The Problem of Bruckners

Ninth Symphony
Robert Matthew-Walker

he facts surrounding Bruckners incomplete Ninth Symphony are well known,

and constitute one of the great tragedies
in the history of music. The unprecedented success Bruckner enjoyed with his
Seventh Symphony, following the first
performance by the Leipzig Gewandhaus
Orchestra under Artur Nikisch on December 30, 1884, motivated the composer
to continue and complete his Eighth,
which he had begun the previous July. It
took him just over a year to have the new
symphony fully drafted, by August 1885,
and another twenty months before the
work was finally complete in full score,
during which time Bruckner had changed
the order of the two middle movements,
placing the Scherzo second and the slow
movement third.
Following Nikischs success with the
Seventh, it was taken up by Herman Levi,
who achieved an even greater triumph for
Bruckner with the work: secure in his
belief that in Levi he had found the ideal
interpreter for his music, Bruckner sent
him the newly completed Eighth, hoping
that Levi would premiere it. But the nature
of the Eighth Symphony is quite different
from that of the Seventh, and Levi found
himself almost totally out of sympathy
with the character of Bruckners latest
Symphony. He told Bruckner directly, in a
letter, of his considerable reservations, and
actually suggested that Bruckner revise the
music. Bruckner must have known in his
heart that in the Eighth Symphony he had
achieved his greatest work, and as we
may imagine Levis rejection of the
score must have come as a body-blow to
the ever-sensitive composer.
So it was that the conductors repudiation of the Symphony produced a long
period of profound self-doubt in Bruckner:
by that time, he had already begun work
on a Ninth Symphony, in the sense that
he had written down ideas that were to
grow into what we have of the work, but
Levis rejection of the Eighth and his
suggestion that that work might benefit
from revision caused Bruckner to abandon
any further work on the Ninth or,
indeed, for a time abandon any work on
his own music and instead to enter into

16

sur faced to quite the

a period of several years
the original
same degree. He was
during which time he
older, but not necessarily
revised the Eighth several
complete plan in
wiser, and the Viennese
times, eventually producshort score, which musical world had
ing a new version of the
changed somewhat in
work with a completely
was always subject that half-decade.
different coda to the first
None the less, the first
movement. The original
to changes in its
three movements of the
score of 1887 remained
were virtually finun-performed until 1973,
ultimate realisation, Ninth
ished and in a performwhen it was played in a
able state long before the
BBC broadcast conducted
is missing.
time of Bruckners death
by Hans-Hubert Schnzeler.
in October, 1894. The finale
The Eighth was not the only
often the most difficult to complete
symphony that Bruckner revised during
satisfactorily for any genuine symphonist
those years: he also made new versions
was left unfinished; as we know, leaving
of several of his earlier symphonies
the composers successors and consome of the revisions, including that of the
temporaries with the problem of what to
Third, being quite extensive, and that of
do about the unfinished finale, or indeed
the Second Symphony being made as late
what to do with the extant completed
as 1892.
movements. Following the premiere of
There can be little doubt therefore, that
the first three movements under Bruckhad Levi understood the true nature of
ners disciple Ferdinand Lwe in Vienna
Bruckners Eighth Symphony in 1887 and
on February 11, 1903, and since the Orel
accepted it for performance, we would
edition was published in 1934 of the
not have had (as we do now) a comSymphonys first three movements
pletely new version of it (nor, surely, new
together with surviving drafts and sketches
versions of several earlier symphonies),
of what had been rescued or salvaged of
but also a completed Ninth Symphony.
the finale, followed by Leopold Nowaks
The composition and reworking (effect1951 edition, almost every recording and
ively, recomposition) of the Eighth had
performance until the dawn of the 21st
occupied Bruckner on and off for around
century had been given of just the first
eight years, from 1884-92. The Eighth
three completed movements.
Symphony was published in its new
The essence of the problem is that, if
version and first performed on December
what Bruckner left (and what in fact has
18th, 1892 conducted by Hans Richter.
come down to us) is indeed all he set
Although (as might have been expected)
down on paper, then in that finale he
the reception of the symphony was what
abandoned the compositional habit of a
one might call mixed, on the whole it was
lifetime. It was Bruckners unchanging
received far more positively than not.
habit first to write out the complete
And so Bruckner, with the problem of
movement in short-score, not in portions.
the Eighth Symphony finally resolved,
The complete movements, on three or
returned again to the Ninth. But by 1893
four staves, invariably demonstrated the
his health was not what it had been
overall plan of whatever movement the
indeed, it was to become so uncertain
composer was working on at the time,
that he was unable to be present at the
and whilst those ideas were always
first performance of his Fifth Symphony in
subjected to considerable revision and
April 1894 under Franz Schalk eighteen
replacement, the general scope of the
years after the work had been completed.
movement was clear in Bruckners mind
That lengthy period of self-doubt had led
before the composition process itself
to a degree of uncertainty which had
began. With that in mind, he would have
undermined his creativity to an extent that
commenced the composition proper of
was not there before or, rather, had not

J U LY - S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5 M U S I C A L O P I N I O N Q U A R T E R LY

an idea of what that coda would contain.

One has to take the comment by
Bruckners pupil Max Graf (1873-1958)
concerning his sight of an extended sketch
of the coda very seriously indeed. Unfortunately, that sketch has disappeared,
and would appear to have been, from
Grafs description, one of a number of
autograph extended drafts of parts of the
finale which were subsequently stolen.
Perhaps also, if that were so, the thief
experienced more than a pang of guilt: on
taking the draft, which of its nature would
have been unfinished (albeit reasonably
fully sketched) he could hardly have
owned up later, once it became clear that
the first three movements were in a more
or less performable state, for such an
admission would have meant social and
musical ostracism.
Nevertheless, we do have the first 560-

M U S I C A L O P I N I O N Q U A R T E R LY J U LY - S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5

odd bars of continuous

music of the finale in
Bruckners hand, tantalisingly ending with the
approach to the coda.
What would have been in
the composers mind at
that point? For some
prospective answers we
have to look at the codas
to the finales of his earlier
symphonies, which, certainly in the more recent
scores, tend to end with a
summation of the complete work in the Fifth and
Eighth Symphonies certainly.
There is also the question
of self-quotation in the unfinished Ninth. In the Adagio
movement Bruckner quotes
identifiable and not so obvious phrases from earlier
works. If he had not been
subjected to Levis criticisms,
and wasted (in effect) five or
six years in making what are
now regarded as unnecessary
(however convincing) new
versions of works which were
perfectly capable of standing
by themselves in their original form,
during that half-decade Bruckner would
have had ample opportunity to complete
the Ninth and very probably begin a Tenth.
If that were true, and there is no reason
to suppose it is an untenable proposition,
then the coda to the Ninth might well
have taken a different course.
This is because when Bruckner was
eventually working on that finale, he
knew that the Ninth would be his last
symphony. This may have been a spur
which was not an entirely new departure
for him. In his earliest symphonies,
notably the Third, he quoted a passage
from his Mass in D minor, and the coda
of the Fifth demonstrated his complete
contrapuntal mastery in bringing together
the entire melodic content of the work in
a final peroration.
We have a clue that that kind of

the finale, leaving us with a

considerable amount of material in
full and short score but the
original complete plan in short
score, which was always subject to
changes in its ultimate realisation,
is missing.
It was undoubtedly stolen. The
consequence is that for most of
the succeeding 80 or 90 years
after Bruckners death on October
11th, 1896, the Symphony has
only ever been heard in an
incomplete version that the
composer himself did not
imagine or intend. There is no
doubt that a great performance
of the first three movements can
produce a result that is profoundly satisfying and we do
not have to list favourite recordings in order to demonstrate
that but to experience the
work in a three-movement
form was never the composers intention.
Bruckner was working on
the finale in the morning of
the very day he died: there
could be no more convincing
demonstration of his desire to
complete a four-movement
symphony than that simple, and in the
event tragic, fact. We have mentioned the
very likelihood of the theft of some of his
workings on the finale by well-intentioned
admirers and disciples, knowing that the
movement was incomplete, and doubtless being unwilling to purloin material
from the first three completed movements. But Bruckner was above all a
methodical man, and we know that he
maintained carefully numbered folios of
his work in progress as he did on the
incomplete finale. Indeed, once those
extant folios have been put in order, we
have around 560 bars of continuous
music, leading to the works coda, the
symphonys missing summa cum laude.
It is that crucial concluding element that is
missing, but from descriptions by several
of Bruckners disciples from what they saw
in the weeks following his death we have

17

concluding coda was what Bruckner had

in mind, as a consequence of the very
long-held pedal note which underpins the
music as the coda approaches. Bruckner,
of course, would have learned this from
Bach, as the final strettos in his fugues get
under way, but it is the immense length
of Bruckners tonic pedal that suggests
another, newer approach to the conclusion of the Ninth. This is that the nature of
the pedal is to hold the music to the
harmonic fundamental over as long a
period as the music can bear and as the
texture widens before it finally comes
together.
What Bruckner would surely have had
in mind is a much wider harmonic spectrum, hinted in the first movement, and
further implied and achieved in the
Adagio; that, in itself, surely demonstrates
that in the Ninth Bruckner was thinking
over a broad tonal area, approaching it in
the finale, and at last coming together in
the coda over the immense tonic D in
the timpani, that pedal being one which

we have every reason to believe is

authentic.
Graf reported the long tonic pedal, and
also that so far as he could see, the broad
sketch of the finales coda would have
brought together all the main thematic
material of the work as Bruckner had
achieved in the finales coda in the Eighth,
but probably over a somewhat longer
time-scale though this last point is
purely conjectural, although implied by
that long timpani tonic.
None the less, and despite as much in
terms of informed conjecture as we may
imagine, the challenge of creating a coda
worthy of the immensity of the task
cannot be gainsaid. But, to get as close to
Bruckners avowed intent as we can, we
cannot maintain that the three-movement
Ninth represents the composers abschied,
however tempting it may seem. Whilst
none of the worthy completions which
have been made by various dedicated
Brucknerians would claim to be what the
composer would have written, there is
much to be learned
from a study of those
completions. In that
regard, we must hope
that there will not be
a never-ending clutch
of finales from which
a conductor may
choose, as if selecting a hand in a rubber of bridge, we can
no longer merely
accept a threemovement Bruckner
Nine as the last word
on the subject. Perhaps an international
symposium on the
subject could be
held, in Austria, and
an agreed completion put forward as
the nearest we can

get to a solution.
It may be possible that at some point
those missing passages from the finale
will come to light hopefully, of course,
the short score of the complete draft of
the finale. When we can see as has
been the case in quite recent years that
previously unknown works by Mozart, Liszt
and others have been found, there may
well be lurking somewhere that elusive
folio in Bruckners hand.
Such a collation of existing manuscript
pages as have been located and put back
in order as revealed the long-thought-lost
Third Piano Concerto of Liszt, and Alma
Mahlers release in 1962 of no fewer than
forty additional pages of manuscript from
Mahlers unfinished Tenth Symphony, half
a century after his death if such as these
can eventually come to light, it may still
reside within the bounds of possibility that
that first draft (and more) can emerge.
Until such time we can only hope, and do
our best to discern just how the shape
and content of that coda would have
sounded.

Nevertheless, we do have the first 560-odd

bars of continuous music of the finale in
Bruckners hand, tantalisingly ending with
the approach to the coda.

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J U LY - S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5 M U S I C A L O P I N I O N Q U A R T E R LY

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