Many consider Ivor Bolton to be one of the best
interpreters of baroque music. This image must be
corrected, because the Englishman is likewise just as
exciting with the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. This
is shown by his Bruckner cycle with the Mozarteum
Orchester Salzburg, currently in production on the
OehmsClassics label. Ivor Bolton landed a surprise
coup with the first release in the cycle, Bruckner’s
5th Symphony. The international press was thoroughly
positive – just as after release of the 7th. The conductor
now presents Bruckner’s 9th – a powerful symphonic
fragment. During Bruckner’s whole artistic life, he
struggled with the symphonic form. At the end, he
may have sensed that this work was in the process of
bursting all conventions – its Finale remained incomplete.
The composer decreed that instead of the Finale,
his Te Deum could be inserted, because the symphony
is “dedicated to the good Lord”. Ivor Bolton decided to use the three-movement fragment in the critical
revision
made by Benjamin Gunnar Cohrs using the
preparatory work by Alfred Orel and Leopold Nowak.
God himself is to blame
The prophet has no honour – or at least, little
– in his own country; especially in Vienna,
be it Mozart, Schubert or Bruckner, who
for a long time was treated as a village idiot that
fabricated „symphonic giant boas“ (Quote Johannes
Brahms). But at the latest in 1884/85,
with the overwhelming success of the Seventh
Symphony at its premiere under Arthur Nikisch
in Leipzig, and even more so under Hermann
Levi in Munich, then one could after all as a
Viennese – by all curious preciosity of being
embarrassed – be proud of the Austrian Anton
Bruckner. “Now he is surely one of us!”. Then
along came big brother Germany and claimed
Bruckner, as down to earth German blood,
for itself. Famous has become the picture of a
lonesome German “Hero and Leader” of Austrian
ancestry – Adolf Hitler – before a bust of
Anton Bruckner, the Germanic proto-genius
drawing from mythical omnipotence. Thus
the catastrophal “clinical case of necrophilia”
(Erich Fromm) decorated himself with the
down-to-earth heaven seeking symbol of creative
religio.
In his lifetime, and for a long period afterwards,
almost all of Bruckner’s works were
played in revised and, in part, extremely falsified
and deformed versions. Placed somewhat
unfortunately in the interconnections
of history, the discovery and publication
of the overdue required original versions of
the Bruckner works, from 1933 in Vienna by
Robert Haas, one of the most commendable
musicologists of the 20th century, occurred
together with the ascension of Adolf Hitler
and the expansion of the “Third Reich”.
With the “Anschluss” of Austria in 1938 the
head office of the Bruckner Complete Edition
was also immediately spirited away from
Vienna to Leipzig. This changed absolutely
nothing on the artistic necessity of withdrawing
from circulation the deformed arrangements
and abridgements of the Bruckner
symphonies and replacing each of them with
the original body of works, and here is where
the immense life-time achievement of Robert
Haas lies.
On the 2nd of April 1932, in Munich,
Siegmund von Hausegger heralded in the
new era of authentic Bruckner presentations,
with the first performance of the original
version of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony – an
irreversible process. At last the musicians,
the experts and the whole audience could acquire
for themselves a realistic impression of
Bruckner’s true greatness. Finally it became
possible to discover the real dimensions of his
creations to their full extent. From that date
a noteworthy Bruckner tradition came into
being, which in Germany is associated with
names such as Hausegger, Wilhelm Furtwängler,
Carl Schuricht, Joseph Keilberth, Eugen
Jochum, Herbert von Karajan, Günter
Wand, Rafael Kubelik and, above all, Sergiu
Celibidache. Naturally there were also others,
such as Hans Knappertsbusch, who continued
to cling to the past and presented the
adaptations. Politically comprehensible, but
in musical matters unacceptable, is the attempt
being undertaken these days by New
York circles around the conductor Leon Botstein
to advocate that the disfigured versions
from Josef Schalk and his peers, which were
played in Bruckner’s time, are on an equal
footing with the original versions.
Incidentally, the first countries outside Germany
in which Bruckner’s music had great
success were the Netherlands and – little by
little with growing resonance – England. Later
on his music made its triumphal procession
through the United States of America, to then
conquer also the Scandinavian and Russian
worlds and, eventually, to become a cultic object
of Japanese classical admiration.
After the Second World War the great
names of the authentic Bruckner movement,
Siegmund von Hausegger und Robert Haas,
were engulfed by the extinct “Third Reich”,
as if in a black hole. Now back in Vienna,
for the freshly started Bruckner Complete
Edition a new editor was employed, Leopold
Nowak, who undertook everything honest
and dishonest to justify his existence on a par
with the pioneer Robert Haas. Thereby editions
emerged which, in cases of doubt, to a
great extent chose unfavourable and atypical
solutions – simply to be different. Accordingly,
after Nowak’s resignation and under
pressure from leading authorities, a reluctant
start was made to tackle a third print of the
Complete Edition, this time – more than a
half century after the epoch-making Haas
editions – on the fundament of new findings
and diverse research results. This third edition
now also forms the basis of the present
new recording under Ivor Bolton.
According to today’s synopsis Bruckner
wrote not simply nine symphonies only,
such as before him Beethoven and after him
Dvorák, Mahler and Vaughan Williams. He
wrote 19 versions, and the leading Bruckner
researcher and music publicist Benjamin
Gunnar Cohrs has placed them in a chronology,
coming to 19 versions of eleven symphonies
(the two early symphonies in f minor
and d minor were no longer acknowledged
by Bruckner himself ). This timetable brings
light onto a very entwined innovative route.
Thus emerged from 1887–89, between the
1st and 2nd versions of the Eighth Symphony,
the 4th version of the Fourth Symphony and
the 3rd version of the Third Symphony, and
from 1890–91, as an insertion in composition
of the Ninth Symphony, the 2nd version of
the First Symphony. It is not surprising that
Bruckner did not come to an end with the
Ninth Symphony!
A great mythology has grown around
Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, his last and uncompleted,
which he had dedicated to ’the
dear God’. In his very sure-footed Bruckner
biography published in 1944, Peter Raabe
quoted Bruckner’s physician Dr. Richard
Heller:
‘I believe, to be able to clarify some pronouncements
from Bruckner, that in his ideas
he had to some extent concluded a contract with
God. If the dear Lord wanted him to complete
the symphony, which is intended to be a canticle
to God, then He must bestow life for as long as
is needed; should he die earlier, then it is God’s
own fault if He receives an uncompleted work.
Devoutness was, by the way, a principal feature
of this great genius. He prayed diligently, and
even when these prayers sometimes took on very
peculiar forms, they were nevertheless deeply
felt and piously brought forth. As no one could
disturb him when he was at prayer, which he
carried out on his knees before his large crucifix,
I had the opportunity several times, standing
quietly in the room, to hear his prayers. He
praised a number of “Our Fathers” and “Hail
Marys” and closed with a fully freestyle prayer,
such as, “Dear Lord, let me be in good health
again soon, look, I need my health so that I can
complete the Ninth”, etc. He uttered this last
passage in a somewhat impatient manner, closing
with a triple Amen, whereby, on a few occasions,
with the third Amen he struck against his
thighs with both hands, such that one couldn’t
help but think that he thought to himself: “If the
dear Lord does not hear that now, then it is not
my fault!” Has the Ninth actually remained
unfinished? Contemporary musicologists are
of the opinion that it was on hand in at least
a first, raw orchestral score and is probably
still even in existence – in private ownership
in Vienna. Time and again scattered pages
from the finale have turned up. The reason
for this is that, after Bruckner’s death, the testamentary
administrator conducted a loose
control and took no steps to ensure that the
material remained in an orderly and connected
condition. In the meantime there is
a group of musicologists who have, piece for
piece, filled out the empty spaces between the
turned up pages of the finale and improved it
step by step. They will not succeed in giving
the symphony a really adequate finale, but as
an attempt at reconstruction it is a highly interesting
exercise in style, one being followed
with great interest by many connoisseurs and
musicians.
Christoph Schlüren
translation: ar-pege translations