It’s not just in politics that some people like to ignore facts that don’t quite fit their personal preconceptions, or which they just plain don’t like. It happens with classical music, too.
On this day in 1896, the great Austrian composer Anton Bruckner died. He had prayed to God to give him the strength to complete his Symphony No. 9 in D minor, but he fell several pages short of the task.
A very serious opening statement and counterstatement, a violent Scherzo with a mysterious Trio, and an Adagio alternating serene exaltation with terrible doubt, these were all completed. But no finale.
Nothing at all of the finale except some indecipherable sketches. It didn’t help that souvenir hunters got into an estate that was not properly secured quickly enough. And even if it had been secured promptly, there was no hope of making sense of those sketches, right? Right?
In 2015, the conductor Kent Nagano admitted that one time he inserted Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung into Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Let us be super absolutely clear that Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Bruckner are two totally different persons.
In that same interview, Nagano says it’s not valid for other people to look at Bruckner’s finale sketches to try to reconstruct what Bruckner himself wrote or intended to write, because then it’s not actually by Bruckner.
The people trying to reconstruct the finale Bruckner wrote are not Bruckner, they are other people. Arnold Schoenberg is also other people. So it’s okay for Nagano to insert into Bruckner’s composition music by someone else that was not intended for that purpose, but it is wrong for other people to painstakingly try to figure out what Bruckner would have written?
What astounding hypocrisy! Maybe Kent Nagano is a Republican. And if it weren’t for the bit about inserting a Jew’s music into the crowning achievement of an Aryan, Nagano’s views on Bruckner’s Ninth would fit in well with the Nazi deification of Bruckner.
Some say the finale of Bruckner’s Ninth contains music so divine that mere mortals can’t handle it. But Bruckner was just a man, and he had no pretense of being a god. As he prayed to God to give him the strength to finish, Bruckner also suggested the possibility of using his Te Deum as a makeshift finale.
Even with the carelessness of the executor of Bruckner’s estate, a lot of pages of the score of the finale still wound up in Ferdinand Löwe’s care. And I’m saying score as in a score that you can extract parts from and give to an actual orchestra to play.
Löwe is still blamed today for a version of Bruckner’s Fourth some consider inauthentic, but that’s a whole other can of worms. Löwe did make a lot of unauthorized changes to the first three movements of the Ninth, reassigning melodic lines and taming at least one terrifying chord.
But apparently he drew the line at substituting entire missing pages of the finale score with his own invention. So he just let people think it was all just sketches, not a score. Maybe he even believed that himself.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, Bruckner’s Ninth was always heard in Löwe’s version, sometimes with the Te Deum as finale, sometimes not. Remember that Bruckner was devoutly Catholic, and Hitler was also Catholic, at least by baptism.
As Nazism took hold of Germany and Austria, Bruckner’s religiosity became more and more of an inconvenience and his church music was almost forgotten. Ending the Ninth with the Te Deum then became implicitly verboten.
Maybe the Nazis thought that mortals could hear only the three completed movements, and then perhaps in Walhalla the brave Reichskrieger who died as heroes would get to hear the finale.
Turns out that we don’t have to be heroes in the afterlife to hear the finale of Bruckner’s Ninth. In his own lifetime, Bruckner actually completed a lot of the finale.
And even though a lot of the pages may be hopelessly lost, thanks to Bruckner’s eccentric creative process, we have a very good idea of how many pages are missing and what those pages probably contain. Sir Simon Rattle explains it saying that Bruckner was like an architect, drawing a blueprint first.
For roughly the first half of the finale, the problem is mainly one of filling in missing details based on our knowledge of orchestration and of Bruckner’s style.
For the second half of the finale there are more blank lines and more gaps, so we can’t be as certain, but we still have the guidance of the precedent of Bruckner’s earlier Symphonies, particularly the Eighth.
Of course Bruckner did revise a lot, and it’s quite conceivable that with another decade of life he could have produced a radically different version of his Ninth Symphony.
But, as it turns out, the musicologists painstakingly working to reconstruct the finale also revise. I think that the first reconstruction by Samale and Mazzuca, recorded by Eliahu Inbal, gives a very good idea of what the Ninth would have been like if Bruckner hadn’t revised the Eighth Symphony and had thus had more time to work on the Ninth.
And the final version by Samale and Mazzuca with Phillips and Cohrs represents, I think, something a lot like what Bruckner had in his mind when he died. I also think that he probably decided that what he left was good enough for others to fill in what he didn’t have time to write. That essentially he was leaving his I’s undotted and his T’s uncrossed.
Here’s an interview with Sir Simon Rattle about the Ninth. Aside from a little bit of hyperbole, he gives a very good overview of the truth about Bruckner’s Ninth.
Worth repeating: there is a lot more genuine Bruckner in the Samale et al reconstruction of Bruckner’s Ninth than there is genuine Mozart in the customarily played version of Mozart’s Requiem.
If you like Bruckner’s other Symphonies, you owe it to yourself to hear the complete Ninth. It’s not exactly what he would have written, but it’s pretty damn close.