Why Bruckner?

The New York Times has an article on Bruckner: At 200, Bruckner Is More Popular Than Ever With Conductors. Why? The piece is a series of excerpts from interviews with several mostly minor conductors. Yannick Nézet-Séguin is one of the better-known: 

What makes Bruckner extraordinary to conduct is that it’s probably the one composer who can really touch the absolute of playing music in a group, or singing music together, which is that it’s not about individual reward or pleasure — it’s really about a surrender to the collective. It doesn’t give you many solos if you are an orchestral player. You play a lot of tremolos if you’re a string player. Brass players tend to be more enthusiastic about it at first, because they get a lot to play. It’s been the same journey with every orchestra I’ve done Bruckner with. It starts with a little bit of, “Oh, it’s going to be long, it’s going to be tiring,” and once you get into a certain zone with this composer, it elevates you, and you feel like you’ve experienced what is truly the symbolic power of orchestral playing.

The Times introduces the article with this:

There was a time, as recently as three or four decades ago, when this composer was a relative rarity, especially outside Central Europe. His reputation preceded him. He was a religious man alien to the modern world, the author of monumental symphonies that many listeners found monumentally dull.

He was a provincial, uncouth, hardly a sophisticate like Brahms or Mahler. There was the forbidding editorial history of his nine (or is that 11? 18?) symphonies, and the lingering unease at his adoption by Nazi propagandists. If Bruckner was never exactly absent from the repertoire, he was long its resident eccentric.

The reason the Bruckner and Shostakovich were both deemed insignificant, minor, boring was due to the aesthetic hegemony of modernism. Music had to be 'progressive', ironic, crisp and dissonant in order to be taken seriously. It had to be on an intellectual foundation that rejected religion and emotional sincerity. Both Bruckner and Shostakovich massively failed this test, albeit for somewhat different reasons.

But as Nézet-Séguin hints, Bruckner (and Shostakovich) both used the large orchestra of the late romantic era in masterful ways. Bruckner especially, as another conductor hints at, is a kind of summation of hundreds of years of music history in his almost medieval melodic lines, quasi-Baroque sequences, and ecstatic use of all the resources of the myriad instruments of the orchestra. He synthesizes everything from Gregorian chant up to Wagner and goes slightly beyond. From a certain angle he could be seen as the apotheosis of Western Civilization in music.

The contrast with Mahler is instructive because with Mahler the autumn of the West starts to be felt. Where Bruckner is glorious, Mahler is unsettled and we start to see the exaggerated postures of decadence. Mahler died in 1911 and within three years the fabric of Europe would be torn to shreds by the First World War. But for Bruckner, there was nothing of this on the horizon.

This is mostly my own speculative take. The Times article is journalism, of course, and doesn't delve deeply. And the great majority of scholarship on Bruckner is still by German scholars, many of the earlier ones compromised by their association with the Nazi era in Germany. There is a new generation, of course, but I have the sense that they are still working out just what is going on with Bruckner!

One of the great Bruckner conductors was Sergiu Celibidache. Here he is with the Fourth Symphony: