About this Piece

Critical and popular approval arrived for Anton Bruckner in 1884 with the enthusiastic reception accorded his Seventh Symphony. Conductor Arthur Nikisch led the Gewandhaus Orchestra in its debut at the Neues Theater. After years of opposition from the musical establishment—particularly from the champions of Brahms in their battles with the adherents of Wagner—the composer was ready to be regarded as his own man rather than an anti-Brahmsian or a Wagnerian.

The success of the Seventh, with its heightened emphasis on the dark, rich sonorities of low brass, did wonders for Bruckner’s fragile self-esteem, so much so that he embarked with unprecedented determination on what would be his largest symphonic creation, the Eighth Symphony.

The Eighth occupied Bruckner for three years, whereupon he sent the score to the conductor Hermann Levi. Levi had been entrusted by Wagner with the Bayreuth Parsifal premiere in 1882 at which, incidentally, Bruckner was in the audience. Bruckner found in Levi what he thought would be his ultimate champion; the conductor had led his Te Deum in Munich and helped raise funds for the publication of the Fourth and Seventh Symphonies. Levi was, however, completely bewildered by the Eighth Symphony and rejected it.  

It was the great tragedy of Bruckner’s life that he valued others’ opinions too highly and would act on them to his own detriment. Levi’s rejection plunged the composer into a profound depression. The final consequence, however, was not artistic paralysis but a manic need to rewrite not only the Eighth but his first five numbered symphonies, which were substantially revised between 1887 and 1891.

Whether the changes in the Eighth reflect Levi’s views—it seems that he did not so much suggest revising the symphony as scrapping it—we don’t know. Bruckner did away with the first movement’s loud coda in favor of the present soft one, ending the movement as it had begun, in mystery, and he wrote an entirely new trio for the scherzo. At the behest of the conductor Franz Schalk, the composer overhauled both the slow movement and the finale.

All of this resulted in three different versions of the Symphony, bringing us to the thorny subject of Bruckner “editions.” To touch on the matter as lightly as possible, the scholarly edition conducted by Zubin Mehta is by Leopold Nowak, published in 1955 and based on Bruckner’s 1890 version.

Vienna, where Bruckner had lived, embattled, often scorned, was the scene of the Eighth Symphony’s premiere the week before Christmas, 1892. The conductor was yet another eminent Wagnerian, Hans Richter; the orchestra was the Vienna Philharmonic, playing in the Musikverein, its home to this day. The Eighth, like its predecessor, was a success. Portions of the music even won a kind of grudging approval from the waspish critic Eduard Hanslick. “A stormy ovation,” Hanslick wrote, “waving of handkerchiefs from the standees, innumerable recalls, laurel wreaths. For Bruckner, the concert was certainly a triumph. Whether Richter performed a similar favor for his audience is doubtful. The program seems to have been presented only for the sake of a noisy minority.” The composer Hugo Wolf, on the other hand, wearing his critic’s hat and writing in the fashionable Wiener Salonblatt, called it “the creation of a giant, surpassing in spiritual dimension and magnitude all the other symphonies of the master.” 

If the Eighth is Wagnerian in its sonority, its architecture is derived from Beethoven—most notably his Ninth Symphony. Bruckner’s symphony, like Beethoven’s, begins with a murmurous, misty “background,” out of which emerges a vast construct, with three major thematic subjects. The principal theme is based on two rhythmic motifs, the first dotted (a sort of motto, heard throughout the Symphony), the second among the composer’s most frequently employed figures, two quarter notes followed by a triplet. There’s a gorgeously arching second theme, in G, then a third, in E-flat minor, whose billowing crescendos take the exposition to its climax. The development is remarkably compact.

Wolf regarded this opening movement as “simply shattering, destroying every attempt at criticism.” One should nonetheless point out, among many memorable moments, the grand climax of the recapitulation, with trumpets and horns thundering out the dotted rhythm of the main theme 10 times, an episode Bruckner referred to as “the announcement of death,” followed by a tense silence and three pianissimo timpani rolls.

The Scherzo, a ferocious, menacing dance, is placed second, a practice initiated by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony. It is predicated on a repeated five-note figure (C, E-flat, F, G, G) that pounds itself into the brain, as Bruckner scholar Robert Simpson noted in his The Essence of Bruckner, like “the constant thud of a colossal celestial engine beyond even Milton’s imagining.”

The vast Adagio is Bruckner’s crowning achievement (he thought so himself)—whose design, rather than its harmonies or thematic content, resembles the third movement in Beethoven’s Ninth. The opening material, which couldn’t have been written without the precedent of the “Liebesnacht” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, is contrasted by a heart-rending theme announced by the cellos.

The fourth movement is music of intense cumulative energy that, to quote Simpson again, “is the greatest specimen of Bruckner’s new kind of finale.… The best way to appreciate its grandeur…is to imagine some great architect wandering in and about his own cathedral, sometimes stirred and exhilarated, sometimes stock-still in rapt thought.” The coda, in blazing C major, reviews the opening themes of all four movements, while summoning up visions of Wagner’s finale of Das Rheingold: the gods crossing a rainbow bridge to Valhalla. —Herbert Glass