{ program notes
composers. His early life was devoted to teaching and service as organist in a series of local churches, including the great Baroque abbey of St. Florian. With great reluctance, he left for Vienna in 1868, at the mature age of 44. There he wrote his last eight symphonies while building a legend at the Vienna Conservatory as an eccentric but beloved teacher of music theory. Naive and socially insecure, he never lost his rural style, dressing in unfashionably baggy suits and speaking with a rustic Upper Austrian accent.
Conductor Walter Damrosch well expressed the dichotomy between the modesty of the man and the grandeur of his music:“ To me it has always seemed one of the inscrutable mysteries that Bruckner, while retaining all his life the simplicity of peasant life, speech and customs, should have had within him a musical genius so extraordinary as to enable him to write music of such indescribable warmth, nobility and eloquence.”
To enter fully into the world of a Bruckner symphony, listeners must readjust their 21 st-century internal clocks. Inspired by Wagner’ s tremendous expansion of the operatic form in his music dramas, Bruckner conceived his symphonic movements on a broad scale. Even when his tempos are not actually slow, his music still seems leisurely. Bruckner themes are very long, built cumulatively from many elements. If Beethoven’ s themes can be likened to pithy sentence fragments, Bruckner’ s are fully developed paragraphs. But he had the habit of taking pauses before beginning new themes or sections of his movements—“ But look, if I have something important to say, I must first take a deep breath,” he explained— and these pauses are godsends to listeners trying to find their way. Actually, Bruckner’ s model was less Wagner than Beethoven’ s Ninth Symphony, whose movements also were expanded into dramas of epic scope.
Bruckner himself gave the Fourth Symphony the subtitle“ Romantic,” but exactly what he meant by this is unclear. Sometime after the music was written he came up with a little scenario for the first movement:“ Medieval city— dawn— morning calls sound from the towers— the gates open— on proud steeds knights ride into the open— woodland magic embraces them— forest murmurs— bird song— and thus the romantic picture unfolds.” But this music is far more than descriptive and clearly deals with greater and more abstract matters.
Bruckner sought in his finales to create a summation of what has gone before and an ultimate revelation of God.
First movement: The beginning of the Symphony seems almost like the beginning of life itself. Out of an almost inaudible flutter of strings, a single horn intones a haunting primordial motive: a simple horn call that defines the home key of E-flat Major. High woodwinds echo the call. Soon this soft, expectant music dramatically escalates into a grandly powerful theme built from Bruckner’ s signature rhythm: one-two, one-two-three. A Bruckner pause, and then the second group of themes opens gently in strings and woodwinds and in the surprising key of D-flat Major. This nature music is made up of two strands: a sweet, birdlike melody for violins and a warm, flowing theme for violas and cellos. Abruptly, the grand rhythmic theme returns, blazing even more strongly in unison. After a mighty climax, it ebbs away.
Another Bruckner pause ushers in the development section. The opening horn calls and the rhythmic theme carry the music into regions of harmonic outer space. Eventually, the horn calls generate an extraordinarily beautiful chorale, with a sublime countermelody in the violas. After the opening music is recapitulated, Bruckner concludes with a magnificent coda full of wonder and awe: the brass pealing with joy and all the horns crying in unison.
Bruckner scholar Robert Simpson calls movement two a“ veiled funeral march.” However, this is not the anguished struggle we hear in Mahler’ s famous funeral movements. Rather there is gentle sorrow and tenderness, for the devout Bruckner saw death not as the end, but the beginning of full union with God. The music is built from three melodic ideas. First a sober, yet uplifting dirge melody in the cellos over softly treading strings. Next, a muted but rich string chorale which gradually ascends. And loveliest of all, a poignant song for violas against a fragile plucked accompaniment.
The joys of movement three are purely earthly. Bruckner called this a“ hunting scherzo,” and it is the most infectiously appealing music he ever wrote. The playful splendor of the brass predominates. In the middle comes a contrasting trio section: a charming ländler dance that conjures up rural Upper Austria.
Rather than providing a conventional triumphant ending, Bruckner sought in his finales to create a summation of what has gone before and an ultimate revelation of God. The final movement returns us to the world of the first movement with its E-flat Major tonality. Horns and clarinets reiterate a three-note descending motive that sounds like a reversal of the Symphony’ s opening horn call. In a slow crescendo, the scherzo’ s horn fanfares build to fortissimo and the orchestra’ s declamation of a stentorian theme in mighty Bruckner unison incorporating the two-plus-three rhythm. Then we hear the second group of themes: contrasting string music in lovely counterpoint and easy rural gait. The exposition’ s third section erupts with violent suddenness in torrents of brass fanfares.
After an elaborate development of these themes, the stentorian theme returns with crushing force amid spectacular brass jubilation. Bruckner closes his“ Romantic” Symphony with one of his most sublime codas, which includes a magnificent passage for the horns. As strings and winds rise higher and higher in a great crescendo, Bruckner’ s vision of Heaven— only glimpsed in movement two— appears gloriously before our ears and eyes.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, strings.
Notes by Janet E. Bedell, Copyright © 2017
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