Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, WAB 109 | Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich & Paavo Järvi | George Enescu Festival | 05.09.2023 | Bucharest Palace Hall
0:11 I. Feierlich, misterioso
26:22 II. Scherzo. Bewegt, lebhaft - Trio. Schnell - Scherzo
37:11 III. Adagio. Langsam, feierlich
Recorded from public broadcast. Enjoy!
Please subscribe for more content like this! Cheers!
___________________________________________________
"Te Deum” is a dedication that, for Anton Bruckner, signifies infinitely more than the single, albeit substantial vocal work so-titled (and sometimes suggested as a fitting finale for the Ninth Symphony) that he completed in 1884. “To God” was the engine, the motivator, the dedication of Anton Bruckner’s life and work, his belief, his raison d’être, his blessing and bane. When Bruckner believed, he created; when his faith wavered, his artistic self-confidence and with it his reason crumbled, to wit the mental breakdowns he suffered along with various severe physical ailments over his years as church organist, teacher, and composer in Linz (he was born in nearby Ansfelden) and Vienna.
He was further victimized, ironically, by the intense but curiously patronizing devotion of friends who regarded him as a supreme inventive genius, but a strictly instinctive genius, lacking the technical means to achieve his musical ends unassisted. Thus, their constant “improvement” of his symphonies, not merely by suggesting changes which he would then (often) make himself, but drastically altering - with or without his permission, during his lifetime and after - his scores to make them conform to some personal or academic notion of practicability. The result of this treatment was to create an all-too-durable, to some observers appealing, image of Bruckner as a sort of idiot savant. Later generations of musicologists have, happily, set this situation to rights, so that we are now more readily able to hear Bruckner’s music as he, and not his well-intentioned associates, conceived it. In recent years additional evidence has continued to turn up that modifies, at times negates, previous notions of the composer’s definitive (a word always to be used advisedly in this context) thoughts regarding his symphonies, even by the selfless latter-day editors of his scores, such as Robert Haas, Alfred Orel, and Leopold Nowak.
The dedication to his “dear God” would be affixed again, a dozen years after the vocal Te Deum, to his Ninth Symphony, which was left incomplete at the composer’s death in 1896. His sketches for the fourth and final movement have been fleshed out by at least a dozen hands in the century just past; but like that other celebrated “unfinished,” Schubert’s B-minor Symphony, the three-movement Ninth hardly seems like a torso: It is complete in effect if not fact, floating, sublimely, ultimately into the ether at the close of the third movement after an hour of alternating struggles and victories.
The Ninth Symphony becomes in a sense self-sufficient with what turned out to be its final measures, which reprise themes from earlier Bruckner works: the Miserere from his Mass in D minor, the Adagio of the Eighth Symphony, and, finally, a fragment of the opening theme of the Seventh Symphony. How odd, and touching, to engage in such a retrospective before even reaching the work’s conclusion. A premonition that this would, indeed, be the end? Or are we merely romanticizing?
Bruckner commenced labors on what would be his last symphony in 1887, immediately after putting the finishing touches to his massive Eighth. He was still at it two years later, having interrupted work to revise earlier compositions. Further interruptions were caused by physical weakness. By the beginning of 1894, however, he had recovered sufficiently once again to travel, to Berlin, to hear his Seventh Symphony and Te Deum performed. In the following months he returned for the last time to the Abbey of St. Florian, near Linz, to play the organ - as he had done for so many years when he was younger. He then made an attempt to resume his lectures at the University of Vienna, but was too weak to continue for more than a few weeks.
By year’s end he had written the three movements of the Ninth Symphony, although he clearly wished to continue. He is quoted as saying at the time, “I have done my duty on earth. I have accomplished what I could, and my final wish is to be allowed to finish my Ninth Symphony. Three movements are almost complete, the Adagio nearly finished. There remains only the finale. I trust that death will not deprive me of my pen.” (Herbert Glass / laphil.com)
25 янв 2024
