Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 0 (“Nullte”) in d-minor
German Symphony Orchestra Berlin
Riccardo Chailly
Bruckner’s Symphony 0 was actually his third, completed in 1869. The designation “Nullte” comes from the fact that, apparently unsatisfied with it, Bruckner withdrew it (“annuliert”) from the body of his published work. If I had to sum up the symphony in a single phrase, I would have to call it a work of extreme contrasts, in the end a little too extreme for my ears.
The opening of the Allegro is dramatic and attention-grabbing, and Beethoven’s influence is immediately obvious, but things get odd pretty quickly. It is possible that hindsight is our worst enemy here – Bruckner’s dedication to his Catholic faith and the large body of sacred music he composed are both well-known – but it sounds to me that this sacred music creeps in everywhere in the first movement. As early as the three minutes in, the swelling strings wedge a hymn of praise into the music. At around 4:00, a chorale-like passage in the low reeds harkens back to Bach, or perhaps even earlier, but definitely to the mysterious world of the cathedral. A brass passage that thematically seems to come out of nowhere does the same around 6:30. The contrasts have begun. The pastoral-sounding section with its chirping bird-like flute around 7:00 also comes out of nowhere, disorienting us briefly until the opening theme eventually recaps. Only a minute later, though, Bruckner wallops us with a decidedly un-Beethovenian, densely chromatic section that looks sideways at Wagner and perhaps even ahead to Mahler. I still can’t decide whether it is revolutionary or simply weird. The development starting around 9:30 is nice, with some good solos in it, but before too long we get another slow, hymn-like passage out of nowhere, followed by a recurrence of the chromatic material around 13:30. The long pause at 14:20 is far longer than any I’ve heard elsewhere, and then – a brand-new slow theme that to my ear bears no melodic relationship to anything that came before. Someone intent on assigning programmatic meaning to music and, again, informed by Bruckner’s religiosity, could plausibly argue for the first movement as a depiction of a struggle between good and evil.
The opening of the Andante second movement is episodic, strung together from thematic fragments. The wind passage at 1:45 is only one example. The orchestration, though, is nice and lush, and the strings around 11:00 are deeply melancholy. Beethoven’s influence is much less obvious here.
The Scherzo, to my ear, has something distinctly Russian about it, even though I can’t put my finger on what it is, exactly, that makes it so. Something in it, I think, echoes Tchaikovsky, no doubt by coincidence. Things get pretty bombastic pretty quickly, especially in the brass. The trio section, on the other hand, reaches much further back, almost to something Haydn might have written, before the bombast returns and, frankly, overwhelms a little.
The finale, marked Moderato, takes up the bombast of the scherzo almost as soon as it begins – around 1:20. It strikes me, once again, as Beethovenesque, but this time it is the “heroic,” anthemic quality that makes it so, even as the melodic and harmonic material is Bruckner’s own. After the second theme is introduced at 2:50, the movement doubles down on the contrasts between energetic fast and pastoral slow sections. There is some interesting texture in the strings towards the end of the movement. The symphony ends, after a hair less than 50 minutes in Chailly’s rendition, just about the way you would expect.
