Bruckner: String Quintet in F major (1879)

Gemässigt
Scherzo:- Schnell    Trio:- Langsamer
Adagio
Finale:- Lebhaft bewegt

Bruckner is surely one of the most perplexing figures in nineteenth century music. Liszt the Romantic Virtuoso, Chopin the Melancholy Consumptive, Wagner the Mammoth Ego were all products of an era when the “personality” was assuming increasingly larger than life proportions. Bruckner lived at this time as well, but blessed with exactly the wrong character credentials to lend credibility to his aspirations as a nineteenth-century artist. Yet in our present day age of even more outsized personalities (although the spotlight seems now to have shifted unaccountably away from the composers) the impresarios can patronisingly capitalise on the supposedly more defective aspects of Bruckner’s make-up: his country origins, his clumsiness, obsession with numbers, passion for railways, (supposedly) unquestioning faith. This quaint image may well have contributed at one time to his standing as one of the most popular of all composers (according to a survey of London concert programmes a few years ago), but it takes no account of his fantastic intellect, originality, and vision – qualities which he himself seemed at times to be unaware of, to judge by the debilitating loss of belief in himself which plagued his last years. This condition was precipitated in the main by Hermann Levi’s well-intentioned but insensitive criticism of the first version of the eighth symphony in 1887, resulting in a nervous crisis and a near-manic spell of revising – initially the Eighth, then the earlier symphonies as well. Tragically, this precious time would have been better spent on the unfinished Ninth, whose finale was never finally organised into the vast monolith he had planned (until highly skilled devotees have attempted to do it for him – with considerable success – over the past 40 or so years).

Although Bruckner was a late developer as a composer, by 1868 (with the completion of the F minor Mass) he had become a fully mature writer of choral music. His energies were now directed towards the problems of the symphony, and with the “mighty cyclopean fifth” (1876/8) he had achieved an awesome mastery in that field as well, so that for the next nine years his self confidence was at its zenith. At this point he turned his attention to a seventeen-year-old request from Josef Hellmesberger for a piece his famous quartet would play: the result was this quintet in F major (significantly, all the large scale works of this period are in major keys, as opposed to the otherwise exclusive concentration on minor tonalities – usually C or D). Bruckner sensibly insisted on the extra viola, with the result that the glowing sonorities he conjures so winningly from the symphony orchestra are miraculously captured here in miniature – and with an economy of scoring hardly typical of his contemporaries, let alone of a man whose only other practical experience of chamber music was a (highly beautiful) string quartet written in 1862 as an exercise for his teacher Otto Kitzler. Initially Hellmesberger was somewhat dismayed by the supposed difficulties of the quintet’s scherzo, so Bruckner attempted to appease him by replacing it with something less demanding, completing a new version some five months later. In the end the original movement was retained, and the composer preserved the discarded piece as a separate entity by calling it “Intermezzo” – although this was not actually published until 1913. It retains the original key of D minor, but a shadowy mysteriousness had given way to something rather more gemütlich – Mahlerian, almost.

Those familiar with Bruckner’s symphonies will be well aware of a dogged adherence to certain individually evolved formal conventions; most of these are also present in the quintet, albeit within the rather less gigantic time scale appropriate to a chamber ensemble. That is not to say that the actual duration of the piece could by any stretch of the imagination be described as compressed! The characteristically deliberate pace of the music, as dictated by the size of its themes and the slow harmonic movement – with its consequent spreading apart of the tonal poles – results in a composition whose proportions must necessarily exceed those of more familiar chamber works, not, of course, including the late masterpieces of Beethoven and Schubert – although the former’s Eroica Symphony and first Rasumovsky Quartet created a precedent, the blending of an expanded structure with an overriding lyrical flow gave the influence of Schubert on Bruckner a marginally greater impact.

The first movement of the quintet is unique (for Bruckner) through being cast in triple time (influenced perhaps by Schubert’s mighty G major quartet?), and the steady pulse of the scherzo finds company in only the sixth and eighth symphonies. But the Adagio belongs in every way to that great succession of slow movements, ranging from ethereal solemnity in the Fifth to the agonising beauty of the Ninth, embracing here a sublime tenderness and passion which guarantees for this quintet an exalted place in the hierarchy of chamber masterworks.

If the finale seems in any way problematic, this can be attributed only to a failed attempt at making it fit into a conventional sonata form which it only superficially resembles: leading in from the G flat major of the Adagio (Bruckner purposefully switched the order of the two central movements from his normal pattern, bringing about this effective harmonic link), the movement progresses through two highly expectant pedal points before serving up an earthy tune, in clearly punctuated four-bar Gesangsperiode, which seems to come straight from the outdoor life of the composer’s native Upper Austria (it’s extraordinary how many of Bruckner’s finales contain melodies at this point which involve the interval of a sixth). At the centre of this arch-like construction is a powerful fugato, which eventually unfolds into that tune again – cleverly demonstrating its thematic relationship through inversion and the stretching of the sixth to an octave. Finally the opening pedal point returns, this time on the dominant of F, ultimately dropping to the tonic in a massive perfect cadence totally justified by the scale of the rest of the work. This is the point towards which the whole movement has been directed, as only now is the home key fully established. Here, together with the corresponding section of the first movement, is to be found the only instance where Bruckner betrays his feeling for the orchestral brass section.

His next major composition was the sixth symphony, which parallels the quintet in many striking ways, not least in its warmly intimate and genial temperament; neither work is one of the composer’s most familiar, yet their combined emotional significance is hardly outweighed by the tremendous edifices surrounding them.

The Fitzwilliam’s performances and recording of the quintet are from the definitive version of the score, edited for the International Bruckner Society Edition by Prof. Leopold Nowak and based on the original manuscript, in conjunction with the copy used for the first edition (1884), which contains various amendments by the composer. 

© Alan George
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