Bruckner
Symphony No. 7 in E major
Anton Bruckner was born in Ansfelden, Austria in 1824 and died in Vienna in 1896. He began this symphony in 1881 and completed it in 1883. It was first performed by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under the direction of Arthur Nikisch in 1884. The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 4 Wagner tubas, timpani, percussion, and strings.
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To encounter a Bruckner symphony is to step into the infinite. Bruckner constructed musical worlds like no other, worlds where the clocks run on “Bruckner time,” where the only story is the music itself, where the mystical becomes transcendent—it is the music of belief.


His contemporaries didn’t know what to make of it. Even his biggest supporters urged him to change it, to make it more understandable, and Bruckner—famously “insecure”—usually did so, or allowed others to “normalize” his works. But was he really so insecure? A good case may be made that he was merely being realistic. Bruckner was a Wagnerite when the top critics in Vienna were Brahmsians who condemned his music in the harshest terms. Even when he allowed his music to be bowdlerized to suit them he couldn’t buy a good review.


Which is why, perhaps, Bruckner did an end run around them when he issued his Seventh Symphony. The work premiered in Leipzig to great acclaim, followed by successes in Munich, Dresden, Frankfurt, Harlsruhe, Hamburg, Cologne, and elsewhere. By the time he allowed it to be performed in Vienna the notices were already in, and though the Viennese critics trashed it as usual they could not bury it.


That probably explains why Bruckner’s famous “insecurity” didn’t strike him this time. After the initial performances of the Seventh he made only minor, performance-related revisions to the score and published it as he intended. (It’s worth remembering, too, that Bruckner carefully preserved his original scores even while he permitted the disfigured versions to be published; perhaps he had the confidence—as Mahler did—that his time would come.)


The Seventh opens with a broad theme that spans over two octaves as it reaches for the heavens. Bruckner said that this theme came to him in a dream: a friend from Leipzig, the late Ignaz Dorm, whistled the melody to him and said, “With this theme you will make your fortune.” A second upward-reaching theme comes from the winds and, after a brass fanfare, a third almost dance-like theme arrives. From this point onward the goal of the music is to recapture that first theme and its tonality. Bruckner delays his return to E major through an episodic, complex development—alert listeners will note the upside-down and mirror-image versions of all the themes—finally arriving at an immense pedal-point built on the note E. At first the music above this pedal-point doesn’t seem to get the message; eventually it transforms itself to agree with it with a sense of overwhelming affirmation.


When it came time to compose the Symphony’s Adagio Bruckner had a premonition: “One day I came home and felt very sad. It was impossible, I thought, that the Master should live much longer. And then the C-sharp minor Adagio came to me.” The “Master” was Wagner, who had been in ill health. Bruckner received the news that Wagner had died just as he was reaching the end of his Adagio; in tribute to him he composed an epilogue to the movement that he always referred to as “funeral music for the Master.”


The movement opens with the sound of Wagner tubas, instruments Wagner had created for his Ring cycle of operas. These combine the basic tone of the French horn with the added weight of the tuba; their sound is unique and immediately brings Wagner to mind. The opening theme is dark and elegiac, but it is followed immediately by a powerful three-note theme in the strings that outlines a major third. This theme is the same one Bruckner used in his Te Deum to symbolize the triumph over death; as the Adagio unfolds its double-variations this theme returns again and again, as if in consolation.


Pulsating strings bring in the Scherzo, along with odd trumpet calls that have been likened to cock-crows. This is one of Bruckner’s splendid rustic scherzos, full of rhythmic vitality and musical excitement. The cock-crow trumpet calls—inverted this time—even make their presence known in the wistful Trio.


The Finale begins with some of the perkiest music Bruckner ever wrote, though it’s actually a variant of the music that opened the first movement so solemnly. The movement proceeds as a kind of rondo form with both this opening music and a chorale-like phrase returning to punctuate the wide-ranging side-trips that Bruckner injects. The goal of the journey is the reappearance of the Symphony’s opening theme, which arrives transformed in a glorious blaze of E major.