresden, Frankfurt, Utrecht,New York and The Hague. But not in Vienna – though the Vienna Philharmonic was enthusiasticabout wanting to play it, Bruckner implored them not to, afraid that the Vienna press, including ofcourse Eduard Hanslick, would set him back. And Bruckner was right – when it was eventuallyplayed in Vienna, it was one year later, in March 1886 under Hans Richter; Hanslick called the work“unnatural, bombastic, sickly and decadent” while the critic and official Brahms biographer MaxKalbeck said, “It comes from the Nibelungen and goes straight to the devil.” On the other handJohann Strauss the Younger, who was the dominant popular composer at the time, was whollycomplimentary. He sent Bruckner a heartfelt telegram saying simply: “I am deeply moved. It was oneof the strongest impressions of my life.” Not long before, Bruckner had indirectly paid Strauss a

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curious compliment in criticising Brahms; he claimed he preferred a Strauss waltz to a Brahmssymphony. It was to be expected – Brahms himself had called the Bruckner works “Symphonic boa-constrictors, a swindle that will be forgotten in a few years.”

Bruckner had begun the Seventh Symphony on 21 September 1881 (he had completed the SixthSymphony only on September 3) and finished the work two years later, on 5 September 1883. Themajor event in the period affecting the composition was the death of Wagner on 13 February 1883.Apparently Bruckner was at work on the second movement, the Adagio, when he heard the news,and the closing pages of the movement are purposefully written as “funeral music for the Master”.According to a letter he wrote to the conductor Felix Mottl, Bruckner actually had a premonition ofthe event, “and at that moment the C-sharp minor theme of the Adagio [the very opening theme ofthe movement] came to me.” Not coincidentally this C-sharp minor theme is played on a quartet ofWagner tubas, the very first time Bruckner employed this instrument. Perhaps also not coincidentally,the long-breathed melody at the very beginning of the entire work contains a cadence that closelyresembles the cadence of the Valhalla motif from Wagner’s Ring cycle – the Valhalla motif being thefirst music given to a quartet of Wagner tubas in Das Rheingold. And when the symphony waspublished, the dedicatee was King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner’s longstanding patron who madeBayreuth a reality. Clearly, the Seventh Symphony functions as a tribute to Wagner on more thanone level.

As a result of its immediate success, the Seventh Symphony escaped the obsessive revisions to whichthe other symphonies were subjected. Nevertheless there is one moment in the Adagio which hascaused consternation amongst Bruckner enthusiasts: whether the percussion instruments (cymbal,timpani and triangle) at the climax of the movement were intended by Bruckner or were yet anotherinterpolation by his well-meaning associates.

Apparently the idea was not Bruckner’s, but came from Joseph Schalk, an ardent pupil of Bruckner’swho felt that the composer, so often fraught with self-doubt, needed the ideas of others.Nonetheless Bruckner often sanctioned the ideas that originated with his associates. The autographmanuscript has both the percussion parts and the words ‘gilt nicht’ (not valid) on it, and it isdisputed as to whose handwriting any of it is – hence Bruckner’s true thoughts on this areunknown. In the performance on this disc the percussion instruments are employed; it is interesting,

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in the knowledge of this dispute, to note Hugo Wolf’s fierce defence of Bruckner against theHanslicks of Vienna. He said, “One cymbal crash by Bruckner is worth the four symphonies ofBrahms with the serenades thrown in.”

Probably the most obvious example in the symphony of the reiterative Brucknerian motif occurs inthe long crescendo passage leading up to this climax with the cymbal crash. A cell consisting ofascending notes is obsessively repeated over and over, ingeniously saved from tedium by daringunderlying harmony. Superimposed on this passage is a motif quoted directly from Bruckner’s ownTe Deum, originally set to the words ‘Non confundar in aeternum’ (Let me never be confounded) – a final prayer for the departed Wagner, perhaps.

The Seventh Symphony otherwise exhibits a general structure much like Bruckner’s othersymphonies, one modelled on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. The enormous first movement,beginning imperceptibly over string tremolandi like the emergence of a world ex nihilo, is a loosesonata form with three theme groups. The second movement is based on two theme groups inalternation, the second theme in F-sharp major bearing a striking resemblance to the correspondingtheme in the Adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth. The hurtling third movement, the symphony’s briefest, isa scherzo permeated by obsessive dotted rhythms, with a contrasting trio section of a soaring, lyriccharacter. The grand, rather festive finale is, once again, a loose sonata structure but this timecomprising four groups of material. The first is in fact a theme that is obviously related to the veryopening themes of the symphony, and in the closing passages of the finale both themes are unitedin a characteristically Brucknerian blazing climax.

IV.“I am completely at sea in the Eighth Symphony...” Hermann Levi

“I ought to be ashamed of myself – at least on this occasion – about the Eighth. What anass! It is certainly beginning to look different...”

Bruckner, informing Levi that a revision of the Eighth was underway

The success of the Seventh Symphony was not to be repeated. In 1887 Bruckner completed hisEighth Symphony and immediately wrote to Hermann Levi, his ‘artistic father’ as Bruckner calledhim, saying “Hallelujah! At long last the Eighth is finished and my artistic father must be the first to

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know about it...may it find grace!” But grace it did not find. Levi was confounded by the Eighth,Bruckner’s longest and most unrelentingly dark symphony. Bruckner was utterly stricken by therejection of this work, and entered a period of self-doubt. He embarked on a campaign of revisionthat was so intense that it preoccupied him for years, even sparking off drastic revisions of the First,Second and Third Symphonies – all this prevented his finishing the Ninth. He was still at work onthat symphony the morning he died, 11 October 1896.

© 1997 Lyle Chan

Recording Producer Hans May

Recording Engineers Gary Yule & Peter McMurray

Editor Colin Cornish

Recorded in concert 22 and 23 November 1996 in the Concert Hall of the Queensland Performing

Arts Complex. Thanks to Jim Atkins and Allan MacLean for production assistance.

ABC Classics Robert Patterson, Martin Buzacott, Natalie Shea, Hilary Shrubb, Claudia Crosariol

� 1998 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. � 2010 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Universal Music Group, under exclusive licence. Made in Australia. All rights of the owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending, diffusion, public performance or broadcast of this record without the authority of the copyright owner is prohibited.

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