A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.
Paul Valéry
Ascertaining the intentions of the creator of a work of art, understanding the role and locus of that artwork in a creator’s life and work, how all of that fits into the complexities of social, cultural and political contexts — these are among the most fascinating and enthralling elements of any encounter with human creativity. These questions are beguiling and perplexing enough when a work is completed. Revision is not uncommon with works of art in any era, but when an artist completes something only to go back to it — immediately, or soon after completion, or years or decades later — we are faced with further questions and fascinations.
The conductor Hans von Bülow regarded Austrian composer Anton Bruckner as “half genius, half simpleton.” Bruckner was a peculiar individual driven by unsettling fixations, his work ethic and his spiritual life marked by devotion and discipline bordering on the fanatical. Yet among the many idiosyncrasies of his personality and his compositional style, few are as fascinating and baffling as his insistent habit of revision. The two hundredth anniversary of his birth on September 4 offers an opportunity to revisit “the Bruckner Problem,” the inescapable and essentially unsolvable questions about the many revisions Bruckner made to most of his symphonies. Compounding this are multiple editions of the various versions, often producing significant variance. The folios and quartos of Shakespeare can’t hold a candle to the often profoundly different perspectives of the symphonies’ numerous editors, even to this day: a new critical edition of the symphonies is a work in progress since 2016.
As with any intellectual or academic discipline, a wide variety of perspectives and biases exist in musicology. Bruckner research is further complicated not only by the already-difficult questions around his relentless modifications, but by the taint of the Third Reich. Robert Haas, an early and enduringly influential editor of Bruckner’s music, associated himself with the Nazi party, which willfully appropriated Bruckner (who died in 1896 and whose life gives no indication that he would have endorsed Hitler’s abominations), portraying the Austrian composer as a pure-hearted artist of small-town peasant stock striving against the corrupting influences of “cosmopolitan” Vienna; we all know how to decode that, and how much stock to place in the venomous rantings of history’s most shameless deceivers. Yet the destructive sweep of their evil was so vast that even nearly a century later, we still have to consciously sift the truth from the lies with which Bruckner’s reputation was posthumously besmirched.
An enduring question, of course, is simply: why? Why are there at least two different versions, sometimes four or more, of most of his symphonies? What propelled this incessant reassessment? One enduring idea envisions the composer as a deeply neurotic, timid, lonely, awkward, frustrated country bumpkin in the big city, a man who spent his adolescence in a monastery and whose cringing personal insecurities made him exceptionally susceptible to others’ persuasions. Surely there is a basis for this image of Bruckner, but it is quite difficult to separate it from the aforementioned fascist propaganda and its blood-and-soil portrayal of him as a victimized hero of das Volk, his critics (no matter how astute or sympathetic in reality) lumped with the usual targets of the Nazis’ homicidal bigotry and fanaticism. Could “insecure Brucker” merely be a pack of lies? Or a collection of half-truths? Or could it be that Bruckner knew exactly what he was doing, that he revised not because he lacked faith in himself, but precisely because he believed that his contributions to music were so deserving of attention and appreciation that further refinement was therefore warranted, even necessary?
The revisions themselves present a whole other realm of captivation and bewilderment. In some instances, the changes are profound, even absolute — completely rewriting a movement; in other cases, they are subtle yet nonetheless consequential. We can find both in the third movement of the Symphony No. 4. In the first version, completed in 1874, it is an “Alpine scherzo” which was completely discarded for the two other versions (1880 and 1888) that followed, replaced by the “hunting scherzo” that is among Bruckner’s most exciting works. The two different versions of this second scherzo are very similar, but they differ in ways that make it pretty easy to understand why musicologists, conductors, concertgoers and yes, even classical radio bloggers argue endlessly over which versions they might prefer. In the 1880 version, a particularly magnificent phrase for the horns ends with a decisive quarter note. That very-similar-but-not-identical passage in its 1888 analogue ends with a brusque staccato eighth note. Should the sentence end with an exclamation point, or a comma? They are not the same.
And there’s no escaping the question. If an orchestra’s music director or a classical radio programmer is going to play Bruckner, a particular version — and one of the many different editions of that version — has to be chosen. I don’t find the idea of a naïf, painfully self-doubting Bruckner wholly implausible, but given his enduring power two hundred years after his birth to force us into dilemmas like this, I’m not convinced he was ignorant of his own strength.
I will be delighted to no end if those who already love Bruckner revel in this bicentennial, but perhaps my highest hope is that those who are not yet enthusiastic will approach these admittedly befuddling questions, ask, “Is this composer really worth it?” and decide, as I and generations of Bruckner enthusiasts have, that the answer is yes. Bruckner’s music thrills, terrifies, inspires and invigorates precisely where we find our own problematic selves in it, exactly in those many moments when the horror and the glory of our own experience is reflected in his juxtaposition of intellectual meticulousness with searing emotion.
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