Bruckner

[Richard Barrett]

Remember though that I was talking about stylistic unequivocality in the context of no.9, which is certainly often equivocal, not to say turbulent, in expression. Although I would say this feature is in particularly strong focus in the last symphony, it is surely a constant thread through the others, even as the style undergoes a clear but very gradual evolution. The affirmative quality with which his symphonies end is always hard-won in the course of an expressive dialectic filtered through a rather insistently symphonic structural concept - the opening movement has to be in sonata form, the scherzo in ABA form etc. - again something that begins to break down in the first movement of no.9, the opening of a new level of uncertainty which (I would say) can no longer be convincingly closed.

[BBMmk2]

What conductor has recorded the best 9th?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

What conductor has recorded the best 9th?

Oh, crumbs, Bbm! So many different approaches to the same score, so many different orchestral sounds, so many great recordings. Imposiblissimo!!!


(But I still think that my favourites are Karajan with the BPO in the '60s - not just because this was the first Bruckner recording I ever owned, changing my life - or with the VPO in the '70s. I'm sincerely hoping that Dausgaard gets to record the "completed" Ninth, though.)

[Bryn]

( ... I'm sincerely hoping that Dausgaard gets to record the "completed" Ninth, though.)

I take it you mean for commercial release. He has, after all, recorded it at least twice (Glasgow and Edinburgh), as broadcast on Ao3.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I take it you mean for commercial release. He has, after all, recorded it at least twice (Glasgow and Edinburgh), as broadcast on Ao3.

Precisely - those broadcasts (in particular, I think, the first one broadcast at the end of October last year and only which I only heard by extreme good chance) were the first to demonstrate to me that a four movement could work convincingly.

[BBMmk2]

I think my favourite has to be Abbado's last recording with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

[Daniel]

But Daniel, what did you think of my comments (from #108) here? How do you react to those earlier symphonies....? I always feel Bruckner's "ambiguities" are still less often perceived...

Those are lovely, illuminating descriptions, Jayne, and I listened again to those symphonies bearing your comments in mind and find myself very much in sympathy with them, but as I said earlier I'd never suggest there weren't dark or destabilising influences at work, it just seems with Bruckner it feels more certain that you'll get hauled back from the abyss if you fall, sth that to my ears seems less clear with Mahler or Shostakovich for example. There is a lack of resolution to uncertainty that energises the work of those two, that feels more intractably ingrained, bleaker than the feeling I get with Bruckner.

This doesn't imply a lack of depth/richness/drama to B's music in case it seems to, I don't feel that at all. And it's just an intuition so whether it's just my listener's contribution to the score or if I'm looking under empirical stones placed there by Bruckner I don't know. I have to add I'm so glad I dusted off the first two symphonies, I can't think why I put them to one side, another occasion to add to the numerous where I've been inspired to listen afresh by your inspiring writing.

Remember though that I was talking about stylistic unequivocality in the context of no.9, which is certainly often equivocal, not to say turbulent, in expression. Although I would say this feature is in particularly strong focus in the last symphony, it is surely a constant thread through the others, even as the style undergoes a clear but very gradual evolution. The affirmative quality with which his symphonies end is always hard-won in the course of an expressive dialectic filtered through a rather insistently symphonic structural concept - the opening movement has to be in sonata form, the scherzo in ABA form etc. - again something that begins to break down in the first movement of no.9, the opening of a new level of uncertainty which (I would say) can no longer be convincingly closed.

I'd agree with all of that, and although I agree it begins to break down in the 9th for example, broadly to my ears I guess there seems to be an equanimity at the music's foundation, in its subconscious, whatever turbulence is taking place above, which for me affects the nature of the music's ambiguity/equivocality and qualitatively distinguishes him from Mahler, Shostakovich etc with whom at that level there feels to be a greater ambiguity written deeper and more implacably into its nature.

Visible turbulence can suggest stillness elsewhere in the same entity I think. Perhaps much as one can detect something of a person's inner thoughts from their tone of voice, that contradicts the actual words they use. It works the other way round too I think, stillness can imply an inner unrest, Schubertian irony often seems to operate like this.

With Bruckner I suppose I hear it as almost an emotional counterpoint, an inner belief battling with outer uncertainty, two different voices, one audible, one perceived magic-eye like. The 'tone of voice' of the music suggesting the more hidden psychology. One could say B's eye seems to rarely completely lose sight of a horizon where things will make sense, whereas in Mahler, Shostakovich etc the ambiguity seems to ring right to its core, and the counterpoint of a suggested inner certainty seems a defining characteristic by its absence.

[P. G. Tipps]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/2/24/1637120/-The-Symphonies-of-Anton-Bruckner-are-appropriate-for-today-s-political-climate

Interesting, not just the headline but the absolute guff that is still said about Bruckner, well over a century after his death, and which the writer is clearly so annoyed about ?.

Poor old Anton ... the 'Nazi' promotion of his music is still trotted out (in that case why never Beethoven ?) and now he appears to be even compared to Donald Trump, for goodness sake !.

The late Robert Simpson, who was a lifelong pacifist, described the composer's music as a 'peace-movement in itself'. I'm not a pacifist but I think I know exactly what Simpson was trying to convey.

There is not the slightest evidence that Bruckner had any interest in the politics of his time or even understood any of it.

The composer's mind was on rather higher things, so evident in much of his music, and thank goodness for that!

[Richard Barrett]

Poor old Anton ... the 'Nazi' promotion of his music is still trotted out

Yes, poor old Anton. But he was one of AH's favourite composers, or at least that person thought it appropriate to say so, and that does say something about the music (including its supposed concentration on "higher things" which is always "trotted out" as a getout clause), which (as in the case of Wagner) one understands less about by ignoring. What Bruckner's knowledge or interests might have been is completely irrelevant in this context.

Coopting a composer and his/her work to one's own ideas and prejudices is always a simplification. And that is just as true of the article you linked to as anything else. It makes a mockery of the opinions expressed in the NYT interview it refers to. Have you actually read that? I quote:

"The immersive aspect of this cycle did make an impact on me — particularly with a composer like Bruckner, whose symphonies all feel, in a way, so alike, digging deeper rather than spreading over more territory... And yet the later symphonies integrate moods and material more powerfully... I was so struck in the first movement of the Ninth by the coexistence of milky winds, spiraling strings, roaring brasses and the slightest shudder of timpani; so many colors and textures, in perfect balance....that unfinished Ninth finally produced the heart-in-your-throat emotional identification that I had been waiting for. The Adagio is built on a gesture of a minor ninth, a huge upward scooping interval that seems to express both hubris and hope."

It's written by two people who aren't in sympathy with the music but are still committed to finding something in it and trying to explain their reactions. I don't agree with them any more than you do but I don't think their opinions deserve to be caricatured.

[P. G. Tipps]

Yes, poor old Anton. But he was one of AH's favourite composers, or at least that person thought it appropriate to say so, and that does say something about the music (including its supposed concentration on "higher things" which is always "trotted out" as a getout clause), which (as in the case of Wagner) one understands less about by ignoring. What Bruckner's knowledge or interests might have been is completely irrelevant in this context.

Coopting a composer and his/her work to one's own ideas and prejudices is always a simplification. And that is just as true of the article you linked to as anything else. It makes a mockery of the opinions expressed in the NYT interview it refers to. Have you actually read that? I quote:

"The immersive aspect of this cycle did make an impact on me — particularly with a composer like Bruckner, whose symphonies all feel, in a way, so alike, digging deeper rather than spreading over more territory... And yet the later symphonies integrate moods and material more powerfullyI was so struck in the first movement of the Ninth by the coexistence of milky winds, spiraling strings, roaring brasses and the slightest shudder of timpani; so many colors and textures, in perfect balance....that unfinished Ninth finally produced the heart-in-your-throat emotional identification that I had been waiting for. The Adagio is built on a gesture of a minor ninth, a huge upward scooping interval that seems to express both hubris and hope."

It's written by two people who aren't in sympathy with the music but are still committed to finding something in it and trying to explain their reactions. I don't agree with them any more than you do but I don't think their opinions deserve to be caricatured.

Well, we can read into the music anything we wish but it appears to me that it is rather more the composer who has been caricatured by the critics ? I did not say I agreed with the writer any more than the two critics mentioned only that I understood his annoyance.

You say Bruckner's 'knowledge or interests are completely irrelevant in this context' but apparently you think that the fact that AH ( I assume you don't mean ahinton!) liked his music is relevant. As I said, the Nazis also heavily promoted Beethoven so why is this composer never 'caricatured' in this way?. My own feeling is that this could be the unfortunate coincidence of Bruckner having being born in Linz just like the Fuehrer, and/or he is simply an easier target for those who simply don't like or, in some cases, positively hate the music

The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm also loved Bruckner's music. So does Pope Benedict XVI. Whatever one's beliefs the music does have a spiritual dimension which can be appreciated by those of quite different and no particular persuasion.

Like others, I am simply sick and tired of this constant 'Nazi' reference to the composer which had absolutely nothing to do with him or the music, unlike, it has to be said, his Catholicism and the examples of Beethoven, Schubert & Wagner who are all clearly very 'relevant' when discussing this composer.

[ahinton]

Well, we can read into the music anything we wish but it appears to me that it is rather more the composer who has been caricatured by the critics ? I did not say I agreed with the writer any more than the two critics mentioned only that I understood his annoyance.

You say Bruckner's 'knowledge or interests are completely irrelevant in this context' but apparently you think that the fact that AH ( I assume you don't mean ahinton!) liked his music is relevant. As I said, the Nazis also heavily promoted Beethoven so why is this composer never 'caricatured' in this way?. My own feeling is that this could be the unfortunate coincidence of Bruckner having being born in Linz just like the Fuehrer, and/or he is simply an easier target for those who simply don't like or, in some cases, positively hate the music

The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm also loved Bruckner's music. So does Pope Benedict XVI. Whatever one's beliefs the music does have a spiritual dimension which can be appreciated by those of quite different and no particular persuasion.

Like others, I am simply sick and tired of this constant 'Nazi' reference to the composer which had absolutely nothing to do with him or the music, unlike, it has to be said, his Catholicism and the examples of Beethoven, Schubert & Wagner who are all clearly very 'relevant' when discussing this composer.

I'm as sick of them as you are, but it seems to me that attempting to pin something on Bruckner because AH (the other one!) is said to have appreciated his music risks misleading both those who do it and those who read what they've done in that regard into a belief in some kind of associative responsibility on Bruckner's part simply because of the way in which he wrote, regardless of the fact that AH was just 7½ years of age when Bruckner died; it is therefore to miss the point which, if indeed there is one, ought to be "what was it about the music of Bruckner (Wagner, Beethoven et al) that AH warmed to?". In other words, is not the attempted "Nazification" of Bruckner a disguise for what is in reality the question of the "Brucknerification of AH"?

So yes, RB's assertion of the relevance of AH's liking of Bruckner's music is undoubtedly correct, but that relevance appears to me to be more to the matter of AH's musical tastes rather than to that of Bruckner and his music.

[Richard Barrett]

this constant 'Nazi' reference

Constant???? You must be hanging out with the wrong crowd!

[Flay]

I think my favourite has to be Abbado's last recording with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

He chose to end his career with two unfinished works.

[Barbirollians]

I regard Hitler's apparent liking for Bruckner about as relevant to the worth of his music as is his vegetarianism to the merits of that i.e completely and utterly irrelevant .

[Richard Barrett]

I regard Hitler's apparent liking for Bruckner about as relevant to the worth of his music as is his vegetarianism to the merits of that i.e completely and utterly irrelevant .

That is blindingly obvious of course, anyone who uses that as a "reason" to reject (or for that matter to admire) Bruckner's music is not using their intelligence.

But while it has nothing to do with the "worth" of his music it does have to do with the reception history of his music, which we are still part of, however much we might imagine our tastes and preferences are unrelated to anyone else's. And there must have been a reason why Bruckner's music was favoured by AH, just as there must have been a reason why vegetarianism was favoured by him, whatever that might be, and ignoring it doesn't make it go away. Personally I love Bruckner's music, and Wagner's too, and I accept that both of them were complex characters, like all of us, whose music involves many often contradictory levels, which don't cease to evolve upon the composer's death but whose meaning keeps changing and ramifying as time goes on.