'Dear Anton . . . Love, Adolf'

Are we listening to Nazi Bruckner?

by Jeffrey Gantz

Anton Bruckner isn't exactly the heartthrob of the classical-music industry. True, his symphonies, even the unnumbered ones, are being recorded in mind-boggling profusion -- just check the catalogue -- by conductors who are dying to be considered spiritual and profound. (What kind of sales figures these recordings ring up is another matter.) But the appearance of his symphonies on concert programs tends to have audiences scurrying for cover rather than storming the box office. He's the apostle of religious ecstasy -- and religious doubt -- in an age that wants to get on with it and not ask the Big Questions.

These days, however, Anton's becoming the center of a firestorm -- make that a Burning Bush -- of controversy. For the first part of this century, his music was performed in versions "edited" -- sometimes heavily -- by his friends. In the '30s, a number of "original" scores came to light; the symphonies were re-edited, and that's the form in which we know them today. The catch is, the work of Bruckner's '30s editor, Robert Haas, had the approval of Adolf Hitler. Was Bruckner's work "Aryanized"? Did the Nazis attempt to "purify" his symphonies in the same obscene way they attempted to "purify" Europe? Was Bruckner a proto-Nazi? This debate has been touched off by a new Telarc recording of Anton's Fifth Symphony -- in the "impure" edited version of 1894 rather than the "original" 1878 -- by the London Philharmonic under polymath Leon Botstein (president of Bard College and also director of the American Symphony Orchestra). The differences are by no means academic -- for starters, Botstein's Fifth lasts just 57 minutes, as against the 80 or so that's become the norm. And in person (he came to Harvard last week to deliver a pair of lectures) he makes a powerful case for the "new" Bruckner.

Just what Anton wanted us to hear is a knotty question. Assailed by constant doubt, and desperate to get his work played, Bruckner made major changes in a number of his symphonies; he also took advice from friends. The result: multiple versions of many of his works. The Fifth is particularly problematic: he completed it in 1878, but there was no prospect of a performance. In 1892, his friend and disciple Franz Schalk, kapellmeister in Graz, borrowed the score with a view to polishing it and making it performable. The "polishing" turned into a major undertaking: wholesale reorchestration (less brass, more woodwind), new tempo and performance markings, a considerable cut in the reprise of the Scherzo, and a whopping 122 bars (out of the original 635) removed from the Finale. Anton made some suggestions that were incorporated, and he may have had an idea what Franz was doing, but it's doubtful he realized the full extent of the changes. Schalk premiered the Fifth in 1894, and it was a huge success. Bruckner, however, was too ill to attend. He never heard the symphony, but before his death, in 1896, he sent off to the Austrian National Library a packet of manuscripts, including his 1878 version of the Fifth.

Which would suggest these were the versions he wanted preserved for posterity. That's certainly what Haas concluded when he went to work on the manuscripts in the '30s and '40s. New editions of Bruckner's symphonies were prepared by Haas and, subsequently, Leopold Nowak; these "pure" originals won general acclaim (a few of the older conductors held out, Hans Knappertsbusch and occasionally Wilhelm Furtwängler), and for the next 60 years everyone was happy.

But is the Bruckner we know the "real" Bruckner? Or is it the Nazi Bruckner? "It was," writes Benjamin Marcus Korstvedt, "only after Joseph Goebbels granted Haas's work Hitler's imprimatur in 1937 that it won unquestioning acceptance. Anti-Semitism also fueled the campaign against the nineteenth-century scores, several of which were published by Jewish firms. Indeed, the whole notion of `purifying' Bruckner's music of textual contamination resonated with the mythos of racial purity." This is the opening salvo from the liner notes for the new Botstein Fifth, which is just the second ever recording of the 1894 version (the first, from Knappertsbusch and the Vienna Philharmonic, came out back in 1956).

It's no coincidence that the battle over Bruckner is focusing on his Fifth. A towering, cathedral-like symphony that seems to have been cut out of stone rather than composed, it rises massive and medieval, with a succession of brass outbursts that make few concessions to the listener. Since the "original" version appeared, recorded performances have got slower and slower, moving from Furtwängler's 67:42 (in 1942) to Kurt Eichhorn's 80:41 (in 1993) -- and Sergiu Celibidache has given performances in Munich that exceed 85 minutes. The Finale is the real bone of contention: four themes, two of them eventually combining into a mammoth double fugue whose concluding brass outburst (Schalk brought in a team of fresh players to help out) would do the Last Judgment proud. In Eichhorn's performance (with the Bruckner Orchestra of Linz) it runs 27:39.

Leon Botstein zips through the same movement in just 16:55. Of course, his version is missing those 122 bars, including the entire first and second theme groups in the recapitulation, with the result that Bruckner's ungainly but precision-balanced edifice (the second theme is completely absent from the development) turns into a sonata-form prelude and fugue. But it's not just the cuts, or the reorchestration, that distinguish this new Fifth -- it's what Botstein, in his liner note, calls "Bruckner's affinity to Schubert and Viennese classicism." The conductor continues: "At stake in this and other interpretive decisions reflected in this recording is a revisionist judgment of the character of Bruckner's music and intentions. Insofar as there is a spiritual dimension to Bruckner's music, it is understood here as being celebratory and not ponderous, as joyful and lyrical and not overcome by its own gravity."

No question that Bruckner belongs to Austria (not Germany) and had an affinity with Schubert, or that his religious mode should be celebratory (just listen to the opening outburst of the Credo from the F-minor Mass). And Botstein's performance style may indeed reflect what Bruckner expected. To my ears (brought up on the 20-minute-plus traversals of Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti), Leon's 14:41 Adagio sounds much too fast, but it's clear Bruckner wanted the movement conducted in 2/2 (two beats per measure, which means not too slow), and Botstein's 36 BPM is well within the marked Adagio range (Karajan and Solti reinterpret the movement as a Largo).

Still -- is this what Bruckner wanted us to hear? Remember that he neither saw nor heard the 1894 Schalk score, and that his 1878 version is the one he bequeathed to posterity. Schalk's editing boils down to three major issues: sheltering us from Bruckner's trumpet outbursts, truncating the reprise of the Scherzo, and turning the Finale into that prelude and fugue. Trumpets, to Bruckner, are the instrument of the Apocalypse, and this symphony is nothing if not Apocalyptic -- no one ever said that the Last Judgment would be easy to take. The reprise of the Scherzo exposes us to more of Bruckner's obsessional counting, a symptom of his frequent depression; it's even harder to listen to, but you can't have religious ecstasy without religious doubt. As for the Finale, 25 minutes is hardly excessive to develop four themes (most composers find two per movement plenty) and a double fugue. And how can one alter the basic concept of a movement without the composer's explicit approval? Every time I hear the Schalk version (and I've been living with my Knappertsbusch recording for the past 30 years), I feel cheated. It's reductive. It's simplistic. It doesn't pine for the center of the universe the way Bruckner's original does.

That's also what I miss in Botstein's interpretation. On its own terms, the new Telarc disc is a corrective to Nazi/Germanic Bruckner. But straight off Botstein reduces the full-measure rests of bars 22 and 30 in the opening Allegro to half measures -- which suggests that he lacks one essential Bruckner characteristic: patience. (Granted, most Bruckner conductors lack much more.) Bruckner is about harmonic motion rather than linear development; his symphonies travel through time, but they also halt, Jacob-like, to wrestle with God's angels. Bruckner's big brass chords are sensuous beasties that revel in the glory of God's Creation (and occasionally agonize, as in the falling sevenths that bring the Adagio to ground); they want to be petted, stroked, savored. And meditated on -- after all, is God's time time as we know it? The horizontal element of Bruckner (which so often gets short shrift) is lovingly represented here; it's the vertical dimension that's missing.

And that's why the Schalk Bruckner is such a dangerous animal. David H. Aldeborgh explains (unintentionally) why in his contribution to the Telarc liner notes: "Despite some gorgeous and even impassioned themes, there is an objective quality about the music which tends toward the impersonal, and for this reason the orchestration should be such as to minimize this quality -- if the piece is to sound friendly, that is." Sure, but does great art have to sound friendly? Is Dante friendly? Is Mark Rothko friendly? What about Jean Sibelius's supreme, icy-cold Fourth Symphony? More than one Bruckner Fifth liner note describes the Schalk version as an "agreeable mediocrity."

In conversation, Leon Botstein is a passionate, informed defender of the 1894 Fifth (we literally tore my Schalk score to pieces -- proof that both of us had a good time), and he has some practical considerations on his side. As Bruckner performances get slower, they get less coherent -- few of today's spiritually challenged conductors know how to meditate. And Bruckner composed for a cathedral acoustic that's absent from today's concert halls and recording studios; where he left pauses to allow his huge reverberations to die away, we hear nothing (though the answer here might be to fix the acoustic rather than charge through the pauses). As for the score, there's no reason Schalk's performance ideas shouldn't count as seriously as Haas's. (It's fashionable now to ridicule Schalk's work, but if his judgment is open to question, his motives are not -- consider what he wrote after the Graz premiere: "Allow me, my most honored master, to lay at your feet my offering of the most sincere admiration, and to acclaim the composer of this most glorious work. In profound gratitude, always your most devoted Francisce.") The bottom line, however, is whether Bruckner really needs an editor. My answer is still no. By all means, make this symphony a living, breathing animal (and every conductor breathes differently). But don't take away the composer's essential characteristics (including the ones that aren't friendly), and don't cut without his explicit consent.

Where does all this leave Anton and Adolf? Pretty much where it leaves Richard Wagner and Adolf. Like Parsifal, Bruckner's symphonies are personal dialogues with the Deity, monastic compositions that don't pretend to express the full panoply (women, homosexuals, Jews, you name it) of Creation. Adolf's conversations with God were obviously all talk and no listen. To say that a provincial Catholic genius like Anton Bruckner (an easy target for the small-minded, xenophobic Nazi Party) is indispensable to God's music is to say that a cosmopolitan Jewish genius like Gustav Mahler is equally indispensable. The Nazis were as clueless about Bruckner's music as they were about Mahler's. Whatever its assumptions, or its shortcomings, this new Bruckner Fifth from Leon Botstein and Telarc reminds us that God's music, like God's universe, invites our exploration.