On Tue, 14 Nov 2017 12:25:25 -0800 (PST), MickeyBoy
Post by MickeyBoyH. C. Robbins Landon agrees with us.
(originally posted by me here 2/16/08)
he Baffling Case of Anton Bruckner
by H. Robbins Landon
From High Fidelity (mid 1960s)
A couple of years ago, Vienna's famous concert organization, the
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, sent out to its subscribers a
questionnaire asking them what kind of music they wanted to hear,
which composers, which works. Of the 4,000 persons queried, only 1,086
replied; on the whole, however, their preferences may be taken as
representative of those of the average conservative concertgoer in
Vienna. The answers were tabulated in two ways: first, by composer;
then by specific works. As anyone familiar with postwar Vienna might
surmise, Anton Bruckner came out on top, by a comfortable margin:
Bruckner, 337; Mozart, 277; Franz Schmidt, 270; Beethoven, 257; Haydn,
244; Richard Strauss, 244-and so on down to Schoenberg (77), Webern
(71), and Prokofiev (66). As for particular works, Bruckner's Eighth
Symphony won at 377 (Mozart's Jupiter got only 100 votes).
For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon of Bruckner in Austria, it
should be explained that his popularity there has been rising steadily
ever since the First World War, and most sharply since the sensational
revelations of the early Thirties, when it was shown that the
published scores of Bruckner's famous symphonies had been "improved"
by well-meaning disciples. It is not always clear why Bruckner allowed
his original versions to be altered by conductors; but in at least one
case, the unfinished and towering Ninth Symphony, the retouchings by
Franz Schalk and Ferdinand Lowe were flagrant . falsifications of the
master's intentions; and there was no question that the
Originalfassung-first played in l932-of the Ninth was more powerful in
addition to being more authentic. As score after score appeared in the
"original version," not only was the musicological sensation among
scholars heightened but audiences in Austria and Germany had a chance
to reconsider Bruckner. Both the professional critics and the general
public came to wholehearted agreement that the original versions,
though longer, were more convincing than the "edited" scores. Bruno
Walter, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Hans Weisbach, Sigmund von Hausegger
switched from the "old" to the "new" and authentic versions. (Of
celebrated present-day conductors, only Knappertsbusch stubbornly
refuses to use the corrected scores.)
Gradually, to many Austrian and German music lovers, Bruckner came to
mean all things. As World War II progressed, it was to Bruckner that
they turned in times of bombing, darkness, and death. When Hitler's
death was announced over Hamburg Radio in those final cataclysmic days
of April 1945, it was the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony that
followed, illustrating (one presumes) the utter depth and despair into
which the German nation had been plunged. Even more than Wagner,
Bruckner came to mean the essence of German spiritual life: all that
was Dichter and Denker, all that was mystic and philosophic, seemed to
be summed up in the solemn grandeur of Bruckner's adagios. It was,
people felt, the ultimate expression of the Faustian nature in music.
The shattering emotional experience of the Eighth under Furtwangler,
played by the Vienna Philharmonic in the scarcely heated
Musikvereinsaal . during the somber winter of 1944, seemed to make all
the suffering worthwhile. An officer on leave in late 1944 wrote in
his diary, "The [Bruckner] Ninth with Hans Weisbach: now I know what
we are fighting for; to return to the Front will be easier."
The reverence for Bruckner in Vienna has, indeed, something
extramusical and feverish about it. The newest trend is to hiss
applause after performances of the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, on the
principle that "profound silence" is the only appropriate tribute to
these two huge and emotionally racking works. The Viennese also
considered it entirely appropriate that St. Stephen's Cathedral
should, a couple of Vienna Festivals ago, have allowed the Vienna
Philharmonic Orchestra to give a concert there consisting of the
Bruckner Ninth Symphony , and his Te Deum. "Thank God," said one
Viennese to me, "they couldn't applaud in the Stefansdom. Besides,
it's almost a Mass, that symphony, isn't it?"
In the fifteen years during which I have lived in Vienna, I have
often-as a matter of statistical curiosity-asked people at a
Philharmonic Orchestra concert if they thought that Bruckner was a
greater composer than Beethoven. Most of them have replied: "Perhaps
not, but he says more to me." Those who have not attended a Bruckner
concert in Vienna can hardly imagine the concentration, the
dedication, with which audiences listen to the Masses and symphonies.
I have never felt a more charged atmosphere in any concert hall than I
did in the Musikverein after Furtwangler's performance with the
Philharmonic, shortly before his death, of the Bruckner Eighth. And
not only the audience is so emotionally involved; the players
themselves seem to take on a kind of rapt, otherworldly inwardness
when playing Bruckner. Everything combines to produce an atmosphere
closely akin to mass hysteria by the time the work is finished. The
very loudness of the last pages of the Eighth, in which it is
tradition to have a whole set of extra brass come in (making sixteen
horns, six trumpets, six trombones, and two bass tubas), is in itself
shocking. And thus the return to reality after the final unison notes
crash down is so difficult that applause really does seem out of place
(as, indeed, it often does after the performance of any great piece of
music).
But this is only one side of the picture. The composer is nowhere near
so universally admired as the existence of the Bruckner cult in
Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland would suggest. In other
countries and other cultures, Bruckner is often regarded with a
loathing fully as strong, and perhaps as unreasonable, as the
adoration in which he is held in Austria. I have seldom met someone to
whom Bruckner was simply "egal," and the violence of reaction which
his music calls forth constitutes what must be called the Bruckner
Problem.
Bruckner's music produces, and I think will continue to produce,
intense emotions, because it was born in a man whose simple,
peasant-like exterior concealed a swirling flood of passionate
feelings. When the Third Symphony was first performed in Vienna, the
audience was so shocked that it first laughed and then angrily walked
out of the hall, leaving the composer alone with the orchestra and a
few faithful followers. In the United States, people do not generally
walk out in the middle of . concerts; but I remember distinctly the
fury of some Bostonians who were treated to their first taste of
Bruckner's Eighth with Koussevitzky shortly after the last war. I was
invited to lunch at a house on Beacon Street the next day, and as the
discussion about the Eighth grew more and more heated, one man,
literally shaking with rage, put down his fork and left the table,
choking out as he stormed from the dining room: "It's the most
frightful, wicked music I ever heard."
I was exposed to a similarly violent reaction when I paid my first
visit to Denmark. We were sitting around the piano-one of Copenhagen's
leading conductors, a well-known Danish musicologist, several other
musicians, and myself-when the conversation fell on Bruckner. It was
then I realized that much of the Bruckner Problem in
non-German-speaking countries is political rather than musical.
"Karajan came up during the war and conducted Bruckner, I think it was
the Seventh Symphony," said the Danish conductor. "I'm sure he did it
well, but for us it represented everything about Germany we hate, the
marching boots, the concentration camps...." "Surely that's an
exaggeration," I said.
"You can't mix music and politics that way." And on the argument went,
till I sat down at the piano and began to play the beginning of the
Ninth Symphony. The company listened attentively, but after a few
minutes my host came over. "Please don't play it," he said, pushing a
glass of cognac into my hand; "it really makes me ill."
Several years later I was in Prague, talking to members of the Czech
Philharmonic Orchestra. We were discussing the group's repertoire, and
I asked if they did any Bruckner. "During the war and before, the
German Philharmonic Orchestra here [now the Bamberg Symphony] played a
lot of Bruckner; but it was for the German population. We Czechs can't
stand Bruckner; it reminds us of the Occupation." And the subject was
very abruptly changed.
Actually, this confusion of art and politics in connection with
Bruckner is partly the result of the Austro-German attitude which, as
I have tried to convey, borders on worship. If Bruckner's music
represents (as I think it must, at least subconsciously) the essence
of German spiritual life to the Austro-Germans, such peoples as the
Danes and Czechs probably react against it more for what it represents
than for what it is. Dragging politics into the Bruckner Problem has
only served to make it worse.
It does not help matters to include Bruckner with the parochial,
highly nationalistic composers who sprouted forth at the end of the
nineteenth century, such as Delius, Sibelius, Smetana, Elgar, and
Nielsen -composers whose present popularity exists almost exclusively
(and even Sibelius is hardly an exception any more) in the cultural
milieu to which they belonged. In other words, the English do not
dislike Bruckner for the same reason that the Austrians dislike or,
more truthfully, are bored by Elgar. The problem of Bruckner is surely
one that is, or should be regarded as, purely musical. Austrians
sometimes try to persuade doubting foreigners that in order to savor
Bruckner you must have seen St. Florian, the great Benedictine Abbey
in Upper Austria where Bruckner was organist; you must have soaked up
the atmosphere of Upper Austria, the lilting countryside, and so
forth. This is surely rubbish, just as it is foolish to say that to
like Delius you must lie on the grass by the Thames on a summer
evening. Of course it is obvious that the Landler, from Mozart and
Haydn down to Mahler, has had a strong effect on Austrian music; but
you can like a Landler or a waltz without ever having set foot on
Austrian soil. And to confuse the Bruckner Problem with local
"Kolorit" is certainly as bad as to bring politics or Weltanschauung
into the affair.
The first thing that labels a Bruckner Symphony as out of the ordinary
is its huge length compared to that of previous symphonic works. The
Eighth Symphony, for example, is almost three times as long as
Beethoven's Fifth. This, in itself superficial, observation means that
the listener must concentrate for some eighty minutes; it puts the
playing of a Bruckner symphony on a special level, otherwise occupied
(as far as length goes) only by Mahler. The large size of the
orchestra-not to speak of the technical difficulties demanded of the
brass section- also places the music out of the range of all but major
symphonic organizations. Thus, on the simplest level, the execution of
a Bruckner work involves problems unrelated to those of the standard
repertoire. It takes but one thought for an orchestral management to
schedule a Bach suite, a Schubert symphony, a Mozart concerto: it
takes at least two, even in Austria, to include Bruckner's Seventh,
Eighth, or Ninth on a program.
The moment one stops thinking about the Bruckner Problem and starts
listening to the music with an objective ear, however, it is not
difficult to see at once why the Austrians identify themselves, or
rather their cultural heritage, with this music: for Bruckner is a
vast summing up, a final passionate outpouring of a long and hallowed
tradition, the end beyond which it is not-and, as history has shown
us, has not been-possible to proceed. Mahler was by no means such a
repository of tradition as was Bruckner; Mahler leads forward, even to
Shostakovich. Bruckner leads nowhere (unless you are prepared to call
Franz Schmidt somewhere, which most non-Austrians are not): he is the
end of the long road.
In the Bruckner orchestral works, there are powerful echoes of the
great symphonic tradition: of Austrian baroque, with gigantic fugues,
proud trumpets, and rattling kettledrums; of Haydn's late Masses,
which were miraculous fusions of the late Viennese classical style and
the older contrapuntal forms; of the doom-ridden tremolos in the first
movement of Beethoven's Ninth-an atmosphere to which Bruckner,
trancelike, returns again and again. There are also traces of
Schubert's lyricism, and many of Bruckner's second subjects bear the
stamp of music's greatest song writer. In the scherzos, we have a
continuation of the famous Austrian dance tradition, one that
flourished in the Deutsche Tanze and Minuets which Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven wrote (and were not ashamed of writing) for court balls and
also for less formal occasions; this tradition turned into the early
waltz (Josef Lanner) and, of course, the Strauss dynasty. In the
orchestration of Bruckner's symphonies, there is always a strong
undercurrent of a mighty organ; and this is no accident, for Bruckner
began his career as an organist, and toured Europe-as far as London
-in that capacity. Finally, his orchestration and his harmonic
language owe a strong debt to Wagner, the composer who might be said
to have colored Bruckner's music more than anyone else. In short, when
a musically well-educated Austrian listens to Bruckner he hears, at
least in his subconscious, the mighty procession of his musical
culture.
After what I have written above, it sounds, on paper, as if Bruckner
were music's greatest eclectic; but if you knew no Beethoven and were
to read a scholarly German thesis on Beethoven's musical inheritance,
you might imagine that composer to have been a combination of Haydn
and Mozart but with more ff's. Bruckner's language, though we can
easily trace its sources, is highly original; once you know it, you
could turn on the radio and spot Bruckner at once even if the piece
were one you had never heard. For like all great synthesizers-Mozart
is perhaps the most celebrated example-Bruckner knew instinctively
which elements of his heritage to accept and which to reject.
The enormous forms in which his music is cast are necessary because
the material he presents is highly complex; it is also complicated,
which is not the same thing. Thus, in the Finale of the Eighth
Symphony, the coda unfolds itself like the reading of the Archangel at
Doomsday; and at the very end, preceded by jagged timpani fanfares,
every principal theme in the symphony comes in at once in a final and
apocalyptic flash of grandeur. But to arrive at this point, to make
this last affirmation of e pluribus unum, Bruckner had to construct a
long and involved movement, to build up, stone by stone, the mighty
edifice capable of receiving, at the end, such an overwhelming
superstructure. One of the things that bewilders many people about
Bruckner is this very size; we must always remember that he worked in
the largest possible forms; (There is, significantly, no important
short piece at all by Bruckner.) His mind worked precisely opposite
from that of a Persian miniaturist, in whose art our eye is caressed
by delightful details; in Bruckner, everything-even the smallest
detail-is constructed with an eye to the whole and is thus relatively
unimportant in itself.
In this sense, not only the Austrians but the rest of us too are
getting a Faustian summing-up in such a work as the Bruckner Eighth or
Ninth Symphony. Why, then, has this music- coming from a school whose
other members have written works cherished the world over-not gone the
way of earlier Austrian composers? Why has not Bruckner become a main
staple of our musical fare in the way that have Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, Schubert, or Johann Strauss?
A number of answers to this difficult question have been suggested,
but none appears to be wholly satisfactory. It is, for example,
possible to link Bruckner's fate with the fate of romantic music in
general: for with the upsurge of romanticism, the course of music
began to take that fateful direction towards nationalism which ended
in the pre-Schoenbergian chaos of a host of minor composers, all
working within their own countries and penetrating the international
concert world only with difficulty, or not at all. By conjuring up the
temptation of subjectivity, composers had to pay the devil's price:
isolation and misunderstanding. And if Schubert's path was
difficult-we must remember that he wrote his Ninth Symphony more or
less for the desk drawer-how much more tortuous was that of Bruckner,
who was, moreover, burdened by a total lack of worldly sophistication,
a hard, peasant's accent (his crude, primitive German was a sort of
society joke in Vienna), and a generally uncouth appearance. Still,
this naive exterior obviously had nothing to do with the visionary
grandeur of his music, and the argument connecting Bruckner and
romanticism can be effectively countered by citing other romantic
figures such as Mendelssohn or Tchaikovsky, whose music has not
experienced any difficulty in crossing the borders of the countries in
which it originated.
Still another argument, which one heard more frequently twenty or
thirty years ago than one does today, is the old anti-Wagnerian cry.
For many years it was the fashion to decry Wagner and, automatically,
Bruckner, whose music, as we know, owes much to Wagnerian methods. Yet
today Wagner is accepted as one of music's greatest geniuses,
certainly not to be classified as a problem any more. This argument,
too, does not bring us nearer the core of the matter. "I am tempted to
believe," writes a valued colleague, "that there is no explanation for
the feast-or-famine attitude towards Bruckner-except that we are
perhaps in the presence of a cultural lag that seems to be more
laggardly in some milieus than in others."
Granted this is true, someone reading this article a hundred years
from now will probably experience the same curious sensations with
which we read of mighty and earth-shaking aesthetic battles that took
place generations ago: battles with which we can hardly identify
ourselves emotionally, so long ago in space and time did they occur.
Personally, I do not doubt for a minute that Bruckner is the greatest
symphonist since Beethoven. Bruckner, I am convinced, is here to stay,
and it is up to us to face his music squarely. Like the tourist in the
Uffizi gallery in Florence who was told by the guard, "It is not the
pictures that are on trial, it is you," one might paraphrase, "It is
not Bruckner's music that is on trial...." Perhaps the answer to the
Bruckner Problem is as simple as that.