Last night Herbert Blomstedt approached the conclusion of his current visit to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall by conducting the first of two performances of Anton Bruckner’s fifth symphony in B-flat major. (The second will take place tomorrow, Friday, night.) He conducted the 1878 version in the 1936 edition prepared by Robert Hass. This version is Bruckner’s own scrupulous revision of the original score, completed on May 16, 1876, which has yet to be published. This differs significantly from the version published by Franz Schalk in 1896. Schalk had given the first orchestral performance of the symphony, which did not take place until January 4, 1894. Bruckner was too ill to attend (he died on October 11, 1896); and Schalk made major revisions to the score without Bruckner’s knowledge to prepare for this performance. That is the version he published in 1896. Bruckner’s 1878 version was not performed until 1935 and then published by Haas the following year.
The Wikipedia author asserts that Schalk made his revision to make the music “sound more Wagnerian.” While it is true that there were many Wagner enthusiasts who wanted Bruckner to be the “orchestral Wagner,” Bruckner himself was not one of them. By many accounts Bruckner was most comfortable behind the console of a church organ; and, like that great organist-composer of the twentieth century, Olivier Messiaen, he was a man of intense and sincere faith, towards which he was highly personal and modest. Nothing could be further from the notorious personality traits of Richard Wagner; and, again as is the case with Messiaen, one cannot really appreciate even Bruckner’s secular music without an appreciation of his faith-based worldview.
This is most evident in the predominance of the chorale genre throughout the texture of his fifth symphony, usually grounded on instrumentation for the brass section. It is also important to note how many of his melodic lines consist of relatively short phrases often separated by sustained intervals of silence. In other words this is a composer who owe far more to the legacies of plainchant and Johann Sebastian Bach that he does to just about any aspect of Wagner’s aesthetic. The one possible exception is when Bruckner unlooses the full resources of the orchestra as a rich texture of interleaved repeated patterns emanating from the different instrumental parts. Even here, however, Bruckner seems less interested in Wagner’s celebration of some mythic hero and more after trying to capture the essence of the smallness of man when confronted with the many works of God.
When I wrote about the recent EMI collection of Bruckner conducted by Sergiu Celibidache, I used the phrase “Bruckner time.” While the prolonged passing of time in Wagner (at later in Gustav Mahler) tended to be driven by the progression of narrative elements, all trace of narrative has been abstracted from Bruckner’s symphonies. His conceptions are more like panorama than narrative, but it is not a panorama of uniform features. As is the case in both Wagner and Mahler, the large-scale perspective of the passing of time is defined through well-planned climaxes. Thus, a conductor is faced with what I have called the “climax management” problem, once described by Pierre Boulez in an interview he gave to James Oesterich of The New York Times as the need “to sort out the climaxes from the lesser peaks, so that the real ones stand out.”
The great virtue of the performance Blomstedt gave last night can be found in his solid comprehension of that “landscape” of climaxes. He conducted the entire symphony without a score, and there was no questioning his ability to hold the work in its entirety in his head. Thus, when the SFS had progressed to the final movement, whose rhetoric depends heavily on the straightforward iteration of thematic material, Blomstedt could apply his command of both phrasing and dynamic control to ride us up and down along those “lesser peaks,” however similar they might sound, until we finally came to the thrill of ascending the “real one.”
This was one of those listening experiences in which the sense of accomplishment emerged just as strongly on the audience side as it did up on stage. As Blomstedt conducted the final abrupt cadence and let the sound resonate in the ensuing silence, one could read that sense of accomplishment in the smiling faces of the ensemble. One could then feel it in the electric enthusiasm of the ovation given by the audience. Yes, there were noticeable blocks of empty seats in last night’s house; but those who attended offered up one of the best instances of rapt attention I have encountered in Davies. As I wrote about the Celibidache recordings, there are rewards to accepting “Bruckner time” for what it is; and Blomstedt offered up those rewards for all to relish to the greatest possible extent.
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