David Dalle
Thursday September 12th, 2024 with David Dalle
Bruckner's 5th symphony. Barmer Boys, Klezmer and more!

Anton Bruckner was born just outside Linz, Austria on Sep. 4th, 1824, 200 years ago. We will be continuing my Bruckner symphonic cycle with two symphonies this month. This week we hear Bruckner's 5th symphony. This work was first completed in 1876, and, unlike the previous two symphonies, received hardly any revisions from Bruckner, only making small revisions in 1878. This lack of revision demonstrated Bruckner's confidence in the work--ironic, because the 5th symphony waited until 1894 to be premiered, a decade after the extremely successful premiere of his 7th symphony and two years after the premiere of his 8th. The 5th was only premiered in a heavily cut and modified version by one of his former students and disciples. Franz Schalk studied with Bruckner in Vienna as a teenager in the late 1870's and he remained a devoted friend and ardent champion of Bruckner's music as Schalk established a successful career as conductor in Austria. He was entrusted with the premiere of the 5th, but Schalk, unbeknownst to Bruckner, spent two years working on his version of the symphony. His motivations were obscure, but the most likely reason was his belief that his modifications would make the symphony more appealing to audiences. Schalk cut a shocking 122 bars from the magnificent finale and re-orchestrated nearly the entire symphony to make it resemble more Wagnerian orchestration. After Wagner's death in 1883, a lot of Wagnerians, particularly in Austria, championed Bruckner as the musical heir to Wagner, although Wagner never done anything to support Bruckner and Bruckner, despite his lifechanging encounter with Wagner's music in 1861, did not orchestrate or write music like Wagner. Schalk premiered his version in Graz in 1894 to tremendous success. Bruckner was too ill to attend and the 5th remained his only completed symphony he never heard performed. Schalk's version of the 5th was chosen for its first publication, and all performances for the next four decades were of this version! Bruckner's own 1878 version was not published until 1935, and has become the standard for most performances and recordings, though Schalk's version does still have a few admirers. As with all Bruckner symphonies, it has a conventional four movements. And, as with the preceding 4th symphony, the weight of the work is in the large finale. But unlike his previous symphonies there are no real climaxes until the very end of the symphony. Such a difference from the 4th which so often has a massive climax growing into an even larger one. The 5th is generally brighter in tone, with its darkest moments in the gorgeous adagio. The enormous finale has Bruckner's most complicated structure, with a hybrid sonata-fugue. The enormous fugue in the development uses all the previous themes and leads to the symphony's apotheosis with a transcendent, glorious chorale! We will again hear Austrian-Canadian composer Georg Tintner from his late 90's Bruckner cycle. His Bruckner is magnificent, and he had clearly been waiting all his life to make these recordings (recorded in 1995-1998, Tintner died in 1999). In a perfect world he would have been able to record them with the Vienna Philharmonic, but his cycle with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra is still indispensable. Tintner almost has a familial link to Bruckner, having joined the Vienna Boys Choir when Franz Schalk was its director!