2024-01-15 17:35:33
Culture Classic Anniversary
The man who rediscovered Anton Bruckner
Status: 15.01.2024 | Reading time: 4 minutes
Chef in Köln: François-Xavier Roth
Those: Marco Borggreve
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Anton Bruckner is the musical anniversary of the year, and everywhere the old clichés are being warmed up and romantic incense clouds are rising. The conductor François-Xavier Roth, on the other hand, does everything differently – and convinces with a radical view of the third symphony.
One would probably not be too wrong if one were to describe Anton Bruckner, the jubilarian of this calendar year alongside Puccini, as a relatively tricky mixture of helicopter father and tiger father. In the absence of actual children, the lifelong bachelor’s parental ambitions were directed toward his symphonies. A quality that – parents and composers are completely alike – can be shown in the example of his child of sorrows – the Third in D minor.
Actually, everything started so well with the third one. It took little longer than a normal pregnancy to come into existence 150 years ago. In September 1873, in addition to the completely finished Second, Bruckner took the fully sketched and three-quarters finished score of the D minor Symphony with him to his idol Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. He should choose between the two symphonies which one should be dedicated to him.
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After a rather beer-filled evening in the salon of Villa Wahnfried – a construction site like the Festspielhaus – Bruckner, the world champion in self-doubt, could no longer fully remember what Wagner had decided to do. After submissively asking the master, it remained with the third party – which in the original version was interspersed with Wagner allusions. Which in turn remained the best news for around 17 years about the most powerful of all Bruckner symphonies at around 2000 bars.
What possibly led to Bruckner’s “Wagner Symphony No 3 in D minor,” as it said on the cover page of the autograph, having to endure an almost endless crossroads to world success after its final completion in the late evening of December 31, 1873, is perhaps better understood nowhere than in François-Xavier Roth’s new recording with the fabulous Cologne Gürzenich Orchestra. And why Bruckner simply couldn’t resist educating this symphonic offspring even more intensively and for longer than he did with his six successors.
Anton Bruckner (1824 to 1896)
Those: De Agostini via Getty Images
The third is, so to speak, the blueprint for all the cathedrals that Bruckner was to design afterwards. A bold design, something unprecedented. An exuberance coolly constructed using classical means, a rhythmic and harmonious assault on heaven.
A world blueprint whose secret program Bruckner revealed in 1891. Then he walked on Vienna’s Ringstrasse past the Atonement House, where Friedrich von Schmidt, the Ringstrasse architect and cathedral builder, is buried: “Here’s a big ball – next to it lies the master on the bier! That’s how it is in life, and that’s what I wanted to describe in the last movement of my third symphony. The polka means the humor and happiness of the world – the chorale means the sad, painful things in it.
There isn’t a bit of incense hanging around in Roth’s version of this massive spatial feat. Each of the many crazy struts shines as if they had just been sandblasted. Roth, who never tires of defending the original versions and Bruckner’s early symphonies – including the study symphony and the “Zero” which Bruckner deleted – Roth shows Bruckner’s construction plan as naked and glaring as possible.
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A plan that comes from the baroque contrapuntal tradition, which Bruckner, the church musician, mastered like no other of his colleagues, and which already in the Third goes far beyond the so-called Romanticism (of which the Third really doesn’t have much) into the modern era (whose new tones in Schönberg’s style are also derived from counterpoint).
It was all too much for the Viennese. The listeners and the Philharmonic Orchestra. They had rejected the third party three times. Until they grudgingly accepted the second version.
And then there was bad luck too. Johann von Herbeck, the intended conductor, died relatively shortly before the premiere in December 1877. Bruckner, who was one of the most magnificent organists of his time but a pretty lousy orchestra conductor, had to take the podium himself. And witness a horrific disaster.
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The audience left the music club hall in droves during the performance. The orchestra stood up immediately after the last note and followed quickly. Whoever stayed whistled. And the newspaper later said: “You can’t stop shaking your head when listening to this music, and you probably even touch your pulse from time to time to see whether what you’re hearing isn’t the product of your own fever.”
Like Gaudi, Bruckner initially did things with his cathedral in Barcelona. The world was not yet ready for his crazy world mirror, for polka and chorale. It wasn’t until 1890, when the Fourth and Seventh had been celebrated, that Hans Richter conducted the third version. Shortened by a fifth, freed from Wagner allusions, exaggeratedly formulated and polished like a motorway church version of the original version.
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