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:

Today's Listening: Bruckner Symphony No. 3

Before we get to the listening, I want to share the opening of this piece: THE ELITE COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO CAN’T READ BOOKS. You can't read the whole thing without a subscription, but the opening is enough:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

The first thing that took me aback was "College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course..." What the hell? Since when? Reading everything you are assigned is pretty much the bare minimum I have always assumed--though, ok, you might skim the boring bits. But in first year university I did all the reading plus I read a whole bunch of other stuff because it was the first time I had access to a really good library and bookstore. I've always been a reader. When I showed up for grade one (no kindergarten in my town) I could already read quite well. From the age of eleven I have read around five books a week. Some of that is light fiction, and some books I have read two or three times, but I think it is safe to assume that I have read between five and ten thousand books so far in my life. And I'm still reading at that pace. Still doesn't mean I'm smart or wise, of course. But I am well-read!

Ok, Bruckner. Is Bruckner's Third Symphony the most rock and roll symphony ever? You tell me. The most rock and roll movement is the Scherzo at 34:15:

Today's Listening: Bruckner Te Deum

In my first year as a university music student I sang in a performance of this piece, but I'm not sure I have heard it since. Until just now.

 Some of it sounds just a bit like Carl Orff if he were a better composer.

Today's Listening: Bruckner

The first movement is 28 minutes long and the second movement even longer. But he manages to squeeze all four movements into less than an hour and a half. Remarkable performance by the Berlin Philharmonic. But what I find most remarkable is that the great Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache conducts it from memory. How can you possibly memorize an hour and a half of orchestral music this monumental? Plus he might have a few other works in his memory.

Malicious Review of the Week

Via Norman Lebrecht I ran across this rather amusing review. Or rather, allegorical satire of a review. Instead of an actual review of an actual concert with actual performers we have a Personal Experience of a Performance of a Bruckner Symphony directed by a Famous Conductor! Here is a sample:

“I was somewhat ambivalent about staying for the second half,” she recalls, “especially after Legendary Violinist gave a great reading of Obscure 20th-Century Piece That No One Else Wanted to Hear. But I had heard that the Famous Conductor is a Bruckner specialist, so I thought maybe he could make it listenable.”

But McBrahmsFan was wrong. “Basically I had forgotten how bad Bruckner is,” she explains, sipping a comforting cup of tea in her apartment. “Even in that historic hall with a great symphony orchestra, there was no saving the music from itself. I’d say Bruckner is a lot of ‘sound and fury signifying nothing,’ but that is too poetic a phrase for its sprawling expanse of Wagnerian brass clichés and proto-minimalistic repetitions of diatonic tetrachords. I almost died.”

And:

“At one point I caught myself thinking, ‘How did this man ever write four-part motets? He can’t even write basic soprano-bass counterpoint.’ The one time the bass did anything it was that tired descending line borrowed from Meistersinger, which created only a momentary interest of passing dissonance. And that trite scherzo – I spent the whole time wishing Mahler had written it.”

Heh. But as funny as this is, it is a mere Shadow on the wall of the cave of what might have been an even better, and even more merciless, scourging of Bruckner.

I was just listening to the Symphony No. 6 of Bruckner yesterday and yes, I was wondering to myself, as I was trying to stay awake, why isn't this better music? Why are the rhythms either sodden plodding or disquieting nasal marches? I hear this music and it just seems to imply gargantuan Imperial German militarism (which, historically, was just around the corner). But, pace the allegorical Sally McBrahmsFan, I was not wishing Mahler had written it, I was rather thankful that it was just Bruckner and not Mahler who seems to have most of Bruckner's failings with an added dose of fervid neuroticism.

I know that there are lots of Mahler fans among my readers--it is one of those rare aesthetic items about which we differ. Perhaps in time I will come around. Or they will...

Let's have a listen to the Bruckner Symphony No. 6. This is the BBC Philharmonic with Juanjo Mena conductor at the 2012 Proms:

Bruckner's 6th

I take my title directly from Tom Service's article this week in his symphony guide. Yes, Anton Bruckner now joins Beethoven, Haydn and Sibelius with two examples in the guide. I just recently listened to all the Bruckner symphonies and was left a little less impressed than I had hoped for. But let's let Tom try and convince us. Here is the link. As always, Tom goes all out to sell us on the piece--his enthusiasm is one of the best things about the series. Here is how he describes the scherzo:

The sound this music makes is unlike any of Bruckner’s other scherzo movements; not just because of its slower tempo than most of the other comparable movements, but because of its atmosphere of feverish harmonic ambiguity and almost grotesque contrasts of texture: the unsettling trudge in the cellos and the basses that you feel wants to resolve but which never properly does (at least, not until the end of the main scherzo section); those scratchy staccatos in the violas and second violins; the glinting filament of the high unison line in the woodwind; and those searching arpeggios in the first violins, which seem to dream of a harmonic stability that the rest of the orchestral texture stubbornly refuses to satisfy – and all that in the first 10 bars! But this passage – and the rest of the mysterious progress of the rest of the scherzo - symbolises the distinctive soundworld of this symphony, especially its employment of so many simultaneous musical strata. It’s the diametric opposite of a musical monolith, but rather a multifaceted, multi-layered - multi-“sauced” – symphonic experience, whose kaleidoscopic orchestration is a crucial part of how its essential drama is communicated: richer, by far, than anything a supposed “organist of the orchestra” could come up with.

So let's have a listen:

Not bad at all, as Tom points out, a lot of fascinating orchestral colors and more rhythmic grace than in other of his movements.

But Tom does fall prey to an unfortunate intellectual failing of our time: the battle with straw men. Indeed, if you do much reading in politics these days you might wonder if there are any other kind of battles! But let's not get distracted. Tom begins his essay by selecting his army of straw men:

“He wrote the same symphony nine times.” "His one-dimensional orchestration is all thanks to his training as an organist.” They're "cathedrals of sound.” "They sound like Schenkerian middlegrounds” … and other such clichés. (Full marks if you got the last one, by the way, but I promise that’s what some musical analysts, especially those disciples of Heinrich Schenker, think of the symphonies. What it means in essence is that Bruckner’s symphonies move like great undigested wodges of harmony rather than being fully finished in proper compositional finery: it’s saying they’re great symphonic lumps, basically, calling to mind Brahms’s hoary old gag that Bruckner’s symphonies sound like “symphonic boa-constrictors”.

Yes, some have made the joke, a take-off on the old one about Vivaldi, that he wrote the same concerto 500 times, that Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times. One of my commentators used it, but immediately qualified it to saying that the individual symphonies were not as distinctly differentiated as those of, say, Mahler. I can't turn it up at the moment, but I think that I have said somewhere that my impression is that, in his quest to match or better Beethoven's stunning achievement with his Symphony No. 9, Bruckner tended to overuse some of Beethoven's techniques, such as the shimmering string halo that begins the first movement, contrasted with a hammer-like theme. But that makes for a poor "straw man" as it is pretty easily demonstrated. The orchestration is another straw man: Bruckner did tend to favor certain kinds of colors, but it isn't necessarily because he was an organist. Berlioz is accused of improper use of harmonic inversions because he was a guitarist, but that doesn't hold much water either. The fact that, in Bruckner, we never seem to be too far from a passage with heavy brass barking at us, probably doesn't have too much to do with him being an organist. That remark about Schenkerian middlegrounds is a little more clever, but Tom turns it into a straw man too.

Oh, what is a "straw man argument"? Read the Wikipedia article, it is pretty good. The telling phrase is that "To be successful, a straw man argument requires that the audience be ignorant or uninformed of the original argument." So, if you are unaware of what the actual original criticisms were, then you might find Tom's argument quite convincing. But straw men arguments are so common nowadays we don't guard against them very well.

But go ahead and read all of Tom's pretty good introduction to the symphony and then give it a listen.

I want to do something rather more "MusicSalonish", meaning that I want to take a look at just a bit of the symphony and see what we turn up. I think it is called original research? Here is the finale to the Symphony No. 6 of Bruckner.

Now let's take a look at just the first eight measures and compare them to, what the heck, the first eight measures of the Symphony No. 88 of Haydn (mainly because we just looked at them yesterday). Here is the first page:

And from the next page:

You will note that there are actually ten measures in my selection, plus the downbeat of measure eleven. This is because the movement begins with two measures of introduction with the E tremolando in the violas. The phrase proper begins in measure three and continues to the downbeat of measure eleven (at least the harmony does!). So what is going on here? The key of the symphony is given on the title page as A major, but the key here (and throughout the finale, right to the end) is A minor, no sharps or flats. The reason for this is, ever since Schubert, composers tended to regard both the major and minor modes with the same tonic, as all pertaining to the same tonality and equally accessible.

The violas hold a tremolando on the dominant (E) for the whole of this passage (a viola-playing friend of mine complains that she once had to sustain a similar tremolando for 350 measures in a Bruckner symphony). The cellos and basses have a descending sequence pizzicato going from ii to V and then repeating. Their harmony ends on V (E) on the first beat of measure eleven. There is a secondary melody in the clarinet that winds around E as well (remember, this is a transposing instrument in A), and touches briefly on the tonic. The main melody is found in the violins, doubling in octaves. Apart from some escape tones and brief scale passages, the tune is built around a 6-5 appoggiatura (from F to E). Then a 9-8 (from A to G over a G harmony), then it speeds up a bit in measure ten where there are parallel 7ths, resolving to a subdominant in first inversion, then, as I said, ending on the dominant.

The whole theme, if I might call it that, is essentially prolonged dominant harmony. Remember how I mentioned that Bruckner tended to be just a tad obsessed with how Beethoven began his Symphony No. 9? Well here, for comparison, is the beginning of that score:

Click to enlarge

Hmm, lessee, key is D minor and we have sustained tremolando A and E which outline which harmony? That's right, the dominant! I certainly don't want to make too much of this, but so many, many symphonists in the 19th century just cannot seem to get away from the Beethovenian kind of opening. It is just so much more portentous (cough pretentious cough) than the simple, crisp kind of theme that Haydn liked to use. But like, I say, I don't want to make too much of it. I just thought it would be fun to look at a little bit of a Bruckner moment. It takes just so much time to analyse a whole hour-long symphony!