Download Bruckner`s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor

(From the CD-booklet of the 1986 Decca recording of Bruckner’s Ninth with Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra)
British musician, writer, and translator Andrew Huth discusses Anton Bruckner’s 9th Symphony
in D Minor:
Bruckner began his Ninth Symphony in August 1887, only two days after completing the original version
of the Eighth. By November 1894 the first movement, Scherzo and Adagio were ready in a fair copy of
the score which shows no trace of doubt or hesitation. For the finale, however, all that exists is a mass of
drafts and unconnected sketches whose incoherence shows only too clearly the effects of the physical and
mental illnesses that darkened the remaining two years of the composer's life.
Bruckner's symphonies, whether in major or minor keys, end with such affirmative visions of glory that
this one exception is bound to make a disturbing impression. There is darkness and drama in earlier
symphonies, but always absorbed into an argument which culminates in a triumphant establishment of the
tonic major key. Not only does the unfinished Ninth lack such an affirmative finale, but the agonized
chromaticism, the battering, dissonant climaxes, introduce a vivid expression of spiritual pain and isloation
which had never been heard before in Bruckner's music.
Bruckner's nature has puzzled many people (including, perhaps, Bruckner himself). The accepted view of
him is of a god-intoxicated peasant whose naive simplicity protected him from a world he could not
understand but who, through faith and perseverance, composed gigantic symphonies of a formal subtlety
far beyond many more obviously intelligent composers. Such a picture ignores two facts vital to an
appreciation of Bruckner: firstly, that constructive musical thought works quite independently from
conceptual thought; and secondly, that a great faith can only exist in the context of great doubts to be
overcome. Bruckner may well have lacked the self-awareness to understand or explain what he was doing,
but the triumphs he did achieve are never insubstantial rhetorical gestures; they are products of a
courageous explorer never contented with easy solutions to the problems he has chosen to face.
In the Ninth, the problems are indeed enormous. Above all, there is the problem of momentum in a
structure of vast proportions built up out of paragraphs lasting several minutes. In such music, large-scale
contrasts of tonality and expressive character assume vital importance as a means of formal articulation,
while the orchestral climaxes, however arresting, are not so much areas of achievement as moments which
increase the music’s overall tension by revealing further directions in which the argument might develop.
The thunderous ending of the first movement, for example, avoids all definition of major or minor,
marking a suspension of the drama, not a point of arrival.
The following Scherzo re-asserts D minor, but a D minor so chromatically agitated that this movement
has little in common with the celebrations of physical movement found in other Bruckner symphonies. Its
elemental power, altogether more threatening, looks forward to the twentieth century, while the Trio,
providing contrast but not relaxation, has a sinister quality found nowhere else in music.
The searching E major Adagio is built upon themes that strive towards resolution and affirmation, but the
passages of glorious beauty that do emerge are quickly swallowed up again in darkness. The heart of the
Symphony lies in the final climax, which erupts, against all expectations, into a hideous dissonance: we are
face to face with all the forces of negation and destruction that Bruckner made it his task to exorcise in his
music. The coda is deeply peaceful, but it is a peace neither of certainty nor of resignation. Because the
Ninth Symphony is incomplete the battle is neither won nor lost; but the surviving movements tell us
clearly enough the terms on which it is being fought, and what is at stake.