The Bruckner Ninth
Symphony we have come to know is not what its composer intended
it to be.
The 1903 premiere of the first three movements, needing to establish the validity of an unfinished work, claimed it to be
“complete in three movements,” maintaining that nothing could surpass
the sublimeness of its Adagio. Bruckner was said to have been uncertain about,
or unable to complete, a fourth movement, leaving only “scant sketches,” and
“pathetic relics.”
These are blatant mistruths, unthinkingly
promulgated thousands of times over by musicologists and music critics ever
since. When I came to re-examine the 440 pages(!) of surviving original
manuscripts in Vienna in the late 1980s, it became obvious that Bruckner had
not only extensively sketched a fourth movement, but he had left a definitive
full score that originally extended well into the final section of the
movement. Each element of its complex design had been revised and fine-tuned,
the first third fully orchestrated; even for the coda, extensive sketches
survive dated May 1896—five months before his death.
So Bruckner left the movement very largely complete. However, a number of the
manuscript sheets were taken by autograph hunters after his death. Some have
re-emerged (only in 2003 was a missing page made available in photocopy). But
in most all cases, Bruckner’s preliminary sketches enabled us to reconstruct an
accurate picture of the musical continuity, and the fully orchestrated sections
showed clearly how Bruckner intended it to sound.
This research led the authoritative Bruckner Complete Edition to publish a
reconstruction of Bruckner’s score and a facsimile edition of the manuscripts,
and in 1999 brought about the first performance in Vienna of the surviving
torso of the movement under the direction of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Edited in
collaboration with Italian colleague Nicola Samale, who had begun working on a
reconstruction of the movement with Giuseppe Mazzuca in 1983, and German
colleague Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, the present version of the reconstructed
Finale was premiered in Linz, Austria, in 1991. Since then, it has been
exhaustively fine-tuned in multiple revisions, documented in over 50 performances
and CD releases.
Tonight marks the American premiere of the score in what we regard as its
definitive form.
The Finale is no musical curiosity, but an integral
part of the work as its composer intended. Just as Beethoven designed his last
symphony around its choral finale, Bruckner designed his Ninth around this
huge, ultimately triumphant movement, synthesising sonata form, fugue, and
chorale. For the devoutly Catholic Bruckner, the symphony was to be his “homage
to Divine majesty,” an agenda reflected in a number of component themes: awe
and fear before the majesty of God, retrospective and farewell, religious
ecstasy, abasement, judgement, and salvation. The Adagio, his “Farewell to
Life,” traces a gradual process of dissolution that leads us, spellbound, into
the enigmatic music of the Finale, a continual series of harmonic ambiguities,
music in a kind of “plasma state.” The movement can be thought of as a kind of
purgatory, charting the progress of the soul after death, the record of an
encounter with the minatory as well as redemptive force of the Divine. Bruckner
explained that it would end with a “song of praise to the dear Lord,” a
“Hallelujah” borrowed from earlier in the work. And it is with this
“Hallelujah” theme—the first entry of the trumpets in the Adagio—that the Ninth
can so justly and so gloriously now conclude.
—John Phillips