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:
7 comments:
Anon from London: it's interesting how reputations wax and wane. Last night in London we had the Khachaturian Violin Concerto, which seems to be making its way into the core repertoire, and also Tchaikovsky's First Symphony. There was a time, which I can remember from my youth, when critics routinely questioned whether Tchaikovsky should have a place in the pantheon. I've not heard anything of that debate in recent decades, however. Tonight: the Busoni Piano Concerto, which also seems to be getting more performances recently.
Every time I read a screed complaining about the hegemony of the "canon" I remind myself that the canon is always in flux, determined by the myriad of choices of audiences and performers--less so critics these days. The Busoni Piano Concerto seems to keep trying to raise its head every decade or so, promoted by enlightened virtuosos. But it hasn't yet really found its niche from what I can tell.
Strangely, the Busoni will have had three performances in the last few weeks - but I guess it will never find a niche, as its demands are so unfeasible. I shall report back after the concert tonight.
Regarding critics, the daily papers have largely abandoned classical music, though there are still occasional reviews. This is a shame, as without a community of interest, the art form goes into hiding, as it were. But there is a review on Bachtrack, which I would agree with. Certainly the soloist (who was new to me) is someone to look out for.
https://bachtrack.com/review-radulovic-rouvali-khachaturian-tchaikovsky-philharmonia-october-2024#:~:text=The%20Philharmonia%20played%20very%20well,baton%20twirling%20remains%20a%20mystery.
Thanks, Anon from L. For some reason I don't find myself on the Bachtrack site very often. Should rectify that.
Canons are also firmly established in other genres, which can be easily forgotten. In classical there's Mozart and in pop there's Michael Jackson. There are actual, explicable reasons how BOTH of them got canonized and in both cases I prefer Haydn and Stevie Wonder to the venerated masters. :)
Hindemith has basically vanished but he used to be mainstream. I haven't tried listening to Bruckner in ages but if Bruckner was a provincial religiously observant composer then he had something in common with J. S. Bach, eh?
Anon from London: The Busoni Piano Concerto was extraordinary. Paul Griffiths wrote in his programme note:
Busoni's major works are like monuments lost in a jungle, things not easy to encounter but magnificent when heaving into view.
I would agree. Perhaps such things are best when not easy to encounter - they are all the more special and astounding when you do eventually stumble on them!
Thanks, Anon. Now I will be sure to listen to the Busoni.
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