The 20 Crucial Compositions of Anton Bruckner

By Alonso Delarte

In this book, Alonso Delarte chooses 20 crucial compositions by Anton Bruckner and explains why they are fundamental to understanding Bruckner. This includes the three great Masses and the nine Symphonies (from No. 1 to No. 9), in their preferred versions, with some mentions of the other versions. The chapter on the Ninth Symphony includes information on the finale; the author is grateful to Benjamin Gunnar Cohrs for his expert advice for that chapter. Also included in the list is the choral masterpiece Helgoland, mostly unknown outside of the German-speaking world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alonso Delarte
• Release date: Sep 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465761033

Alonso Delarte

Composer of music for string quartet and orchestra, the first composer ever commissioned to write a concerto and a symphony through eBay. Finalist in the Knight Arts Challenge Detroit 2013 for a project to run an ice cream truck around town playing classical music, including Anton Bruckner's March in E-flat major.

Book preview

The 20 Crucial Compositions of Anton Bruckner

Alonso Delarte

Published by Alonso Delarte at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Alonso Delarte

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedicated to Harold Shapero, author of the great American Symphony

Acknowledgements

The writings of Robert Simpson on Bruckner, Nielsen and Sibelius have given me a great example for writing about music. Also Prof. John Guinn at Wayne State University, though we disagree on Bruckner.

Many thanks to Benjamin Gunnar Cohrs for all the information he has given me on Bruckner's Ninth Symphony, enough to write an entire book about it. His work on the extant materials has helped bring the world a very faithful representation of what Bruckner was going for as he raced against the clock to finish it.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Mass in D minor

2. Mass in E minor

3. Mass in F minor

4. Locus iste

5. Symphony No. 0 in D minor

6. Symphony No. 2 in C minor

7. Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major

8. Symphony No. 1 in C minor

9. String Quintet in F major

10. Symphony No. 4 in E-flat major

11. Symphony No. 6 in A major

12. Symphony No. 7 in E major

13. Ave Maria

14. Te Deum

15. Ecce sacerdos magnus

16. Symphony No. 3 in D minor

17. Symphony No. 8 in C minor

18. Psalm 150

19. Helgoland

20. Symphony No. 9 in D minor

For further reading and listening

About the author

Introduction

A lesser man would have completely stopped writing music in the face of savage critical hostility. Or at least stopped writing those long Symphonies no orchestra wants to play and no Audience wants to listen to, and instead focus his efforts on those genres for which at least a few people had shown genuine appreciation, such as motets for SATB choir and secular songs for men's choirs. Such a man's music would most likely be completely forgotten today.

Anton Bruckner was not a lesser man. The disastrous premiere of his Third Symphony, in which almost the entire Audience left as the music was playing, would have been a stronger signal to give up than the meanest thing a newspaper critic could muster. And yet, sometimes I think I would actually like it if the New York Times wrote that I compose like a drunkard.

In some ways Bruckner's days were simpler times. Today, most composers are locked in a relentlessly idiotic pursuit of originality. Unusual scales, total serialism, aggressive eclecticism, imaginary instruments, randomness, theater, these have all been done to death and are truly passé. Decades before 9/11, at least one composer tried to pass off a terrorist threat as a legitimate musical composition, something which no doubt would not go over too well these days: any positive reviews would most likely come to the composer filtered by CIA interrogators.

While most composers nevertheless continue their hopeless quest for flashy originality, rich philanthropists have abdicated their responsibilities to gutless bureaucrats working in committees. The gutless bureaucrats are therefore of course much more concerned with preserving their jobs than with helping out that artist who needs that one crucial break to make the difference between success and oblivion. Thus they make safe choices, investing in artists who will produce short-term results to please the nobs and toffs just in case they're paying attention to how their philanthropic dollars are being doled out.

It's easy to believe in God when everything is going well. But given the multitude of harsh indignities that Bruckner suffered, no one would be surprised if he had lost his faith in God. Yet, Bruckner attributed his successes to God and blamed the hostile critics for his failures. What little success Bruckner enjoyed in his lifetime is attributable mostly to a disproportionate amount of sacrifice on his part, and a little bit to a few sympathetic musicians and earthly church leaders. But most likely God did about as much for Bruckner as Richard Wagner. Egomaniacs rarely think they owe anyone anything.

The moral of Bruckner's life story is that even if you are really, really good, and work really, really hard, success will most likely come too late, if at all. However, his life story would hardly make for a riveting Hollywood movie. Born in Upper Austria in 1824, he seemed destined to follow in his father's footsteps and become a schoolteacher. Although he showed musical talent early on, in his twenties he was still pretty much on track to become a teacher.

In 1856, Bruckner started an intense course of contrapuntal studies with Simon Sechter, the same theorist who had taught a dying Schubert just three decades earlier. Sechter demanded his student write no original music while studying with him, and there is no evidence Bruckner ever disobeyed this mandate.

Just completing the course of study with Sechter gave Bruckner very strong credentials, but he did not feel his studies were complete. In Linz, Bruckner resumed original composition, but also sought out the tutelage of Otto Kitzler in matters of form and orchestration.

When Bruckner made Vienna his permanent address, he started out as an unpaid lecturer in harmony and counterpoint at the University. Obviously he had to take on a multitude of other jobs to make ends meet. The story of Mr. Holland appears entirely realistic in that just teaching music is quite enough to leave little time available for one's original composition. Somehow Bruckner found the time to work on his long, elaborate Symphonies.

Bruckner still travelled around Germany and Austria, and throughout Europe. But his life story after this is pretty much one of hard work and crushing routine. Finally, in the last decade of his life, he saw successes and received honors. But he did not rest on his laurels, instead revising a lot of his earlier music and racing against the clock to finish his Ninth Symphony.

Much is made of the Bruckner problem, of the many different versions of some of Bruckner's works. The way I see it the only problem is with the inauthentic versions made by Bruckner's students, who thought they knew better than their teacher and proceeded to tighten up the structures (mostly by cutting out passages they didn't quite like) and improve the orchestration (by making it more Wagnerian).

Fortunately Bruckner saw to it that his original scores were preserved at the Austrian National Library. Conductors rarely touch the inauthentic versions nowadays, but those scores are still on the shelves of public libraries, ready to ensnare the unaware music student who tries to follow a recording along with a faulty score.

As for the multitude of authentic versions, I don't see them as a problem at all, but an opportunity to learn two or three different pieces of music for the price of one. If, for example, you become very familiar with the Third Symphony in its 1889 version, when you first hear the 1873 version you will be greeted by many interesting surprises along what will mostly be a very familiar course.

A common thread among Bruckner popularizers is the need to say that Bruckner requires patience, a slowing down of expectations. That I confront with the fact that I first became interested in Bruckner's music when I was a teenager. So did Robert Simpson. To give you an idea of what kind of attention span I had back then, suffice it to say that a Mozart Piano Concerto would generally make me antsy and impatient. Perhaps back then I liked Mahler's music more. But as I grew up, Mahler's histrionics became less appealing, whereas my appreciation of Bruckner deepened.

Another idea that often comes up is that of Bruckner's organ-like orchestration. In his day, Bruckner was appreciated as a phenomenal improviser on the organ, and we even know that sometimes he came up with ideas on the organ loft that would wind up in the Symphonies. And it is also true that in the louder passages, Bruckner has a tendency to assign different groups of the orchestra different functions: the strings might be playing a tremolo pattern, the brass some kind of fanfare and the woodwinds might be playing scales, for example.

But when we look at the quieter passages, we see great variety in the handling of individual instruments and a knowledge of orchestration, which, while not as flashy as that of Mahler or Ravel, is just as profound. Witness the judicious use of the clarinet's lowest register (the chalumeau register) as a clever variant of the bassoon, the expressive use of soft horn notes, or the simple differentiation of a violin passage by having it played on a lower string than would normally be used.

The notion that Bruckner was incapable of writing smooth transitions must also be dispelled. When Bruckner uses pauses as structural transitions, it is because a full general pause is what best suits his purpose. But when he needed to, he could and did make very seamless, seemingly effortless transitions. Notice for example the first movement of the inexplicably unpopular Sixth Symphony: where does the development end and the recapitulation begin? Robert Simpson gives the answer: on the measure where the A-flats become G-sharps. The only audible cue Bruckner gives us to let us know that a transition has occurred is that the timpanist starts a roll on E.

This book is modeled on Conrad Wilson's books like Notes on Mendelssohn: 20 Crucial Works. I agree with Wilson that 20 is a good, tight number: 30 would be too many and 10 too few. But unlike Wilson, I did not come up with the list myself. Instead, I asked on Yahoo! Answers and the Anton Bruckner Club on Yahoo! Groups: What are the 20 crucial works by Anton Bruckner?

There were few respondents, but their responses were sufficient to build the list with. And I like the way the list turned out: I was ready to modify it if it seriously disagreed with my idea of what the list should contain, if, for example, the Apollo March had made it on the list. Though I do disagree slightly with the list as it turned out, this was not serious enough for me to alter it.

This exercise showed that even today there is still much prejudice towards Bruckner and even his fans sometimes give in to notions misguided by that prejudice. One such misguided notion is that for Bruckner 20 is too high a number of works to single out as crucial. One respondent actually nominated all the Symphonies and then padded his list with the choral masterpieces. In what was perhaps a bit of overcompensation, another respondent went out of his way to almost completely exclude Symphonies from his list.

It was in researching this book that for the first time I felt the plethora of authentic versions of some of Bruckner's compositions to be a problem. One of the respondents nominated different versions of the same Symphony as separate works. This drew immediate criticism from other respondents. Fortunately the list worked out in such a way that there is only one version of each work in the top 20. (But where appropriate, I will make a few remarks on different versions).

With a book such as this, there will be (and there should be) disagreements. In regards to Conrad Wilson's Notes on Brahms: 20 Crucial Works, I would have included the German Requiem and the Piano Quartet in G minor, and I would have definitely excluded the String Quartet in C minor. At first, the inclusion of three chamber pieces with clarinet seemed excessive, but after reading Wilson's explanation on Chapter 18, I can't argue with those decisions, so I don't know what I would have left out in order to get both the Requiem and the Piano Quartet in.

And so with Bruckner, there is also room for disagreement, as there are enough works that could be swapped in or out. Some people will say that Os justi and Pange lingua should have made it in. If I had come up with the list all by myself, the Overture in G minor would have made the cut but not Helgoland. The former certainly gets much more radio play than the latter, despite being just a couple of minutes shorter.

Who knows, there might even be someone who