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Bruckner and the
Vision splendid
Bruckner’s music asks Big Questions, and attempts heroically to make sense of
the answers. You won’t, therefore, hear Bruckner on breakfast radio: to
explore the fullest implications of his cosmology takes time. Indeed, Eliot’s
‘time older than the chronometers’ is, in some respects, Bruckner’s subject
matter. We, therefore, have to cultivate a contemplative patience to
appreciate his work fully.
Inevitably, Bruckner’s world-view was that of the conservative, Catholic,
village society of which he was a product, and out of which he composed great
sacred music. (Bruckner was not a ‘peasant’, despite his quaint manners, as
is so often claimed: like Schubert he was at first a schoolmaster and
organist, as was his father.) One need not hold any religious views in order
to appreciate the sacred or symphonic works, any more than one need know the
Masonic secret handshake in order to adore Mozart. Bruckner’s religion does,
however, help us to understand what the music attempts to do, and why it is
unlike that of any other composer of the time. For the paradox is that at the
time of the most intense flowering of Romantic self-expression, Bruckner
composed music which, as Theodor Adorno remarked, ‘runs counter to the belief
in composition as a subjective act of creation’. For this reason, the common
comparisons between Bruckner and Wagner on the one hand, and Mahler on the
other, should be treated with great caution. Wagner regarded music as the
‘art of transition’, where Bruckner aims to dramatise that ultimate reality
as the ‘unmoved mover’; Mahler’s subject, to borrow again from Adorno, is
‘brokenness’, while Bruckner’s is the essential unity of all things.
Bruckner’s idolisation of Wagner was embarrassingly abject, and led to his
unfairly being tarred as pro-Wagner/anti-Brahms, but the influence of Wagner
on the actual sound of Bruckner’s music is negligible. Bruckner’s orchestra
is almost exactly the same as that of Brahms. The symphonies, in the main,
use only double woodwind and never piccolo, cor anglais, bass clarinet or
contrabassoon (the revised version of the Eighth has triple woodwind,
Bruckner having excised what would have been his only use of piccolo and
contrabassoon!); the celebrated use of Wagner tubas is an isolated instance,
and is specific in its reference to Wagner; the harp is only heard in the
Eighth; percussion extends beyond the timpani as afar as triangle and
cymbals, though even these instances are infrequent, and of questionable
authenticity. There is the occasional teutonism in the brass writing, and the
repeated high violin motives which inevitably accompany a rising figure may
have their origin in the Tannhäuser
prelude, but the harmonic language, while often highly chromatic, is quite
unlike Wagner’s and at no stage does Bruckner treat his thematic material
with Wagner’s plasticity. But Wagner was important in showing Bruckner how
music can be structured on a tonal movement of incredible slowness, allowing for
the construction of works of such scale. If we must find composers with whom
to compare Bruckner, we should perhaps look to the Schubert of the late piano
sonatas (the A major in particular), to the Beethoven of works like the Hammerklavier’s slow movement, and
finally to the masters of Renaissance and Baroque counterpoint. We need to
bear in mind, however, that there is little evidence of Bruckner’s having
studied, or shown a great deal of interest in, any existing music other than,
in a very partial way, Wagner’s. By another paradox, it is the atheist,
urbane sophisticate Brahms whose music is so deeply rooted in the religious
music of the past. Bruckner’s, while making no claims to ‘originality’, is
much closer to the Romantic ideal of spontaneous generation.
Bruckner’s radically different musical language and expansive scale have had
their detractors, the most extreme being Wagner’s bête noir, the Viennese critic Hanslick. Less virulent, but as
uncomprehending, are those who hear in Bruckner a ‘rough carpentry’ (assuming
a lack of formal technique), those who assume that the music is organists’
music, and those who retail the bon mot that Bruckner wrote one symphony nine
times. There are of course many correspondences between his works, and
indeed, instances of self-quotation, but the differences are of greater
import. Eugen Jochum, one of the finest Bruckner conductors of the century,
has remarked, ‘the culminating points...occur at different points in
different works’: there is no formula, and each work has its own unique
internal tension. The Arcadian fourth symphony – one with which new listeners
might start – is a world away from the tremendous spiritual angst whose
defeat is the subject of the Eighth and Ninth.
The similarities, however, consolidate Bruckner’s style and vocabulary. With
the exception of the Fifth, the symphonies all begin with a tabula rasa, either a string tremolando as neutral backdrop, or a
repeated rhythmic figure. The outer movements tend to be cast in a form which
is Bruckner’s own and whose difference from sonata design is assumed to be
evidence of incompetence. (In his thirties Bruckner deliberately imposed
seven years’ silence on himself while he submitted to a strict training in
harmony and counterpoint, and one of the examiners on one occasion was heard
to say ‘he should have examined us’. Bruckner chose to compose the way he
did, and apparently left the self-expression for prodigious feats of
improvisation on the organ, for which he was widely celebrated.) These movements
always have three thematic groups, the second of which is often
song-like. There is little
development in the classical sense, rather, as Robert Simpson puts it, the
movements consist of ‘statement, counter-statement and coda’, where the music
charts an enormous journey away from and back to the tonic. Bruckner often
brings the music to a massive climax only to follow it with silence, rather
than a conventional ‘bridge passage’; commentators rightly point to the
effect this would have in an imagined cathedral, but Bruckner simply said:
‘when I have something important to say, I need to draw breath.’ His
orchestration similarly concentrates on contrasting the massive with the
transparent, most obviously in the contrapuntal song-periods of the second
theme type, while the brass chorale with which the movements often reach
their apotheosis sounds organ-like only, as Tovey remarked, because it is
free of the mistakes of the organist. More to the point, it evokes space in a
way beloved of Baroque masters.
As it evokes space, so too does the music evoke ‘the groundswell that is and
was from the beginning’ through the use of stately movement, sequence and
repetition. (Bruckner, incidentally, was numeromanic, obsessively concerned
with counting). Absolute repetition can only happen in the aesthetic, as
distinct from the temporal, realm. As such it becomes a metaphor for order
and for the eternal. So too, after the massive yearning of the first
movements and the exploration of grief and acceptance in many of the Adagios,
the energy of the scherzos becomes a music of poised ecstasy, and is gathered
up, along with earlier themes, in the finales. With varying success (and who
can claim more?), Bruckner’s musical images, as far as one can in time,
approach something like eternal peace.
© Gordon Kerry
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