PROGRAM NOTES
Anton Bruckner - Symphony No. 2 in C Minor
Anton Bruckner Born September 4, 1824, Ansfelden, Upper Austria. Died October 11, 1896, Vienna.
Composition History Bruckner composed this symphony in 1871 and 1872, and conducted the first performance on October 26, 1873, in Vienna. He revised the work in 1876, conducted a new version on February 20, 1876, made further revisions in 1877 and in 1879, and made final adjustments in 1892, the year the score was published. The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Riccardo Muti uses the Nowak edition of the score that is based on the 1877 version. Performance time is approximately sixty-one minutes.
Performance History Bruckner composed this symphony in 1871 and 1872, and conducted the first performance on October 26, 1873, in Vienna. He revised the work in 1876, conducted a new version on February 20, 1876, made further revisions in 1877 and in 1879, and made final adjustments in 1892, the year the score was published. The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Riccardo Muti uses the Nowak edition of the score that is based on the 1877 version. Performance time is approximately sixty-one minutes.
Symphony No. 2 in C Minor
In September 1873, Anton Bruckner, nearly fifty and scarcely known as a composer, screwed up his courage and went to Bayreuth to show Wagner his newest symphonies—the Second complete and ready for performance, the Third still unfinished. It was an uncharacteristic move for a composer of deep-seated insecurity, particularly since Wagner had never even answered Bruckner’s letter of inquiry. But Bruckner idolized Wagner beyond reason, and so, like a helpless fan, he showed up unannounced at Wagner’s door.
Bruckner did not discover Wagner’s music until he was almost forty years old; this was the turning point in his life— crowned by a performance of Tannhäuser in Linz in February 1863—and Bruckner emerged so changed that, at an age when other composers have already hit their stride, Bruckner found his voice for the first time. When they met in 1865, at the premiere of Tristan and Isolde, Bruckner was too awestruck to show Wagner the progress of his First Symphony. When Bruckner arrived in Bayreuth in 1873, he knew nearly everything the great master had written; Wagner had never seen a note of Bruckner’s music.
And so, Bruckner showed him his Second and Third symphonies. Bruckner later remembered that Wagner studied the score of the Second and said, “Very nice,” but that the expansive Third Symphony, not yet completed, was even more to his taste. Emboldened by Wagner’s attention and praise, Bruckner asked if he might dedicate that work to him. Finally Wagner agreed.
The time they spent together that afternoon marked a high point in Bruckner’s life; for Wagner it was little more than another tiresome intrusion on his privacy. But Bruckner probably didn’t even notice. (He was an abysmal judge of social situations his entire life, and even after he was something of a celebrity in Vienna, he would show up wearing the wrong clothes and say all the wrong things, plainly unaware that people were laughing behind his back.) In fact, Bruckner was so overwhelmed watching Wagner page through his music that the next day he could not even remember which of the two symphonies Wagner liked better, and had to write a note asking, to which Wagner politely replied confirming that it was the Third, the one with the trumpet theme.
Bruckner returned to Vienna filled with the confidence and pure joy he would seldom ever feel again, professionally or personally. The Second Symphony, the one Wagner found very nice but not as daring as the Third, was played for the first time the next month by the Vienna Philharmonic, to a warm reception from audience and orchestra members alike— something of a miracle considering that the same orchestra had dismissed this symphony as “nonsense” at a rehearsal a year before, and had returned the score to Bruckner, claiming it was “unplayable.” They had laughed at the way the music was forever interrupted by silences, like great holes in the score; the Pausensymphonie they called it—a symphony of stops and starts. (Bruckner was unmoved by such criticism, later saying that “Whenever I have something new and important to say, I must stop and take a breath first,” pointing out that Beethoven had a pause right at the beginning of his Fifth Symphony.) Bruckner finally got them to play the score by securing funds from Prince Johann Liechstenstein, in effect buying their time, and also, in the end, their sympathy. The critics, too, were encouraging; one, Ludwig Speidel of the Fremdenblatt, wrote: “There is introduced in this symphony a composer whose very shoelaces his numerous enemies are not fit to tie.”
Bruckner’s triumph was brief. The day after the premiere, he wrote a letter of thanks to the members of the orchestra and offered to dedicate the symphony to them. There was no response. (Years later he would offer the same honor to Liszt, who had once praised this symphony. Although Liszt formally accepted, he left the score behind in a hotel room in his haste. When Bruckner learned this, he was deeply offended and withdrew the offer. As a result, this is the only one of Bruckner’s symphony with no dedicatee.) If his self-assurance was not already damaged, surely the advice of his dear friend, the conductor Johann Herbeck, who suggested a healthy revision of the symphony, finished the job.
It has long puzzled musicians why Bruckner’s convictions caved in whenever colleagues and critics questioned his work— Was he that unsure of his own talent? Was he fearful of authority?—and as a result he has left us a tangle of differing versions for most of his major works—for the nine symphonies, thirty-some scores have been published—and a raging debate over which one Bruckner preferred. The revision Bruckner undertook following the premiere of his Second Symphony, engineered and supervised by Herbeck, opened a difficult new chapter in Bruckner’s career. At first this process was more damaging to Bruckner’s fragile self-esteem than to the music itself, though in later years that was to change, too. From the Second Symphony on, each symphony was finished and then set out to be picked apart—Herbeck was quickly succeeded in this task by two of Bruckner’s eager pupils, Franz Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe, and later by Franz’s brother Josef. From then on, Bruckner seldom trusted his own instincts.
Herbeck was well-meaning and highly musical—although one must question his judgment in tacking a finale onto Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony when he conducted the premiere in 1865—and he was certainly less self-serving than Lowe and the Schalk brothers who were soon to inherit his role. Still, he coaxed Bruckner into several substantial changes that a composer of stronger backbone would never have sanctioned: cuts in the first, second, and fourth movements; the elimination of the repeats from both scherzo and trio; and a number of details, including the substitution of the clarinet for the horn in the coda of the slow movement. Bruckner was swept along; he even began to refer to his symphony, in its original form, as “the old arrangement.” Perhaps Bruckner realized that Herbeck’s recommended changes might help the work find more sympathetic listeners, which was his intention. But what Herbeck perhaps did not understood was that, with this symphony, Bruckner had begun to explore new territory, and it was a landscape so singular and bold that it was not readily grasped, even by practiced musicians.
The opening of the Second Symphony is the first realization of a method Bruckner would use again and again—a theme rising from the mists, destined to overtake the whole orchestra. Here it is high cellos who sing out, echoed by horns, and the music rapidly fills with energy. Just before the second theme, a gracious melody also played by the cellos, the music comes to a complete stop, the first of the Pausen that irritated the Viennese players. (Many were subsequently filled in.) The music moves forward in a way we now know as Brucknerian, sometimes stubbornly repetitive, often juxtaposing brilliant climaxes with sudden quiet passages, or threatening to stall altogether. It is not the way of most music, as Bruckner’s detractors were quick to notice, but it is Bruckner’s way, and in time listeners began to understand what that meant, and to adjust their expectations accordingly. Bruckner’s music unfolds slowly even when there is bustling activity— and that is a sensation that nineteenth-century audiences found puzzling in a symphony, and one that today’s listeners, sitting still for the first time at the end of a hectic day, are sometimes not prepared for.
The vast slow movement is magnificent and tranquil, yet filled with urgent ideas. Time and again, Bruckner climbs to the summit only for a better view of the peak ahead. The central climax is enormous, yet very still. Near the end, the strings play the Benedictus from Bruckner’s F minor mass. The third movement, a dance for full orchestra, fortissimo, brings us quickly down to earth. The central ländler-like trio, played at the same tempo, is enchantingly scored for shimmering strings and winds—the horn has some important lines, as well—and seems to come from a different world. The finale builds frantically to an outburst, only to fall back and try again. Further attempts rise and are greeted by silence, or, at the center of the movement, by music of rapt stillness. The form is Bruckner’s own, though it bears obvious remnants of both sonata and rondo. There is a big, ringing coda set off dramatically by the hushed Kyrie of the F minor mass, sung here by the string choir, and interrupted by deep holes of silence and a fleeting image of the symphony’s opening.
Phillip Huscher is the program annontator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
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