TMSO Special

This concert is over. Date: Sun. 17. March 2019 14:00 (13:20)

Venue: Suntory Hall Venue Info

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Artists

Eliahu INBAL, Conductor

Profile

Program

Bruckner: Symphony No.8 in C minor WAB108 (Nowak: 1890 version)

Program Notes

Ⅰ Allegro moderato
Ⅱ Scherzo: Allegro moderato
Ⅲ Adagio: Feierlich langsam, doch nicht schleppend
　　　　　(Solemn and slow, but not dragging)
Ⅳ Finale: Feierlich, nicht schnell (Solemn, not fast)

Anton Bruckner: Born in Ansfelden, Austria, September 4, 1824; died in Vienna, October 11, 1896

Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is a work of such vast proportions, magnitude of conception and awesome tonal monoliths that it eclipses even all of this composer's remaining edifices in sound. Like Bach, Bruckner infused a sense of religious exaltation into virtually everything he wrote, scarcely differentiating between sacred and secular music. This Eighth Symphony is the most far-flung and expansive of Bruckner’s paeans of praise to God. It is the longest by a good margin (nearly an hour and a half), requires the largest orchestra Bruckner ever wrote for, contains the greatest wealth of inspired ideas, evokes unsurpassed taurine strength, and scales heights of ecstasy exceptional even for Bruckner.

Bruckner began work on the Eighth Symphony in 1884 at the age of sixty. After completing it in 1887, he sent it to the famed conductor Hermann Levi, whom he considered an “artistic father,” for his opinion. Levi found this complex work incomprehensible, and sent word as such to Bruckner. The composer was utterly crushed, so much so that he plunged into a profound depression. Over the next few years he went through revision mania, rewriting not only the Eighth but four other symphonies as well. The symphony was first heard on December 18, 1892 with Hans Richter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. It was an enormous success.

Over the years the Eighth went through further revisions. After World War II, a new Bruckner edition was initiated by Leopold Nowak. Nowak, working with scholarly rectitude, restored the Eighth to its 1890 version, the one we hear this afternoon.

Length and expansiveness are essential ingredients of the Bruckner experience. They are as intimately bound up in his symphonic visions as are brevity and concision in a Chopin Prelude or a Webern Orchesterstück. Listening to a Bruckner symphony requires patience; indeed, it almost defines patience, a quality not easily cultivated in the harried life of our age and its obsession with sound-bites and instant everything.

The impression of immensely wide, open spaces is communicated right from the symphony’s opening theme. The second theme is a strongly contrasting subject in G major, warmly lyrical and set to Bruckner’s favorite rhythmic pattern, a duplet followed by a triplet (or a triplet followed by a duplet). A third theme begins with a dialogue between horns and woodwinds, and continues as a series of five descending, sharply accented notes. The extensive development section opens with another kind of dialogue between solo oboe and a quartet of Wagner tubas, instruments Bruckner used only in his last three symphonies. He treats his themes in inversions, augmentation, diminution, and in varied combinations of these. Tremendous emotional forces are at work, and the strife is not alleviated in the recapitulation, which is ushered in by titanic, grinding clashes of the first theme combined with sequences of the second theme’s duplet/triplet rhythmic pattern. But the greatest climax of the movement is yet to come. This occurs when the rhythmic pattern of the first theme is brutally hammered out by trumpets and horns over a display of frightening power by the rest of the orchestra. An extended epilogue of profound resignation and deep pathos brings the movement to a quiet close, the only first movement of all Bruckner’s eleven symphonies (including the early No. 0 and No. 00) to end so.

In the Eighth Symphony, Bruckner for the first time placed his Scherzo in second place. Bruckner felt this music to be a musical portrait of the Deutscher Michel, the typical, naïve, rough German peasant. Nevertheless, many listeners will find a more sympathetic approach in Robert Simpson’s view: “music whose fantastic power suggests nothing so much as the constant thud of a colossal celestial engine beyond even Milton’s imagining. … the trenchant main theme pounds with the continuous reciprocating action of a mighty piston.” The Trio provides a moment of calm repose in the midst of this tremendous dynamo, beginning with a gracious theme in the violins.

The superb Adagio, one of the longest movements in the entire symphonic repertory (nearly half an hour), is felt by many to be the crowning achievement
of Bruckner’s life work. Two broad thematic ideas alternate, each reiteration an elaborate development of its predecessor. The first paragraph alone occupies an enormous stretch of twenty-eight bars. “Ecstatic mysticism,” “consecration,” and “profoundly dark mystery” are terms associated with this movement, but the experience defies verbal description. The ultimate climax, the grandest in a whole chain of them, is something so shattering one could easily imagine the heavens bursting open in a vision of blinding intensity. The sustained coda is music of sublime acceptance and serenity featuring the horn quartet and, in the final bars, the Wagner tubas.

The Finale, like the first movement, contains three easily identifiable, contrasting themes that are worked into another enormous movement of towering climaxes and devotional strength. In the symphony’s final pages, Bruckner combines the principal themes of all the previous movements in a stupendous C-major pillar of sound, transforming all the symphony’s tensions, harmonic ambiguities, struggles and aspirations into a tapestry of supreme onfirmation and exaltation.
Program notes by Robert Markow

Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.

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