The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anton Bruckner · a symphony in C minor, WAB 108 · four movements for orchestra, in the version of 1890, in Leopold Nowak’s edition of 1955 · about 71 to 88 minutes in performance
Mode
Symphony as a cathedral of time: blocks of sound set in terraces, halts and restatements, closing in a cyclic apotheosis
Mythos
Death and transfiguration: death announced, faced and answered at the scale of the whole
Phase
Four movements, C minor, C minor, D flat major, C minor to C major; the Adagio on the Neapolitan, a semitone above the home key
Presentation
Concert music; four movements for triple woodwind, eight horns (four doubling Wagner tubas), three trumpets, three trombones, contrabass tuba, timpani, cymbals, triangle, three harps and strings
Register
From a theme adrift in the low strings to a brass outburst and a dying pulse; a peasant dance, a prayer with harps, ceremonial fanfares; no word anywhere
Scale
One consciousness facing death, the sacred, the state and the common people, by way of the composer’s own glosses for the last two; about eighty minutes
Governing Proposition
A first movement that ends not in triumph but in a theme dying away in the low strings over a pulse of the timpani; a scherzo of weight, an Adagio that climbs for twenty minutes to one summit, and a finale whose coda sounds the dead theme again in C major with the others. The wager of the work is that the end of a life can be faced first as extinction and then as glory, and that neither cancels the other.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The symphony begins under a string tremolo, with its theme in the low strings, and the theme does not yet know its key. It moves in the rhythm Bruckner made his own, two and three, and it is adrift before C minor is fixed. The work opens as if from far off, in the dark of the orchestra, and it has a long way to go: the first movement takes about a fifth of the running time, and it is the shortest stretch of the work but one.
The movement is in sonata form, built from blocks. A period is stated, the music halts on a general pause, and the period is stated again a step higher. Much of this is structure, the terraces of a large building; some of it is habit, and the habit is the work’s chief cost. The orchestra is the largest Bruckner wrote for: triple woodwind, eight horns, the fifth to eighth turning to Wagner tubas, three trumpets, three trombones and a contrabass tuba. The brass chorales are spaced so that the whole orchestra sounds like an organ without blur.
Near the end the brass break out, and Bruckner later spoke of this outburst as the annunciation of death. Then the theme dies away in the low strings, pianissimo, in C minor, over a pulse of the timpani. His name for the passage was Totenuhr, the death clock. In 1887 the movement had ended fortissimo in C major. The change is the one that made the work: the first quarter of the symphony now ends in death, and nothing after it can close the work until that ending has been answered.
Movement II
Scherzo: Allegro moderato, C minor. In Bruckner’s earlier symphonies the slow movement came second; here the Scherzo does, the first time he placed it so. The move has a reason. It sets the Adagio third, beside the Finale, so that the last hour of the work becomes one ascent, and it leaves the Scherzo to stand directly after the death clock, in the same key.
The Scherzo is built on an ostinato figure, repeated and insisted on, and Bruckner named its main theme the deutscher Michel, the sleepy German everyman. Without his word a listener hears a peasant dance of great weight and not an emblem, and the name is a gloss outside the notes. The main body of the movement is weight more than height. It is also load-bearing: without its insistence the trio would have nothing to lift.
The trio, marked Langsam, is in A flat major, eight semitones above C, the one excursion to the flat side among the inner tonics, and it brings in the harps. The Eighth is the only Bruckner symphony to use them, and it uses them sparingly: here, and again in the Adagio. In 1887 the trio was different music. Bruckner replaced it whole, and the replacement is evidence of both things the subtractive test can find: that the trio’s place was required, and that its first filling was not.
Movement III
Adagio: Feierlich langsam, doch nicht schleppend, solemnly slow but not dragging. D flat major. The movement opens over a held, syncopated accompaniment in the strings, and over it a rising theme. The key stands a semitone above the home key, on its Neapolitan: the slow movement is the farthest point the work reaches from C, and it is also the longest movement, a third of the running time, more than twenty minutes in any performance and near half an hour in the slowest.
The harps return. The movement is the work’s prayer, and with the brass chorales it is where the sacred stands at the centre. It proceeds by the same grammar as the Scherzo, statement, halt and restatement, each block set down whole, looked at and set aside, and the form is the form of contemplation. Its long crescendo is paced over twenty minutes without losing its tension, the terraces rising one above another.
It builds to one climax, with cymbals and triangle, the summit of grandeur in the work. Bruckner rewrote that climax between 1887 and 1890. In the version he released it stands where twenty minutes of preparation lead, and the harps and the opening theme close the movement in the key a semitone above home, from which the Finale must come down.
Movement IV
Finale: Feierlich, nicht schnell, solemn, not fast. C minor. The movement opens with a striding ostinato in the strings, and over it the brass sound fanfares. The return to C from the Adagio’s D flat is a descent by a semitone into home. Bruckner attached a programme to the movement, its fanfares the meeting of the emperors of Austria and Russia at Olmütz. The programme is his gloss, told in a letter, and it is not in the notes: what the score holds is a ceremonial march of great force.
The Finale is in sonata form, and it is long. Its development and recapitulation are the stretches where the work loses altitude between its summits, where the strings carry figuration more than argument and the law of the work holds by procedure more than by need. The middle of the Finale could take another shape without loss, and for decades it was played with cuts.
Then the coda, in C major. The theme of the first movement, the one that died away in C minor at the end of the first quarter, returns with the theme of the Finale, sounding at once, and the coda is usually described as combining the head motifs of all four movements. The themes remain audible together, and the counterpoint is the hardest feat in the score. The end is the beginning transfigured, not replaced: the death clock is answered, and the dead theme is among the voices of the apotheosis.
Movement V
Bruckner finished the first version of the symphony in 1887 and sent it to Hermann Levi in Munich, the most loyal of his conductors. Levi could not make sense of it and declined to conduct it. Bruckner revised the work from 1889 to March 1890: he replaced the trio, rewrote the Adagio’s climax and recast the end of the first movement. The revised version had its first performance in Vienna on 18 December 1892, by the Vienna Philharmonic under Hans Richter. The symphony is dedicated to Emperor Franz Joseph I. It was first published in 1892, in an edition carrying changes by Josef Schalk.
The text has been contested since. Robert Haas’s edition of 1939 restores passages from 1887 into the text of 1890, a conflation no hand but the editor’s made, and the edition belongs to the years when the work was taken up as a German monument. Leopold Nowak’s edition of 1955 prints the version of 1890 as Bruckner left it, and that is the work scored here. The difference between them is a few dozen bars in the Adagio and the Finale, and both are much played. Nowak published the version of 1887 in 1972; it is another object, and it is evidence here only of what Bruckner thought required.
The work entered the repertory in the Austro-German world at its premiere and the world at large in the middle of the twentieth century. Mahler and Franz Schmidt worked in the space it and its neighbours opened, and Hugo Wolf championed them. Furtwängler, Karajan, Celibidache, Wand, Giulini and Haitink are among those who have recorded it. Some eighty minutes long, it asks its listener to hear a death in the first quarter and to wait for the answer until the last minutes, where the theme that died comes back in C major, with the others, and does not die again.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance at the structural joints. Remove the quiet end of the first movement and the Adagio’s D flat has nothing to answer; remove the Scherzo’s insistence and the trio’s A flat has no weight to lift; the coda requires every movement, since it is built from their themes. But the test finds give, and the work’s own history shows it. Between 1887 and 1890 Bruckner replaced a whole trio and rewrote the Adagio’s climax; an editor spliced 1887 bars back in without the joins showing; the Finale was long played with cuts. Inside the movements a period is stated, halted and restated a step higher: much of this is structure, some of it habit. Length is not charged. The repetitions are.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Disclosure through sound is credited in full, and something can be stated: annihilation and transcendence are heard by one consciousness in the same terms, and the end of a life can be faced first as extinction and then as glory without either cancelling the other. The 1890 first movement is the evidence. Bruckner changed its ending from triumph to a dying away in C minor, and the Adagio’s ascent and the Finale’s C major answer that ending without erasing it. Held below the gate by the line between mood and meaning: to name what the notes do, the statement leans on Bruckner’s own glosses, and without them the music discloses awe and dread with great force but states less.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The axis the work exists for, in height and frequency together. The sublime of terror: the brass outburst near the end of the first movement and the collapse into the death clock. The sublime of grandeur: the Adagio’s climax, prepared over more than twenty minutes and reached with cymbals; the Finale’s fanfares over striding strings; the coda, where the themes sound together in C major. The sublime of beauty: the Adagio’s opening theme over its syncopated accompaniment, and the harps in the trio and the Adagio. Elevation recurs in every movement. Held below the top because the Scherzo’s main body is weight more than height, and because the Finale’s development and recapitulation lose altitude between the summits.
Score: 9.4 / 10
A structure that bears weight is there: death announced, faced and transcended. The first movement ends in the death clock; the Finale ends in an apotheosis that gathers the whole work into one sound; the arc is built into the score by the changes of 1890, not merely evoked. But the figures that would make it archetypal while particular are supplied mostly in words outside the notes: the deutscher Michel of the Scherzo, the emperors of the Finale, the annunciation of death. Without the composer’s letter a listener hears a scherzo and a march. The arc from death to transfiguration is a familiar pattern carried to a vast scale, not a new figure. Myth built in outline, figured by commentary: below the gate, narrowly.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is Beethoven’s Ninth, Schubert’s Great C major symphony, and Wagner’s orchestra and harmony. The departures: a symphony of some eighty minutes; the Scherzo placed second, the first time Bruckner did so; a first movement ending in the minor, pianissimo, without precedent in a C minor symphony on this scale; Wagner tubas and three harps in a symphony; a coda that sounds the themes of the movements together. The stake was real: Hermann Levi, his most loyal conductor, rejected the 1887 score, and Bruckner spent two years rewriting it. Held at the line because the road was his own: block construction, general pauses, the chorale and the cyclic return were all in the Fifth and the Seventh.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the work loses much of what it knows, which is that an ending in death must be answered at the scale of the whole. The Scherzo’s move to second place sets the Adagio beside the Finale, so that the last hour is one ascent. The quiet end of the first movement means the work cannot close until the coda gathers it, and the combination of themes is the form of that gathering: the movements become one sound. The block form, with its terraces and halts, is the form of contemplation. Held below the top because the Finale’s middle could take another shape without loss, as the versions show, and because the outer movements follow a sonata plan more than remake it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over more than a century. The question of the text has a literature of its own: Robert Haas’s edition of 1939 against Leopold Nowak’s of 1955, the 1887 version recovered and published in 1972, and the editorial work of the collected edition. Performance keeps opening the work: Furtwängler’s flexible tempos, Karajan’s last Vienna recording of 1988, Celibidache’s very slow readings, Wand, Giulini and Haitink. The questions stay open: whether 1890 improves or tames 1887; whether the coda is triumph or synthesis; how literally to take Bruckner’s programme; whether the Finale holds together. Held below Beethoven’s Ninth and Op. 131 because much of the literature is about the text more than the meaning, and because the critical literature on Bruckner is smaller.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The work fixed the symphony as a cathedral of time: blocks of sound set in terraces over some eighty minutes, ending in a cyclic apotheosis. It showed that the symphony after Beethoven could take Wagner’s orchestra and harmony without Wagner’s drama. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real and largely Austro-German. Mahler and Franz Schmidt worked in the space Bruckner’s late symphonies opened, and Hugo Wolf championed them. Much of the reach belongs to the late symphonies as a group, and the Eighth’s share is not separable from that of the Seventh and the Ninth, though as the largest and most complete statement it carries more than either. The field it entered, Brahms’s Vienna, did not follow it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is weighed in form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the 1890 score, in print since 1892 and in two critical editions. Its text is doubled, a cost and a gain: two versions and three editions, and which is heard depends on the conductor. Presence has been continuous in the Austro-German repertory since 1892 and worldwide since the middle of the twentieth century, recorded by most major conductors, though never at the widest presence of a Beethoven symphony. The surface fixed to its moment is small but charged: the dedication to Franz Joseph, the programme of emperors, and the work’s use as a German monument in the 1930s, to which Haas’s edition belongs.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as every desk. The brass writing is the summit of its kind in its century: eight horns, four of them turning to Wagner tubas, chorales spaced so that the full orchestra sounds as an organ without blur. The counterpoint of the coda, where the themes sound at once and remain audible, is the hardest feat in the score. The Adagio’s long crescendo is paced over twenty minutes without losing tension, and the harps are used sparingly and exactly. The costs: the sequential building, a phrase rising a step at a time, is one procedure used throughout; the general pauses become a manner; and the strings in the Finale’s development carry figuration more than argument.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the death clock that ends the first movement and the C major apotheosis that ends the Finale. One law governs them. The coda takes the first movement’s theme, the one that died away in C minor, and sounds it in C major with the others: the end is the beginning transfigured, not replaced. So does the key plan: the Adagio’s D flat sits a semitone above C, the farthest point of the work, and the Finale’s return to C is a descent by a semitone into home. The rustic Scherzo and the Adagio’s prayer share one grammar. The tension is in the Finale’s development, where the law holds by procedure more than by need.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The orders held: consciousness facing death; the sacred, in the chorales and the Adagio’s prayer, which are the centre of the work; the natural order, in the horn calls and open fifths, by long reading more than by the notes; the state, in the dedication and the ceremonial brass of the Finale; the common people, in the Scherzo’s peasant dance. What the score holds it holds integrated, as one ascent from death to glory. What holds the axis here is twofold. Several of these orders are held only through Bruckner’s words outside the score: without the programme, the state and the everyman are a march and a dance. And the family, labour and history are absent.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 9.4, then The Made at 9.2 and The Inner Law at 9.1. Elevation in every movement, of terror in the death clock, of grandeur in the Adagio’s climax and the coda, of beauty in the Adagio’s theme and the harps; brass writing that makes the orchestra an organ without blur, and a coda whose themes sound at once and stay audible; one law, the end as the beginning transfigured, from the dying close of the first movement to the C major of the last.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: consciousness, the sacred, the natural order, the state and the common people, several of them held only through the composer’s words outside the score, with the family, labour and history absent. Next above it, The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 and The Unconcealment at 8.4: parts the composer himself found negotiable, and a meaning and a myth figured partly outside the notes.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 9.1, The Living Form at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clears it by a tenth, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and with the Epochal Gate unmet and an aggregate of 8.7 the work stands in Tier IV.
Basis · the score of the Symphony No. 8 in C minor in its version of 1890, in Leopold Nowak’s edition for the collected edition (1955), and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and the running times are ranges across the recorded tradition, not measurements. The four movements are scored as one work; no single performance or recording is the object, and the performance tradition is evidence only. Robert Haas’s edition of 1939 is named as the other much-played text; the version of 1887 is a different object and is cited as evidence only. There are no words in the score. Bruckner’s headings and markings are given as he wrote them, and two names he gave in his own description of the work, Totenuhr and deutscher Michel, are quoted; his other words are paraphrased, and his programme is evidence about the work, not part of it. The key plan and the time shares were counted by script. Details that could not be verified, among them bar counts, the year composition began, the collaborators in the first edition, the conductors associated with each edition, the date of Bruckner’s letter, the scoring of the harps, the key of the 1887 trio and of the Adagio’s climax in each version, the date of the meeting the Finale’s programme names, the number of themes combined in the coda beyond the first movement’s and the Finale’s, the reception of the premiere, and later lines of influence, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.