The New Bruckner

Compositional Development and the Dynamics of Revision

Dermot Gault

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317022985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The New Bruckner provides a valuable study of Bruckner's music, focusing on the interaction of biography, textual scholarship, reception history and analysis. Dr Dermot Gault conveys a broad chronological narrative of Bruckner's compositional development, interpolating analytical commentaries on the works and critical accounts of the notoriously complex and editorial issues. Gault corrects longstanding misconceptions about the composer's revision process, and its relationship with the early editions and widely-held critical opinions. Bruckner's constantly evolving engagement with symphonic form is traced by taking each revision in due order, rather than by taking each symphony on its own, and by relating the symphonies to other mature works such as the Te Deum, the three great Masses, and the Quintet, and argues that Bruckner's music became more organic and less schematic as the result of his revisions. The book will be essential reading for those studying Bruckner's compositions, the complex history of their reception, and late Romantic music in general.

Chapter 1
Introduction

A Fiasco in Vienna

On the morning of 16 December 1877 Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony was given its first performance in the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna. The work was conducted by its composer and played by one of Vienna’s leading orchestras, the orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, two factors that should have worked in its favour. Instead, the stage was being set for a disaster that would nourish the myths and misapprehensions surrounding Bruckner’s name in years to come.

Hostility on the part of the orchestra had been evident already at the rehearsals. The publisher Theodor Rättig, who had been present as a member of the Vienna Singverein, had been made both sad and indignant ‘to see how the young players in the orchestra made fun of the old man’s incompetent conducting. He had no notion of how to conduct and was reduced to simply beating time like a puppet.’1 Bruckner for his part subsequently complained to Wagner, the work’s dedicatee, of a lack of rehearsal time.2

The resulting debacle has gone down as one of the great fiascos of musical history. As the critic of the Wiener Zeitung remarked, ‘even before Herr Bruckner had raised his baton, a part of the public was already leaving the hall, and this exodus assumed greater dimensions with each movement’.3

No sooner had the symphony ended than the players left their places, leaving Bruckner alone on the platform, looking out on an empty hall and shaking his head in hurt bewilderment. Only a handful of his students remained to cheer him. It is a classic image of the Romantic composer’s rejection by uncomprehending listeners, and also a defining moment in the narrative of Bruckner’s relationship with his public and his contemporaries – the ageing, isolated composer, the hostile press and the few disciples who were from this point onwards to figure so largely in the story of his work.

The Third Symphony encapsulates many of the issues that continue to surround Bruckner: the vexed question of his numerous revisions, and the degree to which they were motivated by adverse reception; the extent to which his former students participated in both the revisions and in the first published editions; Bruckner’s relationships with Wagner and the Wagnerian faction in Vienna; the complex cultural and political cross-currents of the time; and the presence or absence of extra-musical elements in the music itself. The première can also be seen as the origin of the notion of Bruckner as a cause, a composer who needed both advocacy and protection, which was to subtly pervade twentieth-century Brucknerian discourse. The fiasco has helped to cast Bruckner in the role of failure and victim, an ineffectual and isolated figure, tragic but also pathetic, whose later acquiescence in the alleged distortion of his own work could be ascribed to the loss of morale brought about by this disaster.

The concert was widely but negatively reviewed in the following days. Moritz Adler in the Morgenpost condemned the symphony’s ‘lack of taste and lack of inspiration’, singling out the ‘brain-shattering orchestration’ for comment. Franz Gehring in the Deutsche Zeitung acknowledged that the composer was ‘unquestionably an “original”‘, but felt that ‘he must have few if any friends, for surely they would have prevented him from launching into such a farcical enterprise’. Eduard Hanslick of the Neue Freie Presse confessed that ‘we have not understood this gigantic work. Its poetic intention was not clear to us – perhaps a vision of how Beethoven’s Ninth tries to make friends with Wagner’s Valkyries and ends up being trampled under their horses’ hooves’. Ludwig Speidel of the Fremden-Blatt also sought a ‘poetic intention’, commenting on the conjunction of ‘a dance melody and a chorale’ in the Finale, and speculating (with some justification, as it happens) on a hidden programme on ‘the two faces of life [Kontrast des Lebens]’.

The response has traditionally been portrayed as entirely negative, but from the outset, the reception of Bruckner’s music could be divided into three categories: enthusiastic acceptance; outright rejection; and qualified admiration. On this occasion, unfortunately, acceptance was confined to Bruckner’s pupils, Rättig recalling that at the end ‘there was at best a small group of ten to twenty young people of both sexes who applauded; they were opposed by the hissing and laughing gang’.

But already there were critics who found things to admire. Theodor Helm in Pester Lloyd had his share of complaints, citing ‘dreary and petty passages, harmonic horrors, and the most arbitrarily crass outbursts’, and singling out the Finale for its combination of ‘the most piquant polka-française – treated with learned counterpoint! – with howling hyper-Wagnerian chromatic winds’. But he also described Bruckner as ‘a talent of the first rank, who belongs to the terribly small number of modern musicians who can be spoken of as true symphonists’, and added that ‘we find in the “Wagner Symphony” true orchestral ideas of a greatness, a nerve, and a monumental quality which surprise us with flashes of genius.’ Josef Königstein of the Illustrierte Wiener Extrablatt admitted that ‘the composer’s creative energy must be sincerely respected. Even more: we believe positively, that the composer could create something significant in the symphonic field if only he showed more self-discipline.’ Eduard Schelle in Die Presse likewise acknowledged ‘a wealth of ideas’, although he also suggested that ‘the absence of proportion, of structural clarity and logical formal development’ would require ‘a fundamental revision’.

Thirteen years later a revised version of the Third was performed, successfully, in the same venue. Helm, Schelle and Speidel had become Bruckner converts, and by the time of his death in 1896 Bruckner had established himself as a significant presence in Viennese musical life. In the following decades his reputation steadily grew; but Bruckner was still widely seen as a composer compromised by a deficient sense of form. In the words of Felix Weingartner:

the plans of earlier symphonies are for him mere schematic designs, an instruction manual so to speak, according to which he arranges and connects his often wondrous thoughts.4

For Weingartner, Bruckner’s symphonies did not give the impression that the composer had any ‘unified and total picture’ of the work:

Rather, it is as if he waited at each step to see what his trusting, childlike, dreamy musical sense would whisper to him … the Good Lord, in whom he had boundless confidence, wished him well and would see to it eventually that something tremendous came of all this.5

Clearly, perceptions of the man have influenced perceptions of his music.

Bruckner has always been a composer with an image problem. In his own time his manners, clothes and very appearance counted against him, and with remarkable unanimity his former pupils paint a picture of a countryman who was out of place in the elegant society of late nineteenth-century Vienna: Ernst Decsey, for example, recalled how Bruckner’s large battered hat (großen Schlapphut) and ‘extraordinary, wide trousers’ contrasted with the fashionable public on the Ringstrasse.6 Even in provincial Linz, his friend Moritz von Mayfeld had been moved to ask Bruckner if he had made his clothes himself or had a joiner make them for him.7 His table manners were unrefined; Werner Wolff recalls him crunching fish bones,8 Richard Heller remembers him slurping his soup like ‘a farm-hand grown old in honourable service’.9 He spoke in a thick dialect, painstakingly transcribed in his pupils’ memoirs. While these statements can make points by illustrating how Bruckner would move from dialect to Schriftsprache (written language) to make a point, they inevitably reinforce the negative subtext of an uneducated rustic.

The abiding image established by the anecdotal memoirs of his former pupils is one of benign eccentricity. Bruckner is repeatedly described as childlike and naïve; for August Göllerich, ‘the modest Linz Cathedral organist … helpless as a child in worldly matters, was from the first a target for the mockery of the big city intellectuals’,10 while for von Himmel, Bruckner was ‘this simple, modest man, this pure naïve artist unaccustomed to the bustle of the big city’.11 Josef Schalk found that ‘a child-like purity and openness [Unbefangenheit], and an unbelievable ignorance and unawareness of the practical things of life distinguished him as both man and artist’.12 For Mahler, Bruckner ‘had an untainted happiness, which at that time was youthful, almost childlike, as well as an inherently trusting nature.’13 Likewise, for Linda Schönbeck, Bruckner ‘remained to the end a child of nature – harmless, naïve, a mind without malice, obliging and pleasant to everyone.’14

In the years following Bruckner’s death in 1896 former pupils such as Carl Hruby, Friedrich Klose and Max von Oberleithner published volumes of reminiscences that are remarkably informative concerning Bruckner’s love life, or lack of it, and his eccentric manners.15 This fond but essentially deprecating image is enshrined in August Göllerich’s authorized biography, completed after his death by Max Auer. The intention was doubtless to present a rounded picture of the man, but the consequence was that Bruckner was established in the public mind as a homely, easy-going rustic. More perceptive writers, however, noted signs of depression and obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and deep resentment at his treatment by the press and the musical establishment of Vienna.

Two complicating factors have undermined perceptions of Bruckner as a composer. The first is that the image of Bruckner as a composer with a deficient sense of form has been compounded by the issue of his numerous and notorious revisions. The proliferation of versions has encouraged the myth of Bruckner as an indecisive fumbler who, while gifted with striking and original musical thoughts, lacked the insight and intellect needed to organize them coherently.

Bruckner is by no means unique in subjecting his works to revision, but while no-one is denying that the revisions of Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius (for example) were all their own work, this is precisely what is queried in Bruckner’s case. This is the second complicating factor, the perception has gained hold that several of his most important works show the influence or input of well-meaning friends and former pupils, interference to which, we are told, Bruckner at best acquiesced as a temporary measure. This has resulted in the intellectual chaos of today’s popular Bruckner discourse, where any aspect of Bruckner’s work that one considers anomalous can be freely ascribed to the ever-convenient ‘others’. Scholars protest, but the attitude has its roots in the scholarly revisionism of the 1930s that produced the ‘New Bruckner Movement’.

The first decades of the twentieth century had seen Bruckner becoming established in the repertory, if only in the German-speaking world, and his Fourth and Seventh Symphonies in particular became favourites with audiences and conductors. In Germany and Austria there were also concerted efforts to promote Bruckner through special concerts and festivals. These early performances were, necessarily, based on the first published editions of the symphonies, which had (with the sole exception of the Third Symphony) only began to appear following the success of the Seventh Symphony in 1885, and which had been prepared for publication by the ‘Apostolen’, the small group of disciples on whom Bruckner became dependent in his later years, principally the brothers Josef and Franz Schalk, together with Ferdinand Löwe and Cyrill Hynais: names that loom large in the narrative of Bruckner’s life and work, and who have been viewed negatively ever since the 1930s, when the musical world received a major shock on being told that the familiar scores were in some cases widely divergent from the manuscript sources, having been freely edited by the ‘Apostolen’. The image created was of rash youthful enthusiasts who, while undoubtedly devoted, had also been high-handed and even domineering. As most of these editions had appeared in Bruckner’s lifetime, this scenario also necessitated creating a particularly meek and compliant Bruckner.

A new series of publications appeared, showing a clearer, plainer, Bruckner. Unfortunately, although it was not widely appreciated at the time, an additional complicating factor was being introduced through the dominance of Robert Haas, curator of the Musiksammlung in the ÖNB and Editor in Chief of the then recently-established Bruckner Gesamtausgabe (Complete Edition). His stated aim was ‘to identify and eliminate alien additions’16 – which increasingly came to mean the removal of anything that did not conform to a personal conception of Bruckner’s style. While Haas’s editions of Symphonies 1, 4, 5 and 6 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• table of Contents
• List of Tables and Music Examples
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Tradition and Innovation
• 3 Masses and Early Symphonies
• 4 The Emergence of the ‘Bruckner Symphony’
• 5 Consolidation and Revision
• 6 Four Masterpieces
• 7 Bruckner and his Disciples
• 8 The Eighth Symphony
• 9 The Final Decade
• 10 Anomalies of History
• Appendix The Versions of the Symphonies
• Select Bibliography
• Index