I had actually written a lot of words about the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth, tied in how journalists are pretending to not know what Vice President Kamala Harris’s positions are even though they’re all there in her speeches and in the Democratic platform document, and mentioned William Grim’s essay asking whether Wagner created Hitler, etc.
But then I thought I should just chuck it all and let the music speak for itself. Besides, trying to read Grim’s essay before posting this article would cause me to miss the bicentennial altogether.
Software developers like to start things with zero, so here’s Paavo Järvi conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra in Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 0 in D minor. It runs fifty minutes, but there’s no part of this where I second-guess his tempo choices.
Okay, so the last four minutes of that video is applause, in regards to duration, Järvi’s interpretation is in the middle of the pack.
Bruckner depends very much on a sympathetic conductor. Georg Tintner had an interesting take on Bruckner’s Third Symphony. But Tintner’s recording of the Zeroth is so boring that I understand people disliking Bruckner if that recording was their first exposure to this great composer, instead of a satisfactory recording like Marriner’s, or a brilliant one like Järvi’s.
And he gets all that sound with an orchestra that actually falls short for Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor (Bruckner’s missing the contrabassoon, an instrument he didn’t use all that much).
The misconception of Bruckner’s runaway orchestras comes from the misconception of his being a Wagnerian symphonist. In Das Rheingold, for the entrance of the giants Fafner and Fasolt, Wagner needs a bass trumpet in E-flat, tenor trombone, two bass trombones, contrabass trombone, tuba, timpani and strings.
As I tried to put this into a music notation program, I wondered if I would have to define the bass trumpet and the contrabass trombone. I didn’t. Well, I chose to use the bass trumpet in B-flat preset rather than define the bass trumpet in E-flat.
Music for the appearance of the giants Fafner and Fasolt in Rheingold.
And Wagner could very well have thrown in three bassoons (or two bassoons and a contrabassoon) and eight horns into this. The most incompetent conductor could not fail to understand what Wagner means by “sehr wuchtig” here.
Unlike Brahms, Bruckner wrote very little chamber music. Bruckner wrote a String Quartet in C minor, which is not as heroic as the key might lead one to expect. Then, around the time he was also working on his Sixth and Seventh Symphonies and Te Deum, he also wrote a String Quartet in F major (string quartet plus a second viola).
The original performers found the scherzo too difficult, so Bruckner wrote an Intermezzo that is slightly easier, maybe.
The String Quintet has been arranged for string orchestra and for full orchestra. It’s interesting to hear it with such larger ensembles, but I do think it loses something and for the most part Bruckner thought in terms of a string quintet, not an orchestra.
I’m still annoyed with Kent Nagano for denying the truth of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Specifically, that Bruckner almost finished the damn thing. As in, we can reconstruct the finale, which supposedly only existed as a few undecipherable sketches, with 95% confidence. And a few people have done just that: two or three different teams, plus individuals like William Carragan and Gerd Schaller each working alone. The task is not free composition, it’s more like a compact disc player still managing to play a badly scratched CD, thanks to the error-correcting codes.
Although religion was allowed in the Dritte Reich (though with various caveats), Bruckner’s religious music was pretty much ignored during that time, and didn’t resurface until the 1960s. Most of Bruckner’s vocal religious music uses texts in Latin, but his setting of Psalm 150 is in German, though not from the Lutherbibel from what I can discern. Depending on how I cued this up, you might or might not hear a few introductory words in Spanish.
I should end this on a quieter note.
