Bruckner: Symphony No.4 in E flat major – Romantic (1874/1878-80)
Bewegt, nicht zu schnell
Andante quasi Allegretto
Scherzo:- Bewegt – Trio:- Nicht zu schnell
Finale:- Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell
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 No.5 (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. Such mastery was by no means easily or painlessly acquired; and this awesome edifice of a symphony – far exceeding the huge Ninths of both Beethoven and Schubert – could hardly have been other than the summation of an especially long-term process. Indeed, as far back as the Requiem of 1849 one can trace those particular ingredients of the Eroica and the first Rasumovsky quartet which enabled Beethoven – and subsequently Bruckner himself – to create symphonic structures on a significantly expanded time-scale: these being the slowed-down harmonic tempo with its consequent spreading apart of tonal poles, together with the more deliberate pace of the music itself. Although drastically re-written during that desperate period of revising near the end of his life Bruckner’s first two symphonies (together with Die Nullte – “No.0”) were actually conceived and composed with relatively little struggle. But the gestation process of No.3 was altogether more problematical, and saw Bruckner grappling determinedly with his instinctive need to evolve a new monumental dimension in symphonic thinking. Hand in hand with this evolution of form can be heard the emergence of that massive orchestral sonority which is such an integral part of the Bruckner experience, founded as it is on the extra prominence of the (often enlarged) brass choir. Not surprisingly, this third symphony has come down to us in no less than three quite distinct versions, the first of which contains vast quantities of music absent from the subsequent re-workings.
Much the same applies to the next symphony, to the extent that the entire scherzo was replaced by the famous “hunting” movement – which is the one most often heard, to this day. But the labours expended on its predecessor were far from being in vain; and even though the E flat symphony too was extensively revised its original draft nevertheless displays a new-found – if hard-won – assurance. It is only in the ambitious finale where we can sense that Bruckner was still not entirely at ease with himself, nor with his plans to shift the centre of gravity of a large scale symphony from the first movement to the last. Beethoven did eventually manage this – albeit with the assistance of the human voice and a “libretto”……; but Bruckner’s own ambitions were soon to be triumphantly realised at last in the titanic sonata-fugue finale of the “mighty cyclopean Fifth” (to quote Robert Simpson).
At once the fourth symphony draws us into the characteristic Bruckner sound world at its most magical: an expansive forest of rustling string tremolandi pierced by a distant horn-call. Yet in a number of ways this most familiar of his works departs from a somewhat dogged adherence to those formal conventions clearly recognisable in every Bruckner symphony. Firstly, it is the only one without a true Adagio (but what premonitions of the Mahlerian funeral march are to be found in its steady tread!); and the newly-composed scherzo already referred to is the only such example not cast in the traditional triple metre. Indeed, this very movement could be seen to epitomise another unusual feature of the Fourth: it is the only symphony to which he gave a title; and in doing so he appears to challenge his own deeply held convictions as to the “absoluteness” of what a symphony should be. He even went so far as to concoct a programme, including fanciful descriptions and tales of dawn, knights, hunts, mediaeval towns, etc – mainly for the amusement of his friends, it has to be said. This symphony’s true inspiration lies, as can be heard by all who care to listen, in the very environment which surrounded him: the open vistas of the Upper Austrian landscape; the actual sounds of nature, be they bird calls or the murmur of wind in leaves; the jollity of peasant life and the fun of village music making (witness the trio, or the deliberately rustic moments in the finale); or the mysticism of the Catholic Faith as exemplified in the great monastery of nearby St. Florian – whose magnificence could be no more devotedly represented than in the tremendous “cathedral of sound” which crowns this glorious masterpiece.
© Alan George
