Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E major [arr. Eisler, Stein, Rankl]
Essential to understanding Austro-German music is the notion of a lineage, a legacy of Germanic composers that has its roots in the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, those framers of the classical style dubbed the First Viennese School. This very palpable musical heritage, often referred to begrudgingly as the “German musical hegemony,” persisted well into the 20th century, but was cast in sharp relief in fin-de-siècle Vienna by the divisive music critic Eduard Hanslick. Writing for the Neue Freie Presse, Hanslick championed the music of Johannes Brahms and other composers of “absolute” music — that is, without programmatic imagery — who he saw as defenders of the great Viennese musical tradition. Conversely, Hanslick published scathing indictments of the aesthetic school of Richard Wagner, poster boy of the supposed “Music of the Future,” which Hanslick disparaged for its dramatic elements and extra-musical associations. Through his crusade against program music, Hanslick effectively created a divide between what was perceived as “old” and “new” music in his conservative Vienna, a rift whose aftershocks would plague progressive composers for years to come, and indeed, are still evident today.
Wagner’s death in 1883, like Beethoven’s a half-century earlier, was a watershed moment for European artistic and intellectual worlds. For contemporary composers, it raised questions of legacy: of where exactly Wagner fits into the Germanic musical tradition (as a successor or an aggressor?), and of where to go from here (were his larger-than-life, chromatically-soaked Gesamtkunstwerks the turning point or terminus for German romanticism?). Anton Bruckner, Wagner’s friend and admirer, was at work on his Seventh Symphony when he learned of his passing, and later confessed about the symphony’s funereal second movement, “I really did write the Adagio about the Great One’s [Wagner’s] death. Partly in anticipation, partly as Trauermusik for the actual catastrophe.” Bruckner’s nods to Wagner don’t stop there; the symphony quotes several Wagnerian leitmotifs, and some veiled structural connections to Beethoven’s Eroica and Liszt’s Faust Symphony could even suggest a program for the symphony as a whole depicting the hero death of Wagner, the Faustian innovator of harmony.
But it is the symphony’s Finale that offers the most concrete and compelling evidence for insight into Bruckner’s tribute to Wagner, as well as Bruckner’s estimation of his own place in the Germanic musical lineage. The exposition of this disfigured sonata-form movement presents three themes in three distinct key areas: a snappy, impish figure in E major modeled after the opening theme of the first movement; a poised but sensitive chorale in A-flat major; and a monstrous bastardization of the lighthearted opening motive, this time set to A minor in fortissimo. Most interesting about Bruckner’s elusive form in this movement is his treatment of the recapitulation, where he brings the themes back in reverse order and in the “wrong” keys: B minor for the third group, followed by the second group in C major, and finally the triumph of E major with the return of the first group.
Bruckner did not pioneer this peculiar form; rather, his use of this reverse recapitulation structure puts him in the company of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms and other masters of the venerated Germanic musical legacy who also deployed the same form. Scholars have since termed this formal device the “tragic” reverse recapitulation, and some evocative titles from the repertoire of pieces organized in that fashion lend support for that interpretation (Haydn’s Symphony No. 44 in E minor, “Trauer-Sinfonie”; Brahms’ Tragic Overture; Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, “Tragische”, among others). To suggest Bruckner expressly sought to build tragedy into his symphony by reversing the recap of the finale would be presumptuous, but the existence of these works and Bruckner’s documented knowledge of some of them at least provides a rhetorical precedent for the formal affect he seems to have channelled to express the tragedy of Wagner’s death.
In the context of the classical education system that produced composers of this era, “tragedy” as a rhetorical concept doesn’t just mean doom and gloom; it stems from Greek dramatic theory and the Aristotelian idea of peripety, the tragedy inherent in the subversion or reversal of expectations, be they narrative or tonal-formal. In Mozart’s opera Idomeneo, for example, Idomeneo rashly promises Neptune to sacrifice the first living creature he sees in exchange for safe passage home from the Trojan War. When that fateful first encounter turns out to be his own son, the tragedy lies not just in the prospect of infanticide, but in the tragic reversal of expectations. For composers conditioned by the time-honored, Germanic tradition of sonata form, a violation of a normative structure represented a tragic deformation. Sure enough, the famous quartet from Act III depicting the height of the characters’ suffering follows the same tragic reverse recapitulation structure.
This distinction between overtly tragic expressive content and inherent tragedy of structure is important because the exultant E major coda of Bruckner’s Finale may seem mismatched with a form that has traditionally been used to express despair. Indeed, Bruckner’s ending is unique in this regard, but this seeming contradiction actually serves his tribute to Wagner. When, in the final bars of the symphony, the Finale’s first theme returns atop echoes of its first movement ancestor, it is easy to imagine this coda as a musical representation of Wagner’s legacy resonating for eternity after his death. In this reading, Bruckner’s Finale projects a dichotomous program: a tragic lament of Wagner’s death coupled with a triumphant eulogy celebrating his arrival in heaven and the longevity of his legacy on earth. Ascribing extra-musical meaning when it is not explicitly stated can be misguided and misleading, but in the context of the Germanic musical heritage, the tonal-formal interactions in Bruckner’s Finale surely belie a certain programmatic rhetoric even without imposing a whole narrative.
The slim 1921 chamber arrangement supervised by Arnold Schoenberg for his Society for Private Musical Performances and completed by his students, Hanns Eisler, Erwin Stein and Karl Rankl, may seem counterintuitive. Scored for only string quintet, clarinet, horn, piano four-hands, harmonium and timpani, it is a far cry from the robust, Wagnerian orchestration Bruckner originally had in mind. But for what it lacks in grandeur and decibels, the chamber version offers a certain neoclassical transparency that seems to clarify the music’s intricate tonal-formal relationships. Surely this was by design; the cerebral Schoenberg, with his newly-minted twelve-tone compositional system, must have been attracted to Bruckner’s calculated approach to composing and his music’s highly-organized architecture below the surface. In fact, Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony even reveals some early forerunners of the kind of interval manipulation that would become a hallmark of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic style. Not only do the themes appear in reverse order in the last movement’s recapitulation, but the intervalic relationships between the tonal areas of the exposition are literally retrograded in the recapitulation (E—A-flat—A minor in the exposition, transformed to B minor—C major—E major in the recapitulation). The Finale also features passages in which inversions of the movement’s first two themes are superimposed. For a composer so often reductively compartmentalized as “late-Romantic,” it is striking to unearth these seeds of modernism in Bruckner’s music. Moreover, it is no wonder that Schoenberg seemed to perceive a kinship between himself and Bruckner, both victims of the suffering of the avant-garde at the hands of the conservative Viennese press.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale in New York series at Carnegie Hall
Essential to understanding Austro-German music is the notion of a lineage, a legacy of Germanic composers that has its roots in the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, those framers of the classical style dubbed the First Viennese School. This very palpable musical heritage, often referred to begrudgingly as the “German musical hegemony,” persisted well into the 20th century, but was cast in sharp relief in fin-de-siècle Vienna by the divisive music critic Eduard Hanslick. Writing for the Neue Freie Presse, Hanslick championed the music of Johannes Brahms and other composers of “absolute” music — that is, without programmatic imagery — who he saw as defenders of the great Viennese musical tradition. Conversely, Hanslick published scathing indictments of the aesthetic school of Richard Wagner, poster boy of the supposed “Music of the Future,” which Hanslick disparaged for its dramatic elements and extra-musical associations. Through his crusade against program music, Hanslick effectively created a divide between what was perceived as “old” and “new” music in his conservative Vienna, a rift whose aftershocks would plague progressive composers for years to come, and indeed, are still evident today.
Wagner’s death in 1883, like Beethoven’s a half-century earlier, was a watershed moment for European artistic and intellectual worlds. For contemporary composers, it raised questions of legacy: of where exactly Wagner fits into the Germanic musical tradition (as a successor or an aggressor?), and of where to go from here (were his larger-than-life, chromatically-soaked Gesamtkunstwerks the turning point or terminus for German romanticism?). Anton Bruckner, Wagner’s friend and admirer, was at work on his Seventh Symphony when he learned of his passing, and later confessed about the symphony’s funereal second movement, “I really did write the Adagio about the Great One’s [Wagner’s] death. Partly in anticipation, partly as Trauermusik for the actual catastrophe.” Bruckner’s nods to Wagner don’t stop there; the symphony quotes several Wagnerian leitmotifs, and some veiled structural connections to Beethoven’s Eroica and Liszt’s Faust Symphony could even suggest a program for the symphony as a whole depicting the hero death of Wagner, the Faustian innovator of harmony.
But it is the symphony’s Finale that offers the most concrete and compelling evidence for insight into Bruckner’s tribute to Wagner, as well as Bruckner’s estimation of his own place in the Germanic musical lineage. The exposition of this disfigured sonata-form movement presents three themes in three distinct key areas: a snappy, impish figure in E major modeled after the opening theme of the first movement; a poised but sensitive chorale in A-flat major; and a monstrous bastardization of the lighthearted opening motive, this time set to A minor in fortissimo. Most interesting about Bruckner’s elusive form in this movement is his treatment of the recapitulation, where he brings the themes back in reverse order and in the “wrong” keys: B minor for the third group, followed by the second group in C major, and finally the triumph of E major with the return of the first group.
Bruckner did not pioneer this peculiar form; rather, his use of this reverse recapitulation structure puts him in the company of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms and other masters of the venerated Germanic musical legacy who also deployed the same form. Scholars have since termed this formal device the “tragic” reverse recapitulation, and some evocative titles from the repertoire of pieces organized in that fashion lend support for that interpretation (Haydn’s Symphony No. 44 in E minor, “Trauer-Sinfonie”; Brahms’ Tragic Overture; Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, “Tragische”, among others). To suggest Bruckner expressly sought to build tragedy into his symphony by reversing the recap of the finale would be presumptuous, but the existence of these works and Bruckner’s documented knowledge of some of them at least provides a rhetorical precedent for the formal affect he seems to have channelled to express the tragedy of Wagner’s death.
In the context of the classical education system that produced composers of this era, “tragedy” as a rhetorical concept doesn’t just mean doom and gloom; it stems from Greek dramatic theory and the Aristotelian idea of peripety, the tragedy inherent in the subversion or reversal of expectations, be they narrative or tonal-formal. In Mozart’s opera Idomeneo, for example, Idomeneo rashly promises Neptune to sacrifice the first living creature he sees in exchange for safe passage home from the Trojan War. When that fateful first encounter turns out to be his own son, the tragedy lies not just in the prospect of infanticide, but in the tragic reversal of expectations. For composers conditioned by the time-honored, Germanic tradition of sonata form, a violation of a normative structure represented a tragic deformation. Sure enough, the famous quartet from Act III depicting the height of the characters’ suffering follows the same tragic reverse recapitulation structure.
This distinction between overtly tragic expressive content and inherent tragedy of structure is important because the exultant E major coda of Bruckner’s Finale may seem mismatched with a form that has traditionally been used to express despair. Indeed, Bruckner’s ending is unique in this regard, but this seeming contradiction actually serves his tribute to Wagner. When, in the final bars of the symphony, the Finale’s first theme returns atop echoes of its first movement ancestor, it is easy to imagine this coda as a musical representation of Wagner’s legacy resonating for eternity after his death. In this reading, Bruckner’s Finale projects a dichotomous program: a tragic lament of Wagner’s death coupled with a triumphant eulogy celebrating his arrival in heaven and the longevity of his legacy on earth. Ascribing extra-musical meaning when it is not explicitly stated can be misguided and misleading, but in the context of the Germanic musical heritage, the tonal-formal interactions in Bruckner’s Finale surely belie a certain programmatic rhetoric even without imposing a whole narrative.
The slim 1921 chamber arrangement supervised by Arnold Schoenberg for his Society for Private Musical Performances and completed by his students, Hanns Eisler, Erwin Stein and Karl Rankl, may seem counterintuitive. Scored for only string quintet, clarinet, horn, piano four-hands, harmonium and timpani, it is a far cry from the robust, Wagnerian orchestration Bruckner originally had in mind. But for what it lacks in grandeur and decibels, the chamber version offers a certain neoclassical transparency that seems to clarify the music’s intricate tonal-formal relationships. Surely this was by design; the cerebral Schoenberg, with his newly-minted twelve-tone compositional system, must have been attracted to Bruckner’s calculated approach to composing and his music’s highly-organized architecture below the surface. In fact, Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony even reveals some early forerunners of the kind of interval manipulation that would become a hallmark of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic style. Not only do the themes appear in reverse order in the last movement’s recapitulation, but the intervalic relationships between the tonal areas of the exposition are literally retrograded in the recapitulation (E—A-flat—A minor in the exposition, transformed to B minor—C major—E major in the recapitulation). The Finale also features passages in which inversions of the movement’s first two themes are superimposed. For a composer so often reductively compartmentalized as “late-Romantic,” it is striking to unearth these seeds of modernism in Bruckner’s music. Moreover, it is no wonder that Schoenberg seemed to perceive a kinship between himself and Bruckner, both victims of the suffering of the avant-garde at the hands of the conservative Viennese press.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale in New York series at Carnegie Hall