Let’s hear it for Bruckner
Bruckner’s symphonies sound out the gap between the human and the divine
Far from being meandering repetitive bore-fests, Bruckner’s symphonies are wonderful, strange and enigmatic works of genius, insists Tom Service
ILLUSTRATION: MARIA CORTE MAIDAGAN
In any dictionary of musical invective, you’ll find some of the most devastating zingers directed at the music of Anton Bruckner: Brahms called Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony a ‘boa-constrictor’, while Eduard Hanslick described the Third as ‘a vision of Beethoven’s Ninth trampled under the hooves of Wagner’s Valkyries’. But Gustav Dömpke takes the Brucknerian biscuit: ‘We recoil in horror before this rotting odour which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive counterpoint…’.
Why was Bruckner’s music so o ensive to so much late-19th-century critical opinion? And why do the clichés about his music persist today? How is it that his defenders are just as damaging to his reputation as his critics?
I love Bruckner’s music, because its combination of visionary intensity and humanist empathy changed my life when I was a teenager hearing the Third Symphony for the first time. And that means that when people say ‘Bruckner just wrote the same symphony nine times!’ (in fact he composed 11, including the unfinished Ninth), or ‘Bruckner is too long, too repetitive, too boring’, I feel the need to defend him. So I point out the simple fact that every symphony is a realisation of completely distinctive expressive, structural and emotional type, from the shimmering natureworship at the start of the Fourth to the cubist, proto-stravinsky changes of perspective at the opening the Fi h (not my thoughts, but the analysis of the conductor and Bruckner fan John Butt).
But Bruckner also needs defending from his supporters – and some of his conductors. Some say Bruckner’s symphonies are ‘cathedrals in sound’: epic edifices that are designed as vehicles for spiritual self-abasement and contemplation of the divine. But that o en results in performances that are so slow they turn his symphonies into inert sonic monuments rather than living, breathing experiences.
Yet instead of fervent spiritual certainty, his symphonies are full of musical strangeness and cosmic doubt. Listen to the primordially questing openings of the Eighth and Ninth. Instead of merely devout religiosity, Bruckner’s symphonies resonate with us because they sound out of the gap between the human and the divine. They explore the abyss that separates the fundamental questions we have about life and death from their answers.
And if you want one suggestion for a recording to change your mind about the supposed monolithic monumentality of Bruckner’s music, listen to Furtwängler and the Berlin Phil’s 1942 performance of the Fi h, in which the music is in a constant state of flux. It’s a revelation of the wildness, energy and experimentation of Bruckner’s unique musical imagination, and a lesson for today’s conductors in releasing Bruckner’s symphonies from all those boa-constricting clichés.