The Symphonies of Anton Bruckner are appropriate for today's political climate

The New York Times doesn’t like Hillary Clinton, nor Anton Bruckner. The Staatskapelle Berlin came to New York with conductor Daniel Baremboim to play the nine numbered Symphonies of the Austrian composer in eleven days, a major landmark in American musical life. The New York Times covered it.

Covered it, alright. With great condescension, apparent from the very first paragraph. Nine “sprawling” compositions, and the Times couldn’t be bothered to send one critic to all nine concerts, instead sending two different critics, each for a “healthy chunk” of the series (“healthy” as in broccoli).

John Berky, who runs the website ABruckner.com, wrote this about the Times article in a newsletter:

After the cycle was over, the New York Times published an inane interview by two music critics who never understood Bruckner and still don't. The article entitled, “When a Composer Just Doesn’t Do It for You (No Matter How Much You Listen)” could easily been replaced by an article written by me explaining why I don't understand Hip-Hop.

I’m going to go several steps further and assert that not only is the article asinine, it is morally wrong. So. Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim and Zachary Woolfe, you don’t like Bruckner? That’s fine. But you’re actively trying to dissuade anyone else from checking out his music. That is wrong.

Maybe the two critics didn’t come up with that unfairly insulting headline (the headline for the print article was different but also insulting). But they are responsible for the rest of the content. Except of course the photo of the orchestra with Baremboim.

Hey, by the way, notice in the photo how the cellos seem to be almost in the middle of the orchestra? Looks like the first violins are to the conductor’s left, and the second violins to his right. That’s the sort of detail that a halfway impartial critic would have at least mentioned in passing.

Instead, the two very biased critics treat us to dismissive references to Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. But the worst part is how they try to link Bruckner to nationalism and racism.

So the Nazis wanted a great composer to hold up as an example of being Aryan. The choices were Paul Hindemith, who was alive, and Anton Bruckner, who was dead. It was an easy choice. Actually, there were a few more choices than that, but you get the point.

Da Fonseca-Wollheim writes that “Bruckner the star of [the Nazis’] weekly classical broadcasts in the latter years of World War II,” which sounds correct but is a bit misleading.

A Furtwängler recording of Bruckner was played for the announcement of Hitler’s death. But even in death, Bruckner resisted the Nazi appropriation. You can only suppress his church music so much, and the Nazis wanted Hitler seen as a deity.

Bruckner’s veneration of Jesus and the Virgin Mary did not fit the narrative the Nazis made up for him. As World War II went on, Bruckner did lose favor with the Nazis, and after the war, his music was not banned in Israel like Wagner’s was.

What I find the most offensive in the Times article, however, is Woolfe’s attempt to compare Bruckner to Donald Trump: “White, male, mocked by urban elites for his provincial manners and dress — sound familiar?”

Look, Bruckner dressed in a manner that was appropriate for his social standing in rural Austria. When he moved to Vienna, he was not able to afford the latest and greatest in fashion, at least not at first anyway (his fiscal prudence did eventually make him wealthier than he realized).

Trump is supposedly a billionaire. What is his excuse for his fake hair, ridiculous tan, and tying his tie so it hangs below his belt? Vanity and insecurity seem to be the only plausible explanations.

Or maybe Woolfe was trying to compare Bruckner to Hitler, but the basis there seems to be thin, perhaps limited to the Hitler mustache, which, in any case, I would prefer to think of as a Chaplin mustache. In any case, Bruckner seems to have not ever let it grow too much.

The Times critics do talk a little bit about the actual music itself, but then they get bogged down in a discussion of whether or not Bruckner is too personal or not personal enough. Da Fonseca-Wollheim writes:

My experience in the hall was inevitably colored by what has happened in the world, beginning with a presidential inauguration that was heavy on nationalist rhetoric. Perhaps my biggest gripe about Bruckner has been how perfectly suited his music is to communal veneration. A lot of people who love Mahler also love Bruckner, and there are similarities. But Mahler always puts the individual — the doubting, neurotic individual — at the center. In Bruckner, the triumphant hero of too many movements seems to be a “we.”

As in a mob “we,” not a Stronger Together “we” (not that the Times considers Clinton to be news anymore, after all they did trying to invent a Clinton Foundation scandal).

Da Fonseca-Wollheim goes on to write that Bruckner’s music is “not sufficiently embodied: a kind of sexless protagonist grappling with abstract demons.” I guess she would rather listen to porn scores by Walter Murphy or Ron Jones.

Did the critics have anything to say about how the Staatskapelle Berlin played? A little bit, just a little bit. Da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote that “the level of playing was uniformly impressive” and Woolfe wrote that “This orchestra made as good a case for the music as I’ve ever heard live. Mr. Barenboim kept it vital, flowing: He didn’t linger either on the bombast or the Adagio exhalations. The playing had power and transparency, a real sense of layers.”

Overall, it is a terrible article, and I will not dignify it with even a target=”_blank” link. I’d sooner link an Eduard Hanslick review. The article did not provide at least a fleeting overview of each of the Symphonies, which is what I will do now.

Overview of the Bruckner Symphonies

Fans of Robert Schumann would do well to check out Bruckner’s Study Symphony in F minor. Bruckner wrote it while he was studying orchestration with Otto Kitzler and considered it nothing more than a school exercise. For his part, Kitzler considered it competent but unoriginal. However, it has more than a few hints of Bruckner’s later greatness. (This Symphony was not included in the Staatskapelle Berlin cycle).

The first version of the Symphony No. 1 in C minor is not so much tragic, as the key of C minor would suggest, but more heroic, and with youthful vitality. This is also true of a version of just a few years after the original.

Near the end of his life, Bruckner revised it again, making it much more tragic and warlike. I’m not sure which version the Staatskapelle Berlin played in New York; it’s another one of those details the Times critics might have mentioned if they hadn’t spent so much ink berating Bruckner.

Music historians seem to agree that Symphony No. 0 in D minor was actually written after the First but before the Second. I won’t bore you with all the dates and such. I will just say that this is dramatic, exciting music, and an interesting precursor to the Third Symphony. And that it was not included in the Staatskapelle Berlin cycle either.

Even if Bruckner had written two C minor Symphonies in a row, Symphony No. 2 in C minor is vastly different, with more melancholy but also more sweetness. There’s something like four different versions to choose from with this one, but again, that’s a detail the Times critics failed to mention.

Maybe the best introduction to Bruckner is his Symphony No. 3 in D minor, the one with a trumpet theme that Wagner liked enough to accept the dedication. Spoiler alert: the trumpet theme comes back at the end in D major.

In whichever version you hear it, the Scherzo is music that would make for a good temp soundtrack in an aerial warfare scene of a war movie. But in what is sometimes called the 1877 version, the Scherzo has a special coda that ramps up the excitement even more, at the expense of making the finale a bit anti-climactic.

The most popular Bruckner Symphony is perhaps Symphony No. 4 in E-flat major, “Romantic.” Back in the 19th Century, some people considered it a requirement that music have a story in words to go along with it. Bruckner tried to oblige, writing about medieval castles, knights in the forest, hunts and such.

These days, it’s usually heard in the 1880 version, which includes the famous Hunting Scherzo.

By the way, in the 1870s, orchestras weren’t really interested in Bruckner’s music. His successes at the time came mostly from secular music for men’s chorus. A lesser man would have stopped writing those big Symphonies no one wants to hear, and see about monetizing his men’s chorus music.

Bruckner would have rated but a paragraph in Grove’s if he had done that. Still, when he started writing his monumental Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, he could not have known he would one day be regarded as one of the greatest symphonists of all time.

Almost a century before Vagn Holmboe, Bruckner was putting musical themes through metamorphosis. The Scherzo theme is masterfully derived with simplicity from the Adagio theme in a way that is far more apparent to the eye than the ear.

In the finale, Bruckner combines fugue and sonata form to make for exciting, powerful music. Cymbals, triangle, offstage band, included in an inauthentic version, are wholly unnecessary. Bruckner did not make any significant revisions to his Fifth, Sixth or Seventh Symphonies.

For a late work, Symphony No. 6 in A major is almost as obscure as the Study Symphony. And it is my favorite of Bruckner’s Symphonies. Concert idea: Bruckner's Sixth in the first half, excerpts from Superman by John Williams in the second half.

Has Bruckner’s Sixth ever been played in Detroit? Yes, it has, but I don’t think I’ve heard it live. I have this vague memory, but it could be a false memory. It has been definitely played in New York, and there is a memorable recording by Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic.

What’s more, it was played in New York last month not once but five times! Juanjo Mena conducted the New York Philharmonic in the Nowak edition of Bruckner’s Sixth in four concerts the last weekend of January. The program had Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major in the first half.

As he criticizes Mena's conducting, James R. Oestreich shows that he knows something about Bruckner in his New York Times review:

Mr. Mena, 50, and the chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic since 2011, is, in any case, no tyro, but he set himself a difficult assignment, taking on a Bruckner symphony — and a lesser-known one, the Sixth — as a guest. A lot of balancing is needed among Bruckner’s thickly layered textures to make everything speak: more than can comfortably be done in a couple of days of rehearsals, especially in acoustics as intransigent as those of David Geffen Hall.

And Mr. Mena did not entirely succeed by the time of the first performance, on Wednesday evening. The first movement was almost unrelentingly loud — assaultive, at times — and textures were muddy.

The other three movements offered relief, especially the second, where there were wonderfully lyrical moments and fine exchanges among solo woodwinds. (How often does applause break out after a slow movement, as it did here?)

Wait a minute! Why didn’t the New York Times assign the Staatskapelle Berlin concerts to Oestreich? That would have made a hell of a lot more sense.

Symphony No. 7 in E major brought Bruckner his first success in orchestral composition. It is luminous music throughout, even with the first appearance in Bruckner's music of the Wagner tubas, which really are horns with a darker, more trombone-like sound.

Musicologists and conductors continue to argue whether the cymbal clash in the Adagio was Bruckner’s idea or an inauthentic addition by someone else. Where does Baremboim stand on this issue? Corinne and Zach didn’t bother to take note.

With Symphony No. 8 in C minor we once again run into the issue of different versions. The 1887 version was good, despite an unconvincing first movement coda, a little too much repetition in the Scherzo, too many cymbal clashes in the Adagio and a somewhat plain finale coda.

But the narrative trajectory from darkness to light, more intense than Beethoven’s Fifth, it was already there in 1887. Hermann Levi, the first conductor to see the new score, didn’t get it. By 1890, Bruckner had produced a new version that was a vast improvement, but it wasn’t really tailored to be easier for Levi to understand.

However, some argue that if Bruckner hadn’t spent so much time revising the Eighth (and other works, too), he might have had time to finish the Symphony No. 9 in D minor. This music is almost apocalyptic, as in Book of Revelations apocalyptic. Da Fonseca-Wollheim writes:

And that unfinished Ninth finally produced the heart-in-your-throat emotional identification that I had been waiting for. The Adagio is built on a gesture of a minor ninth, a huge upward scooping interval that seems to express both hubris and hope.

Of course, this wasn’t supposed to be the last movement. But as it was, Barenboim’s epic Bruckner traversal ended with the horns holding a radiant but scarily fragile note for what seems like an eternity. For me, it was an appropriate question mark, left hanging over all the musical and political turbulence of the past two weeks.

Forgive her for not knowing about the participation of the Wagner tubas in those final measures of the Adagio.

Bruckner wanted to write an actual finale, and he did get very far. He might have even written down a bare bones sketch for the coda. Trouble was that the executor of his will failed to properly secure the estate. Souvenir hunters helped themselves to pages of the emerging score.

Some of the pages have been recovered, and musicologists have, despite the gaps, been able to put together a pretty good realization of what Bruckner had at the time he died.

It’s not the finale that he would have written if he had had more time and health, but it is much closer to Bruckner's intention than ending with the Adagio, or even continuing with the Te Deum, a makeshift solution Bruckner himself suggested.

By the way, this is a time as good as any to call out conductor Kent Nagano for his hypocrisy (it’s not just Republicans who can be hypocrites). A couple of years ago, Nagano recorded a video message in which he said that it’s not right to perform any musicologist’s completion of the Bruckner Ninth and that it is fine as it is in three movements, because it’s not pure Bruckner.

But in that same video, Nagano admitted he once stuck Schoenberg’s Erwartung into Bruckner’s Ninth. So it’s wrong to play what musicologists have painstakingly put together from Bruckner’s own sketches and score, but it’s okay to insert a completely different composition by someone else into the Ninth? Absurd! Ridiculous!

Though not as absurd and ridiculous as the Fonseca-Wollheim and Woolfe tirade against Bruckner in the Times. Yesterday I wrote about how the music of Vagn Holmboe is not quite appropriate for the political climate today (that was originally posted on Daily Kos, and this post was also originally posted on Daily Kos).

I think that the music of Anton Bruckner, on the other hand, is appropriate for the political climate today. Not because of a “question mark” produced by a performance tradition that has mostly ignored the finale of Bruckner’s Ninth due to an accident of circumstance, but because Bruckner’s music, even in the most desperate or harrowing moments of the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, always has the hope of a triumph in a major key at the end.

And we need that hope, as we face the possible destruction of this great nation at the hands of people who don’t care about the principles and ideals it was founded on.

The Symphonies of Vagn Holmboe, not quite for our time

According to the New York Times music critics, some music is not always appropriate for the current political climate. Presumably, the overplayed compositions of the core repertoire are always appropriate.

Maybe Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture would be ironically appropriate for this year’s Independence Day festivities. After all, the Russians triumphed over the French in 1812 and over the Americans in 2016.

Here is an idea for American orchestras’ Fourth of July concerts: an all-Russian program. Start with Balakirev’s Overture on Three Russian Songs, then Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, intermission, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.

And the orchestral version of Balakirev’s Islamey… oops, no, scratch that one. Pad out the time to the fireworks and the 1812 Overture with assorted Russian marches. But I digress.

Too many music critics fall for the notion that the best music just naturally rises to the top, but the truth is that luck has a lot to do with it. How else can you explain that Johann Sebastian Bach was essentially forgotten for a century and a half, and that Michael Haydn is only now being brought out of obscurity?

Nor do I have any faith in composition contests to name worthy winners, even though there is in the history books one example of just such a thing happening: in Denmark, almost a century ago.

As so often happens, the contest committee had advanced a lot of bland, boring choices to the second round. Fortunately for Vagn Holmboe, and for us, the conductor Egisto Tango, chairman of the committee, had been absent for the first round.

When Tango returned, he rescued the committee from their shortsightedness and stupidity. Unsatisfied by the second round picks, he asked to see the scores eliminated in the first round. When he came upon the score of Holmboe’s Second Symphony, he knew he had a winner.

Maybe it was just an accident of timing that I really started to get to know the Symphonies of Vagn Holmboe during President Obama’s two terms. I had been aware of Holmboe, world famous in Denmark like Nielsen, since President Bill Clinton’s first term.

I had a subscription to CD Review, a magazine that went out of print at some point prior to 1996. I don’t remember where I left those magazines, nor do I remember which Holmboe recordings they reviewed, but I do remember getting the impression that Holmboe's music is consistently grim, fierce and bleak. Which is a lot better than many 20th Century composers, whose music is bleak and dull.

It wasn’t until some time after 2006 that I realized I had access to the Naxos Music Library, and not until 2009 that it occurred to me to look Holmboe up in there. I think it was the Eighth Symphony that I heard first. The ferocious intensity of the first movement had me hooked, even though the rest of the Symphony did not make much of an impression on me at the time.

Overview of the Holmboe Symphonies

Symphony No. 1, Opus 4. Holmboe's shortest Symphony, and it is such a delight that it feels like it's way too short. If there is any hesitation to try it out, one criticism of it, "sounds more like a dance suite," should overcome that hesitance.  

Symphony No. 2, Opus 15. An important step on Holmboe's way to his mature style and his concept of "metamorphosis." Much more serious than the First, longer, not as tuneful, the Second is an absorbing narrative from start to finish.

Symphony No. 3, Opus 25, "Sinfonia Rustica." Here we hear the more cheerful side of Holmboe. Would you have guessed that it was written during the Nazi occupation of Denmark?

The cheerful opening Allegro non troppo could be seen as a gesture of defiance towards the Nazi occupiers. The lengthy, slow middle movement recalls Nielsen's take on the melancholy temperament, but without that same sense of resigned passiveness, and there is central episode with an almost combative mood that is more what is expected from Holmboe. The closing Vivace gradually builds back up to the exultation that began the Symphony.

Symphony No. 4, Opus 29, "Sinfonia Sacra." God exists but He doesn't care about people. This is a good explanation not only for the suffering of so many innocent people but also the comfortable lives of evil, wealthy people. Holmboe believed in God, but not a God who cares all that much about us.

Vagn Holmboe's brother died in a concentration camp, and he wrote this Symphony to his memory, his only choral Symphony. The Gloria (fifth of six movements) seems to me to have no trace of irony, though it does remind me of the Rustic Symphony which Holmboe wrote during the war.

Idea for a concert: video game composer Nobuo Uematsu in the first half, making sure to include “One-Winged Angel” from one of the Final Fantasy games.

Symphony No. 5, Opus 35. Aside from its col legno beginning, the first movement might on first hearing seem like more of the same old Holmboe: gritty, serious, driven. But this is music that repays repeated hearings; the pentatonic leanings of the first movement are likely to be more apparent the second or third time one listens.

The Andante affetuoso shows Holmboe's typical objective lyricism, here more or less dominated by the oboes. It is the concluding Vivace that really sets this Symphony apart from Holmboe's later works, with an upbeat mood that is almost as cheerful as in the Third Symphony.

I recommend starting a concert with John Williams’s Cowboys Overture (I have musical reasons for this suggestion), then Mozart’s Piano Concerto in B-flat major, K. 595 (more for historical than musical reasons), intermission, then this Holmboe Symphony.

However, if you’re afraid of people leaving at intermission, put Holmboe in the first half, and then Williams and Mozart in the second half. Though maybe Mozart might come across kind of boring and anti-climactic after Williams and Holmboe.

Symphony No. 6, Opus 43. This one is just in two movements. Not much seems to happen in the first movement, but it really held my interest throughout. In the second movement, Holmboe uses what he could not have known would become a stereotypical rap rhythm (as in rap prior to hip-hop).

Symphony No. 7, Opus 50. Not as combative as the Eighth, but very intense. The structure is significantly less traditional than that of the Eighth: we could say that the Seventh consists of the traditional four movements but with three interludes inserted between them, each called "Intermedio" and marked Andantino, each lasting a tiny bit more than a minute.

Perhaps Holmboe felt the unusual structure was necessary to highlight his now overt aesthetic principle of continuous thematic metamorphosis (a principle wholly compatible with a more traditional structure, as the Eighth shows us).

Chamber Symphony No. 1, Opus 53. There are timpani right off the bat. I guess “chamber” means no unpitched percussion, and probably no trombones or tuba either. Though about the same length as the “full orchestra” First Symphony, the First Chamber Symphony is definitely middle period Holmboe, driven and serious.

The idea of Holmboe writing a Sinfonietta seems ludicrous. If you shop online, be sure to hear a 30-second sample from the energetic finale.

Symphony No. 8, Opus 56. This Symphony is the perfect expression of our modern lives: constant struggle, with the relaxing moments being only brief respites before the next crisis. There is practically no lyricism, but the intense narrative is so well crafted that the attention doesn't wander even in the quieter moments.

The "molto intensivo" marking for the opening Allegro is more for the benefit of the performers than the listeners. Although the rest of the Symphony doesn't exhibit quite the same level of intensity, the unflinching quality persists to the bitter end. This is one of the top ten Symphonies of the 20th Century.

Consciously or subconsciously, John Williams continued the thematic metamorphosis of Holmboe’s Eighth Symphony in his Catch Me If You Can soundtrack.

Sinfonia in Memoriam, Opus 65. Originally billed as the Ninth Symphony despite the composer’s objection, the Sinfonia in Memoriam should technically not be included in this list. However, it is included in the boxed set of Holmboe’s Symphonies on the Bis label.

The middle Allegro vivace shows Holmboe really knew how to write for the strings col legno. It is music that crackles with great energy. The rest of it has not yet made much of an impression on me, but eventually will.

Symphony No. 9, Opus 95. Many years passed with Danes waiting for their greatest living composer to write his Ninth Symphony. Seems neither they nor he believed in the curse of the Ninth, it’s just that he had inspiration for other things.

I still think Holmboe’s Ninth is just plain weird. Very interesting, but weird, and somehow much less accessible than either the earlier or later Symphonies.

Superficially, it’s like the Seventh, but there’s just three “full” movements, though the two Intermezzos are longer than the Intermedios of the Seventh, and you have to turn up the volume much higher to be able to hear them. But the content of the Ninth is full of specters and shadows.

Chamber Symphony No. 2, Opus 100, “Elegy.” I’m not quite sure what to make of that “Elegy” subtitle. My first impression is that it is a weightier follow-up to the First Chamber Symphony.

Chamber Symphony No. 3, Opus 103a, “Frise.” Though in six movements rather than four, the Third Chamber Symphony seems to be much in the same spirit of the first two. It hasn’t yet grown on me like the other two.

A discographical note: as far as I’m aware, the only available recording of the Chamber Symphonies is by the Lapland Chamber Orchestra conducted by John Storgårds.

Symphony No. 10, Opus 105. Would you believe that the Detroit Symphony Orchestra premiered something by Vagn Holmboe? That was back in 1972 when the Detroit Symphony was a world-class orchestra, not a “community-supported orchestra” in which the musicians make a sacrifice in their paycheck but management doesn’t.

The Detroit Symphony will continue to perform world premieres, but revisit past premieres like Holmboe’s Tenth? No way. This coming season, they’re playing Beethoven’s Ninth, Rachmaninoff’s Second and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth all over again, three works that they have probably played in several consecutive seasons.

Though maybe Holmboe’s Tenth might not be the best choice for the orchestra to play Holmboe again. It’s music that holds the interest, it has something to do with Walt Whitman’s eidolons, and it is cited in Robert Layton’s A Guide to the Symphony.

For now, none of it really stands out, but I’m sure that with repeated listenings that will change. After all, it took a while for Martinů’s Third Symphony to stand out in my mind from his first two.

Symphony No. 11, Opus 144. There is something Olympic, as in competitive, about the first movement, that suggests to me athletic striving. But there is also this specific percussion sound (at 3:59 in the Aarhus recording) that suggests the sea to me for some reason.

Symphony No. 12, Opus 175. How to connect movements of a Symphony so that each seems to start from where the previous one ended? The Twelfth has one answer: notice how the middle Andante sereno echoes the end of the preceding Allegro con forza; you might need headphones to notice this, though.

Not that I have much of a basis for this, but if I had to give a nickname to this Symphony, it would be “Prospero’s Island.” Antony Hodgson did once say that Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 81 in G major could benefit from a colorful if irrelevant nickname.

Symphony No. 13, Opus 192. When Owain Arwel Hughes was planning a complete set of Holmboe’s Symphonies (excluding the Chamber Symphonies), he noticed the last CD of the set would be barely a little more than 40 minutes with just the Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies. So Holmboe wrote one more, a 20-minute work that brings the CD up to the more satisfying duration of 63:31.

Don’t think of it being in any way valedictory, despite it being his last, and certainly don’t expect a triumphant peroration at the end. Had Holmboe lived longer, he might have written a Fourteenth Symphony along similar lines.

Conclusion, for now

It takes time to really get to know a composer, and Holmboe is certainly worth knowing. Some of what I’ve written above comes from my eBook 104 Great Symphonies You Haven’t Heard Yet (Daily Kos readers get it for 75% off with coupon code QV73B, valid only on Smashwords until March 23). And some of what I’ve written above will find its way into a later version of that book.

Although I strongly recommend Holmboe’s music, his objectivity does not quite seem the ticket in these troubled times in which the world might fall apart completely, in my opinion.

With President Obama and the possibility that we were on our way to a fairer society in which the economy benefits everyone, not just the top tenth of one percent, a healthy dose of realism was appropriate.

But now, I find myself wanting music of great optimism, and perhaps reassurance. Rued Langgaard, that other composer world-famous in Denmark, is just too syrupy, however. Anton Rubinstein maybe? Or another Anton…

Consider this post ended not with a I chord, but a V7 chord, with the seventh of the chord trilled.

This was originally posted on Daily Kos yesterday.