CD-219: Bruckner Symphony No. 9 in D minor

"This 1950 performance has circulated on many labels,
never sounding remotely as good as it does here."
Henry Fogel, Fanfare

Bruckner - Symphony No. 9 in D minor
by Jack Diether

The three great uncompleted symphonies of musical history are Schubert's Eighth, Bruckner's Ninth, and Mahler's Tenth. All three, as it happens, originated in Vienna: Schubert abandoned his "Unfinished" for unexplained reasons; it was not is last symphony. Mahler put his last symphony aside temporarily but died before he could resume it. Only Bruckner continued to labor over his symphony up to the very day of his death in 1896, at the age of 72.

He had begun working on the Ninth Symphony as long as nine years before, in 1887. But there occurred that year the unexpected and traumatic (for the composer) rejection of his Eighth Symphony by his recently won champion, the renowned conductor Hermann Levi, who had directed the world premiere of Wagner's Parsifal at Bayreuth. Bruckner suffered his most serious lapse of self-confidence, and spent most of the next three years revising not only the Eighth but also some of his earlier symphonies. That probably cost the world a completed Ninth Symphony. Although he had made valid sketches for two movements of the Ninth by the spring of 1889, it was not until the spring of 1891 that he got down to sustained work on the whole score. By that time, he had gone into the gradual but inexorable decline in health that was to end in death five and a half years later.

Bruckner finished the first movement in 1892, the Scherzo in 1893, and the Adagio near the end of 1894 - the three sections that comprise the Ninth Symphony as we presently know it. He then worked fitfully on the Finale for over a year and a half, sometimes with a clouded mind. for he was afflicted part of the time with pathological obsessions, his recurrent burden in the past even when he was in better physical health. Yet he did work on the conclusion of his symphony up to and including the day of his death. As his biographer H.F. Redlich has noted: "Bruckner died in the afternoon of lith October 1896, after a walk in the park, having worked on the finale of Symphony IX in the morning hours. The funeral ceremony on 14th October took place in the Karlskirche, near the Grosse Musikvereinssaal, in which so many of his symphonies had had their first performance." (The Master Musicians Series: Bruckner and Mahler)

The composer left nearly 200 pages of sketches for this Finale. In his book The Essence of Bruckner, Robert Simpson says of them: "In these pathetic relics we find the debris of the last battle between Bruckner and the fiend of nervous subjectivity he had fought all his life, and often beaten with triumphant decisiveness. It would not be fair to say he lost the final contest, for he simply did not live to finish it. But the fight was far from won."

The completed part of the symphony was published in 1903, edited by Ferdinand Loewe, the prominent Bruckner disciple. Loewe gave out that he had spent most of the seven years since Bruckner's death diligently deciphering the manuscript. Actually, the manuscript was a model of Bruckner's customary neatness, and Loewe had spent that time reorchestrating the work and altering the dynamics and expression marks, sometimes even the harmonies, on a grand scale. Loewe took neither credit nor blame for this, believing that he was simply supplying an indispensable service out of pure love and concern. Stylistically he was more a prisoner of his time than Bruckner was, and only two decades later was this spurious Bruckner Ninth unmasked and the authentic one put in its place by Alfred Orel and Robert Haas, Editor of the International Bruckner Society - in Vol. 9 of the Critical Edition (Augsburg, 1932 and Vienna, 1934), a truly revelatory event.

Yet in the 1950 concert performance presented on this CD Knappertsbusch was still using the old Loewe version. That is an essential part of the period flavor and aura with which Knappertsbusch's Bruckner interpretations are imbued, just as in the case of his great contemporary Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886 - 1954). Though use of the older versions is frowned on by today's musicologists and has been abandoned by performers, the Knappertsbusch and Furtwängler readings preserve for us something quite authentic in their own way, which otherwise we would never be able to recapture: the only Bruckner known to two (or more) generations of music lovers in the post-Wagnerian era - a Bruckner using quasi-Wagnerian orchestral effects, the interpretations shot through with subtle rubatos and extreme ritardandos, with tapered corners and "hairpin" dynamics a la fin de siècle...

Excerpt from the sleevenotes ©1985 Jack Diether

Find out more:   9th Symphony : 2. Scherzo CD covers to print:   CD-writing cuesheet: [What's that?]

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