Bruckner: The Boring Symphony

Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 1 in c-minor

German Symphony Orchestra Berlin
Riccardo Chailly

Bruckner composed the first of the symphonies he saw fit to perform in 1865-1866, conducting the premiere in 1868 in Linz.  He revised the symphony in 1890-1891, and it is this later version that we usually hear today.  It is clear from the first listen that most of the weight of the symphony is in the last movement.  It was also clear to me from my first listen that although it has its moments, on the whole the symphony is fairly boring.

The opening of the first movement is conventional, vaguely Beethovenian but not too much.  As early as a minute in, we get the foreshadowing of weirdness to come with an unstable chord or two in the strings, and it is these small moments of unexpected material that we have to listen for if we want to get something out of the symphony.  A chromatic second theme leads to some tension around 3:00, and we get another taste of weirdness to come in the ominous-sounding low brass around 4:50.  Not really a conventional sonata-allegro to my ear, the movement slips into development almost unnoticed and starts to build some real tension.  The brass chords around 7:10 are very much at odds with perfectly pleasant strings, and we get more unsettled harmonic stuff around 9:50 after a brief restatement of the first theme.  Eventually, things settle back down and a fragment of the first theme closes things out on an appropriately triumphant note.

The Adagio opens with some seriously dark and strikingly modern-sounding strings under a horn pedal, but unfortunately the mood doesn’t stay as melancholy as I might have liked.  I’m not sure how I feel about the flutes at 2:20, but the tonal colors are nice once other woodwinds come in.  The darkness clears up relatively quickly and the movement proceeds mostly in major.  Strings around 5:00 are compelling, and the counterpoint between strings and flute at 7:30 is effective.  There are some moments of tension later in the movement (e.g. around 8:30), but on the whole there is not a lot to hold one’s interest, and the overall effect is a little flabby.

Bruckner opens the Scherzo on a rousing note, and I suppose some people would call the wind colors in the opening vibrant; to my ear garish is a better descriptor.  Opening ideas develop for a while starting around 1:50, then we abruptly get a brand-new theme at 4:10.  Is this the trio?  I wasn’t sure.  There is more subtlety and variety in this section, but in the end it still doesn’t grab me that much, though I can’t argue with the gorgeous tonal colors in the low brass around 6:10.  At 7:30, we get a restatement of the opening — that second theme was the trio, after all.

Finally we get to the main event.  The opening of the Finale is super-dramatic; all I could think of is theme music for a final battle scene in a film.  Mild dissonance in the quiet passage at 1:15 leads to a slower, much more pastoral and, to my ear, slightly flaccid second theme.  There is more battle after that, and by the four-minute mark we’re in the development. Interestingly, Bruckner develops the second, pastoral theme first, though he does eventually get to the battle stuff, too.  There is new material starting around 6:40, and it is probably one of two or three most compelling bits in the whole work, with some really interesting chromatic movement in the strings.  Unfortunately, the music bogs down after this, the beautiful clarinet solo notwithstanding.  There is a tumultuous new section just before the ten-minute mark.  It reuses bits of the opening theme and manages to build emotional tension without much corresponding harmonic tension. Around 12:19, Bruckner recaps the opening with bits of the second theme woven in — whether you consider him one of the “greats” or not, it is moments like this that make him a solid candidate.  Too bad we had to wait until the second half of the last movement to hear it.  There is a faux finale just after 13:00, with more stuff after that that sounds unrelated to me.  There is a dense buildup to the real finale.  Once again the colors are very nice, but the overall effect is busy, and the main feeling I had once the symphony ended was one of relief.