A symphony by Anton Bruckner (1824-96) sounds like nothing else, except perhaps another Bruckner symphony. The joke is that Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, and though that isn’t exactly true, it’s true enough to make the point. For so remarkably insecure of a man, he stuck doggedly to his guns, and that meant writing symphonies his way, a way that no composer before or since has written them. There’s a shallow resemblance, of course, to the music of Wagner (a deity to Bruckner) and more than a hint of Schubert (Bruckner even studied with the same counterpoint teacher), but these influences will only get you, as a listener, so far with Bruckner. You’re off in virgin territory the first time you hear him.
Mine came when I was in high school. My trombone teacher brought out the trombone parts to Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony one day in a lesson to play them through. They sounded unusual and interesting to me, and my teacher must have said something about how wonderful Bruckner’s Fourth was, especially for trombones. So I bought a record of it (the first classical record I can remember buying), just so happening upon a classic account of the score by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. It wouldn’t be too much to say that the record held me spellbound and I played it obsessively.
How to describe the sound? It was misty and mysterious and far away, at times, a mere carpet of tremulous strings and a horn call in the forest. But the music grew and grew by sheer dint of repetition, the rhythms gathered together, and the whole orchestra exploded, fortissimo, in a majestically etched theme, made out of open intervals of fourths and fifths, and a simple scale pattern, a theme sculpted from rock. That cycle, of mystery pushing toward magnificent climax, was repeated over and again. It sometimes seemed that we weren’t getting anywhere – the music remained in a perpetual state of wonderment.
The simplicity of the music, its naïveté, attracted me. The main thematic idea of the first movement of Bruckner’s Fourth (emblematic of many Bruckner themes) is simplicity itself: A quarter note E-flat followed by a quarter note B-flat below it (a fall of a fourth); then quarter note triplets down the rest of the scale, A-flat, G, F, before winding up on the E-flat an octave below the first one. That’s it, just a measure long. It’s little more than an arpeggio, and yet Bruckner forges an entire movement from it.
The Seventh Symphony in E major, which Carl St.Clair and the Pacific Symphony perform Feb. 28-March 1, has another one. The initial theme doesstart with an E-major arpeggio, going down, then up over three measures. Bruckner’s compositional gambit of later turning this thematic unit upside down (it goes up, then down, in the same rhythm) can make you wonder about the guy. It’s so simple that it’s almost inane – but somehow he makes it work.
“He made music like no other,” writes musical essayist Michael Steinberg, “naive and complex together, homely and sublime.”
Bruckner was born in a small village in upper Austria, of peasant stock. His father and grandfather were schoolmasters, and his ancestors before that, going back five centuries in the same region, were serfs, farmers and innkeepers. When Bruckner was 13 his father died and he was sent as a chorister to the Augustinian monastery at St. Florian’s, near Linz. His musical studies, begun with his father who was also an organist, progressed steadily (Bruckner was a fanatically hard worker), but for many years he intended to be a schoolmaster too, and indeed for many years was.
The musician eventually won out, though, and he first became the organist at St. Florian’s and then at the Linz Cathedral (even though his friends had to force him to take the audition, which he won handily). Friends also persuaded Bruckner to move to Vienna, where his country manners, dress and dialect were the source of wicked humor. When the Vienna Philharmonic wasn’t refusing to perform his music, dismissing it as “nonsense” and “unplayable,” his friends were cutting and altering his mammoth symphonies to make them palatable to their own tastes. He was misunderstood. Gustav Mahler, an admirer, summed up Bruckner better than most, calling him “half simpleton, half God.”
Bruckner’s music is still looked down on by some musical cognoscenti. Its simplicity and naïveté, its meandering from one false climax to another, its sudden pauses after which the music takes off in another seemingly unrelated direction, are deemed weaknesses rather than strengths. But these qualities are part of what makes his music unique.
His repetitiveness is a strange thing. Sometimes Bruckner gets stuck on a little fanfare rhythm, or a short scrap of melody, and the music sounds like a broken record, unable to get out of its groove. (Bruckner has been cited by some minimalists as an inspiration). He had a condition known as numeromania; he would count things, Deryck Cooke reports, cathedral gables for instance, “until he got the number absolutely right,” an effort “to reduce a worrying multiplicity to order.” This mania is expressed in his music too. Only once he gets all those repetitions in order can the music rest.
Bruckner’s personality – his insecurity, his deeply felt religion, his wonder at God’s creation – is all in the music. Of all the major composers, his is probably the least egotistical, and the least sexual or sensual (he never married). It’s interesting that he never wrote a concerto; virtuoso display was never his thing. His symphonies are monuments to God, cathedrals in sound. They express awe above all else, and no one ever opened up the heavens in his music better than Bruckner.
A few short words about the Seventh, the most well received in his lifetime and probably still the most often performed, will suffice. The outer movements are typically monumental and meandering; you can’t necessarily hear the logic of them (a major task for conductor and orchestra is to make these movements cogent). At climactic points he has a striking way of setting the orchestra in unison, all instruments playing the same thing, without harmony. The Adagio, a favorite of Hitler’s by the way, and broadcast on the radio before the announcement of his death, is a resplendent hymn and good example of Bruckner’s luxurious harmonic progressions and super-plush writing for strings.
The Scherzo, one of his finest, is Bruckner at his repetitive best. You’ll know everything you need to know in the first 12 bars (and the trumpet’s seafaring theme will run through your head for days). The brass section, in fact, is key in Bruckner. If you get lost, just wait for the trombones. The majesty of God is in them.
Contact the writer: 714-796-6811 or tmangan@ocregister.com
