Yannick Nézet-Séguin opens the Orchestre Métropolitain season on Sunday afternoon with a tribute concert to Anton Bruckner on the occasion of the bicentenary of the composer’s birth. For the occasion, he is reviving an old tradition by associating the Te Deum to the 9e Symphony.
When Anton Bruckner died in Vienna on October 11, 1896, he left a very large unfinished work: his 9e Symphony. It’s obviously some kind of curse. How to complete a 9e Symphony after Beethoven? If we consider that the composer “did not have time”, we must first agree on the notion of “time”.
It was in 1887 that Bruckner began composing his 9e Symphony. And there he will leave it aside and waste four years revising his Symphony no 8then his Third and even the Firstsomething quite useless since it does not interest many people and it will not change anything in his destiny. The composer will not return to his essential last symphonic words until 1891. On November 30, 1894, the 3e movement, the sublime Adagiois happily completed.
So we have almost two years during which Bruckner cannot manage to give birth to a finale. And it is not laziness: it is an obsession that is almost running on empty. Bruckner will never give up. On the very morning of his death, he is still working on his cathedral, his grandiose monument, dedicated to the glory of God, “ To the great glory of God ».
Should we seek to complete the 9e Symphony Bruckner’s or to perform only the three existing movements? Bruckner himself suggested that his famous Te Deum be played as the final movement of this work. We will hear the result on Sunday. This option was used when conductor Ferdinand Löwe presented the work in Vienna in 1903. Löwe, for his part, also arrogated to himself the right to fiddle with Bruckner’s scores to tone down their harmonic and rhythmic audacity, which he did for the occasion.
The idea ” 9e Symphony + Te Deum » remained present until the 1960s and 1970s, as a grandiose way of representing this work. For our part, in half a century, we have never experienced a concert of this type. However, it should not be excluded that it was an idea launched by Bruckner in desperation. The composer had the absolute obsession of not being played and could fear (despite Schubert’s counter-example) that the incompleteness of his final symphony would be fatal to him, thus finding in this completion by the Te Deum a clever “marketing idea”.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin is not the only one to have had the intuition to test this original intention, since Markus Poschner, who has just recorded the great Bruckner integrals for Capriccio/Naxos, gave the diptych in concert at the basilica of the abbey of Saint-Florian (Bruckner’s church) on September 4th.
Other ways
But a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 1896 and 1903. First of all, Löwe’s alterations have been eradicated. The musicologist Alfred Orel has restored to its truth this “musical sum intended for future times”, in the composer’s words. The true Ninth Bruckner’s score, in three movements, was premiered by Siegmund von Hausegger on April 2, 1932 in Munich, and recorded in 1938. Orel’s score, published in 1934, not only restores the composer’s orchestration, but reproduces sketches of the Final.
The perception of the Final of the 9e Symphony which prevailed until the beginning of the 21st centurye century is summed up by the English musicologist Robert Layton: “Bruckner left many sketches, but his creative ideas were still too vague to give credit to all those who would attempt a Final hypothetical. We have nothing comparable to the sketch that Mahler left us of his 10e Symphony and to which a scholar like Deryck Cooke could have given a finished form.
This idea has been challenged for a quarter of a century. In 2002, in Salzburg, the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt gave a “concert lecture”, recorded by RCA, putting 526 bars of this final movement into context. The Austrian conductor claimed that Bruckner had been two months short of orchestrating and completing this Final. Given Bruckner’s slowness and the project of an apotheosis encompassing themes from earlier symphonies and the first three movements of this one, we very much doubt it.
It is nonetheless false to say that we have nothing comparable to the sketches of the Tenth by Mahler. These fragments may be disconcerting or “disappointing”, but far from non-existent. There are now three ways to play the 9e Symphony Bruckner’s: the only three completed movements (an overwhelming majority of concerts), with one of the various attempts at Final reconstructed (works of Samale, Mazzuca, Philips, Cohrs, Carragan, Schaller, Letocart) or with the Te Deumsomething that had become extremely rare, even lost.
Sunday’s concert will be all the more interesting.