Anton Bruckner at 200: His melodies are like bathing in brine

2024-09-04 10:54:53

Anton Bruckner was born 200 years ago. He is yesterday and tomorrow, a revolutionary believer. Today’s listeners find comfort and inner sanctity in the Catholic composer of the cross.

One, Riccardo Muti, conducted Anton Bruckner’s Eighth, the last soloist to perform for the first time at the Salzburg Festival at the age of 84 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. As a large, pathos-filled, brass-sharp C minor opera, melodramatic and effective, yet professionally calm, wonderfully led up to its final release – similar to the late Verdi.

The other, Kirill Petrenko, tried – as his first intrusion into the Bruckner cosmos at the age of 52 – the light, yet hyper-complex Fifth, the “Faith Symphony”, while moderately and cleverly on the journey that began in Pordenone, Friuli. , with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, which is dedicated to him out of. Before that he acted as the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic on the Spree and in Salzburg, Lucerne and now in London. But as is often the case with him: he can’t let go (yet), the sound architecture is not developed.

The third, Herbert Blomstedt, conducted the Bamberg Symphony on Bruckner’s grave under the organ of St. This period includes the unfinished, spiritual, otherworldly ninth. It just sounds like a hint of evil, summing up the whole life dedicated to music, especially spent with this composer. You can experience it on Arte on September 4th, Anton Bruckner’s 200th birthday.

Riccardo Muti, Kirill Petrenko, Herbert Blomstedt: Anton Bruckner is – still – and still on this anniversary a man. A word for the old, white, egocentric, do not leave the Lord’s Stand. They still approached him with fear. Even Christian Thielemann, who was otherwise interested in research, became calm and balanced and let the precious gold glitter shine.

These pieces are long, as well as full of testosterone, although they stay away from any macho character, but can become ordinary and common when they are loud and fun. There is something grave, majestic, pontifical about them, and they sound especially beautiful in Cathedrals. But even without the spiced tone and patterns in your head, these gigantic listening styles reveal a lot.

Especially and especially today. They are nothing special; But do you have to? With hardly any other composer there is such a difference between simply measuring notes and allowing them to blossom and become music.

Powerful compressions, harmonious movements, formation of moments, development of lost cultural orientation, all known, experienced, heard, tested. The colossus Bruckner with him managed a catalog of works (eight and three-quarter mature symphonies, two composed symphonic sins of the river, a few symphonic trivialities, a few masses, motets, a Te Deum, cantatas, organ and piano pieces) , this colossus. still standing there in a strange irregular way.

However, he has made a big house for himself in music history and in the entertainment business. Bruckner is yesterday and tomorrow at the same time, a devoted devotee who dedicated his music to Richard Wagner, the Emperor or even the good Lord. Johann Sebastian Bach also performed the latter. But deliberately bold, not as hunchingly easy as this gluer of the music stuck together, forever isolated on his body system bench, running away from the people.

The man Bruckner, or rather this man tormented by self-doubt, oppressed by sorrows, eager to listen to every critic, who should always increase his calculations, who died in the area especially in Vienna, is foreign to us today. We don’t understand and underestimate how this hunter, of all people, can insist on such a terrible song – and we even get more of it. We draw comfort, beauty, upliftment from you, let it go, become light, floating on the clouds of your voice through everyday life.

In the temple of classical peace

Bruckner for children, that will probably not happen. It doesn’t have to. There must be something for the mature listener who is not completely spoiled by the decaying society and thirsts for the unheard sounds, the noisy joy of old age. Not everything has to be boiled down to simple language. Some things may still take their time today.

Of all people, Anton Bruckner, the cross Catholic composer who draws his inspiration every day from the fear of God, which has become outdated at the time, wants to bury this with sound, he appeared on his 200th birthday, today. , in the pagan era, as a kind of Ayurvedic Monk world, which is with us made by hand, purified and pampered by the oils of the sweet sound.

We meet him in the temple of the singer’s sadness that shines forever with his songs of sorrow, which is more beautiful, wider and different than singing and giving. It is a detox agent as well as a remedy. A refreshment beyond compare.

Nothing stands in the way. All previously shared writing issues in the Bruckner community have been addressed. A young conductor as young as the 53-year-old German Markus Poschner, who has already received the Bayreuth recital, can dare to show the perfection of Bruckner’s son perfectly with all 19 parts as the conductor of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz.

As a kind of Parsifal without music, Bruckner has long united the opposing camps of the Brahmsians and Wagnerians. It forms a symphonic bridge to the brilliantly contrasting worlds of Mahler and Strauss’s vocal epics, to the Finnish eternal gloom of Sibelius and the ambivalences of Shostakovich, which sounds tortured by a channel century.

The heavenly endings of this music, apparently the infinity of those who are not resolved, they slow us down, bring us down, with a passionate feeling of a special kind of Bruckner’s experience replaces the body-to gliding along in Solelake. It has no esoteric trappings and yet always has a cathartic effect. We no longer stand in front of him in amazement, we want to give ourselves the best pleasure while listening to a dry, special shower.