Born in rural Upper Austria to a family of sturdy peasant origins, Anton Bruckner was the latest bloomer of all the major composers. His early life was devoted to teaching and service as organist in a series of local churches, chiefly the great Baroque monastery of St. Florian. He became a formidable virtuoso on this instrument, mesmerizing listeners with his inspired improvisations. With great reluctance, he left his provincial sanctuary for Vienna in 1868 at the mature age of 44. There he wrote his last eight symphonies while building a legend at the Vienna Conservatory as an eccentric but beloved teacher of composition and counterpoint. Naive and socially insecure, he never lost his rural style, dressing in unfashionably baggy suits and speaking with a rustic Upper Austrian accent.
So devout a Catholic was Bruckner that students recalled his interrupting classes to kneel in prayer at the sound of the Angelus bell from nearby St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Conductor Walter Damrosch aptly expressed the dichotomy between the modesty of the man and the grandeur of his music: “To me it has always seemed one of the inscrutable mysteries that Bruckner—while retaining all his life the simplicity of peasant life, speech, and customs—should have had within him a musical genius so extraordinary as to enable him to write music of such indescribable warmth, nobility, and eloquence.”
By February 1875, when he began writing the Fifth Symphony, Bruckner was deeply unhappy that he had come to Vienna. He wrote to a friend: “My life has lost all joy and enthusiasm—and all for nothing. How I wish I could go back to my old post!” Although he had written three symphonies in Vienna, there was little interest in performing them. He was established at the Vienna Conservatory, but his rustic manners had recently lost him a job as piano tutor at a seminary for women teachers, and he was very short of money. The powerful critic Eduard Hanslick had already begun his public persecution of Bruckner and his music. Not surprisingly, he began composing the Fifth with the melancholy theme for oboe that opens the Adagio second movement.
Sadly, Bruckner never heard a proper performance of the Fifth—only a read-through for two pianos in 1887, more than a decade after he had finished the work. Its first orchestral performance did not come until 1894, and then in a heavily rewritten version by his misguided disciple Franz Schalk—which Bruckner, mercifully, was too ill to attend. Nevertheless, even the humble Bruckner knew he had written something extraordinary and called its Finale his “contrapuntal masterpiece.” Having written the symphony in a little over a year from 1875 to 1876, he only edited it lightly two years later and never subjected it to the second thoughts that marred many of his other symphonies. It was the culmination of his symphonic achievement up to that time and pointed the way to his remarkable last three symphonies. With the Fifth, Bruckner scholar Robert Simpson says, “Bruckner [had] now reached his full stature.”
To enter into the world of a Bruckner symphony—and especially into the splendor of the 80-minute-long Fifth—listeners must readjust their 21st-century internal clocks. Inspired by Wagner’s tremendous expansion of the operatic form, Bruckner conceived his symphonic movements on a very broad scale. Even when his tempos are not actually slow, his music still seems leisurely. Bruckner themes are very long, built cumulatively from many elements. His harmonic strategies are even more protracted, and the home key becomes a distant goal approached by a very circuitous route.
Actually, Bruckner’s model for the Fifth is less Wagner than Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Bruckner has been unfairly accused of writing for immense, swollen orchestras in the manner of Wagner or Mahler. In fact, he was a master of achieving monumental effects from moderate orchestral means, and astonishingly, his orchestra for the Fifth matches Brahms’s symphonic forces. Bruckner’s orchestral sound is unique and extraordinarily effective. Like the great organist he was, he juxtaposed contrasting blocks of wind, brass, or string sounds much as an organist moves to different manuals with new stop combinations. His strategy for building his immense climaxes was to fall continually short of the summit and build again to achieve truly Olympian heights.
Just as we allow our pulse to slow when we enter a cathedral, so must we turn off our phones and surrender ourselves to a world beyond time as we listen to this composer. In the words of Simpson, this composer’s art has “a special appeal in our time to our urgent need for calm and sanity, for a deep stability in the world, whatever our beliefs, religious or other.”
Before beginning his symphonic career, Bruckner studied diligently for six years with the Viennese master of composition and counterpoint Simon Sechter; in fact, he succeeded Sechter in teaching these subjects at the Vienna Conservatory. His Fifth Symphony shows his contrapuntal mastery—the art of interweaving many independent instrumental lines—at its zenith. All the movements are enriched by lavish contrapuntal activity, and the Finale tops them all with two fugues, the second of them a double fugue on two subjects.
This is the only symphony Bruckner begins with a formal slow introduction, which, in Simpson’s words, “spreads its influence over the whole symphony, tonally and thematically.” A very hushed pizzicato idea in low strings, suggesting the key of B-flat, stalks in the background, over which the upper strings float poignantly dissonant suspensions. A sudden silence and a fierce upward motive explodes from the brass in the distant key of G-flat major. Another silence, and we hear a fragment of a noble brass chorale in A major. These brass elements reprise and conclude with a fuller presentation of the chorale, now on D and closing magnificently with the echo effect of a great sound decaying in a cathedral. As Michael Steinberg comments, the drama of this mighty movement will be the torturous search for the home key of B-flat major, so destabilized in this introduction.
That D is revealed to be D minor—the symphony’s other most important key—as the main Allegro finally gets underway with a quietly insistent theme in the violas and cellos that incorporates an upward flip. After this is developed, we hear the second theme: a melancholy, strangely unsettled melody sung by the first violins in a low register over a plucked accompaniment, all of which seems inspired by the music that opened the movement. A serene third theme in the flutes over an undulating counterpoint of strings and horn leads to two large but short-lived climaxes in the brass-dominated orchestra, and then the music subsides into the development section.
Here, the slow introduction’s music re-emerges: the pizzicato steps with horns taking over the string suspensions, the brief explosion of brass. The Allegro’s upward-flipping first theme reappears and receives an elaborate contrapuntal development, made more exciting by Bruckner’s use of quicker imitative entrances (a technique known as stretto). Late in the development, the introduction’s chorale theme makes a magnificent reappearance. The arrival of the fortissimo recapitulation in B-flat major is an electrifying homecoming. In the closing moments, the successful conquest of that key is celebrated with the full orchestra tolling like cathedral bells.
The superb Adagio in D minor is worthy of Bruckner’s fame throughout the German-speaking countries as the Adagio-Komponist. Beginning once again over a pizzicato pattern, it introduces the first of two major themes Bruckner will develop: the plaintive oboe theme that was his first inspiration for the Fifth. Notice the sighing falling-seventh intervals in this melody; Bruckner will make powerful use of them throughout. The effect here is rhythmically fascinating: While the oboe theme is in two beats, the pizzicato accompaniment is in three.
Sung by the violins on their dark-colored G string, the warmly consoling, richly harmonized second theme is one of the most beautiful Bruckner—or anyone—ever wrote and rises to a magnificent open-hearted climax. Both of these themes alternate with more elaborate contrapuntal developments. In the final return of the oboe theme, Bruckner transforms the falling-sevenths motive into a vast tolling motion, but then surprises us with a very subdued ending.
The Scherzo is linked to the Adagio by its key, D minor, and its adoption of the triplet pizzicato pattern, now sped up and bowed, as an ostinato background. In Simpson’s words: “This is one of Bruckner’s most gigantic and fantastic scherzos: A formidable inhuman power is directly faced with heedless gaiety.” The Scherzo also contains a gentler Ländler-style theme for contrast. Bruckner builds this into a full sonata form with a fairly elaborate development section. The trio section—in B-flat major and featuring two beats rather than three—is a bucolic oasis with a naive theme and nostalgic coloring from the horns. The Scherzo then repeats in full.
The Finale is one of Bruckner’s grandest achievements. In Peter Laki’s words, “Its vast architecture fuses a monumental sonata form with elements of fugue.” Like the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, it begins with a review of past themes: The first movement’s introductory pizzicato idea now gains a clarinet motive as commentary. We also hear the first movement’s Allegro theme and the oboe melody from the Adagio. The clarinet gives them a sassy response. The low strings react by turning this response into a fugue subject and building a highly rhythmic, Beethovenian fugue. A pause, and a cheerful second theme appears in the strings. Another pause, and the brasses shout out an idea that is an augmentation—a slowed-down version—of the fugue theme, as the strings swirl in excitement.
But something more important is coming. Out of the shadows bursts a brilliant ray of light in the unexpected key of G-flat major: a splendid chorale theme that seems the fulfillment of the chorale fragments we heard at the beginning of the symphony. The strings and woodwinds greet it with rapturous wonder. Now the violas turn it into a new fugue subject; eventually, with a drumroll, the first fugue theme with a downward leap joins in to make a double fugue.
The recapitulation brings back a lovely version of the cheerful theme to cool things down. But then the drive to the finish begins. With a triple-forte burst, the now mighty upward-flipping theme of the first movement’s Allegro joins the Finale’s main theme in contrapuntal enthusiasm. However, Bruckner artfully retreats to build for a greater climax. When it finally comes, it is a pure rush of adrenalin: a magnificent peroration on the chorale theme, setting up one of the most viscerally thrilling conclusions in the whole symphonic literature.
—Janet E. Bedell