Bruckner 7
PROGRAMME NOTES
written by JASPER CROONEN
Ralph Vaughan Williams Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra (1934)
Anton Bruckner Symphony No. 7 in E major (1881-1883)
[discover also: Close Encounters]
[discover also: Bruckner 7 als matineeconcert]
[discover also: Bruckner Deconstructed]
[discover also: Wolfgang]
[read also: conductor’s note]
[read also: interview Mihai Cocea]
[all programme notes]
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21.06.2025 FLAGEY BRUSSELS
The human and the superhuman
“The first time he saw Ada again was after a performance by the Concertgebouw Orchestra. She had received a position there, and the season opened with Bruckner’s Seventh. (…) The adagio with its inexorable cello passage opened him up.”
- Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven
Anton Bruckner and Ralph Vaughan Williams – two composers who would appear to have little in common. The former looked with piously towards heaven, while the latter had a blinkered focus on the world around him and took stock of society.
Suite for viola and small orchestra
For the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, music was an intrinsically social event. Music was an art form by and above all for human beings. “He composed for every situation, however humble, for which music was needed” wrote the musicologist Hugh Ottaway about him. “Including styles and genres of a kind that many lesser composers would have considered beneath them.” As a result of this impartiality, Vaughan Williams has left us an enormously varied repertoire. Not only symphonies, concertos, sonatas and operas, but also educational music, songs for war benefits and music for radio plans.
However disparate all that music may appear to be, Vaughan Williams’ fascination for the traditional music of his homeland forms an unmistakable golden thread through his entire oeuvre. Like Bartók in Hungary, Vaughan Willimas made it his life’s work to record these local traditions, write them down and work them into his music.
He conspicuously demonstrates this source of inspiration in his Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra. The work, comprising eight movements, is subdivided into three groups. In his analysis of this work, Bernard John Kane wrote that the first group was intended to evoke a traditional Christmas mood. “The arpeggios in sixteenth notes in the viola suggest the ringing of church bells during the festivities of the winter solstice.” Vaughan Williams continues to delve into the Christmas spirit with a lyrical Carol tune in the second movement and festive dance steps in the third. Folk music returns very clearly in subsequent movements as well, such as in the closing movements ‘Polka Mélancolique’ and the stamping ‘Galop’.
The Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra is anything but complicated music. It is a passionate love letter to his own instrument, the often reviled string instrument, and is primarily an ode to the sounds that Vaughan Williams had absorbed from his surroundings.
Double zero
Anton Bruckner was cut from very different cloth. His Roman Catholic faith was awakened already in his youth at the monastery of St Florian, where he was educated after the premature death of his father. His piety would not be limited to the religious sphere. Bruckner was a composer who had a lifelong devotion to the great masters. Obsessed with Beethoven, a devotee of Wagner.
This constant admiration also found expression during one particular period of Bruckner’s career. In 1855, the composer, at over thirty years of age, decided to start taking music lessons again. Although he had already written several successful compositions by then, he started all over with studies in elementary harmony and counterpoint. He would spend six years pursuing this training, a period in which Bruckner hardly composed any music. Even thereafter, his quest for recognition was not satisfied. In 1861, he asked the Vienna conservatory to be allowed to take the entrance examination. When he appeared for the exam session, the conductor Johann Herbeck, a member of the jury, remarked that “he should be testing us!”
Even after obtaining his diploma and with the recognition of his most important contemporaries, Bruckner continued to be uncertain of his own ability. He always felt like the underdog, certainly in relation to God and his musical heroes. This is no doubt one of the reasons why Bruckner kept on reworking is compositions – especially his symphonies. And why the numbering of his works is so complex, including number zero and even a “double zero”.
Symphony No. 7
The Seventh Symphony is something of an exception in this regard. It is one of Bruckner’s few orchestral works that remained in its initial form. Other than a few minor changes after the première and after the performance, there is only one extant version of the Seventh. Moreover, it is one of the few symphonies with which Bruckner met with immediate success, which was far from self-evident. Many of his works were premiered only in the final years of his life. The Seventh was immediately well received. A reviewer for Berliner Tageblatt wondered with surprise in his review: “How is it possible that you could have remain unknown to us for so long?”
Without taking anything away from Bruckner’s own ability, his reverence for other great composers has resulted, in this symphony, in something quite distinctive. The world-famous Adagio is an elegy for Richard Wagner, who lay on his deathbed while Bruckner was writing it. With four Wagner tubas – the brass instrument that Wagner typically used in his Ring des Nibelungen–Bruckner wrote a final homage to the composer he admired so much.
And Beethoven’s shadow also loomed over Bruckner’s shoulder while he was writing his Seventh Symphony. His pupil Carl Hrubý recorded how Bruckner, after a performance of the Eroica, began, lost in thought, to muse on his own lack of success. “I think that if Beethoven were still alive today and I would visit him, I would show him my Seventh Symphony and ask him:
“Don’t you think, Mr von Beethoven, that the Seventh is not so bad as some people claim – people who are using it as an example and describe me as an idiot…” and Beethoven may take me by the hand and say: “My dear Bruckner, don’t worry about it. Things were no better for me, and the same gentlemen that used me as a stick to beat you with still don’t really understand my last quartets, however much they pretend they do."
But no matter how different the paths of Bruckner and Vaughan Williams may seem to be, their ambitions are nevertheless closer to each other than you might think. For although their approaches seem extremely different, the goal is the same. The strict boundary between the secular agnostic Vaughan Williams and the deeply religious Bruckner is a bit less firm than it might seem at first glance. Bruckner, like his father, played at Austrian folk celebrations; and Vaughan Williams also composed works for the church. Both composers sought to expose the humanity of music. Vaughan Williams did that by listening to the voices around him, while Bruckner listened to the voices from above – both spiritual and professional. Each in his own way succeeded fabulously in achieving his goal.
