Bruckner’s symphonies: Analysis, reception and cultural politics
Abstract
Despite significant advances in Bruckner scholarship, many problems persist. Although the relationship between Bruckner's music, post-Wagnerian ideology and, ultimately, Nazism has been carefully reconstructed, questions of how such matters should condition our responses to the music remain unaddressed. This important study isolates problematic issues of interpretation, analysis, reception, and historical location, and offers potential solutions through case studies of individual works.
The timeworn view that Bruckner's sonata form is a motionless architecture devoid of dynamic processes has long contributed his isolation from the mainstream post‐Beethovenian tradition. Taking inspiration from August Halm's (1914) and Ernst Kurth's (1925) approaches, which were aimed at overcoming this view, this article seeks to elucidate the processual aspects of Bruckner's symphonic form in light of recent theoretical developments in musical form. Specifically, it combines William Caplin's form‐functional theory (1998), especially its beginning–middle–end paradigm, with Matthew Arndt's (2018) reconception of formal functionality to construct a new framework for the analysis of Bruckner's symphonic forms.
By way of an analytical case study of the first movement of Bruckner's Sixth Symphony, the article reveals that the expression of continuous motion occurring across discrete formal entities, often further dramatised by ‘wave dynamics’ (Kurth 1925), is fundamental to Bruckner's reinvigoration of sonata form's inherent temporal process in a post‐Romantic context. In the exposition, the inter‐thematic beginning, middle and end paradigms are redistributed to the three thematic groups, which express their unique temporal domain while delineating a continuous tonal journey from the home key to the subordinate key. The remainder of the movement articulates a gradual journey of homecoming, with each subsequent large‐scale part addressing previously suggested tonal implications. Ultimately, the modified form‐functional approach adopted in this study sheds light on Bruckner's exceptional care for formal syntax on various levels of structure, and its close association with an overarching, though unconventional, tonal plot.
Julian Horton's 2020 article on the ‘necessity of analysis’ delineates previous critiques of music analysis into the performative and the historicist and counters their assumptions. He proposes that analysis remains viable in light of historical, ontological, systemic, discursive, phenomenological and political imperatives. Seven respondents critique his account from the perspectives of pedagogy, performance, traditional literacies, popular music, ethnomusicology, world music and the postcolonial. Horton responds to these responses, and Jonathan Dunsby concludes with a summary of key issues. This Critical Forum is proposed as a kaleidoscopic collection rather than a single review and raises fundamental questions about the nature of analysis within the academy, and the very purpose of musicological research.
Franz Schubert's music has long been celebrated for its lyrical melodies, 'heavenly length' and daring harmonic language. In this new study of Schubert's complete string quartets, Anne Hyland challenges the influential but under-explored claim that Schubert could not successfully incorporate the lyric style into his sonatas, and offers a novel perspective on lyric form that embraces historical musicology, philosophy and music theory and analysis. Her exploration of the quartets reveals Schubert's development of a lyrically conceived teleology, bringing musical form, expression and temporality together in the service of fresh intellectual engagement. Her formal analyses grant special focus to the quartets of 1810–16, isolating the questions they pose for existing music theory and employing these as a means of scrutinising the relationship between the concepts of lyricism, development, closure and teleology thereby opening up space for these works to challenge some of the discourses that have historically beset them.
Toward the end of his 2012 book, Audacious Euphony, Richard Cohn asks, “how does music that is heard to be organized by diatonic tonality [as in the age of Mozart] become music that is heard to be organized in some other way [as in the age of Webern]”? In the present article, a theory different from Cohn’s is offered as answer. The theory’s three sub-theories, harmonic hierarchy, within-key chromaticism, and “solar” key distance, lead to a distinction between four types of harmonic systems: the strictly diatonic, the first- and second-order chromatic, and the restricted twelve-tone system. As its name implies, the latter harmonic system allows for twelve-tone levels, though under a restriction (termed Principle of Diatonic Fusion) that holds “the Webern in Mozart” in check.
Schubert's late music has proved pivotal for the development of diverse fields of musical scholarship, from biography and music history to the theory of harmony. This collection addresses current issues in Schubert studies including compositional technique, the topical issue of 'late' style, tonal strategy and form in the composer's instrumental music, and musical readings of the 'postmodern' Schubert. Offering fresh approaches to Schubert's instrumental and vocal works and their reception, this book argues that the music that the composer produced from 1822–8 is central to a paradigm shift in the history of music during the nineteenth century. The contributors provide a timely reassessment of Schubert's legacy, assembling a portrait of the composer that is very different from the sentimental Schubert permeating nineteenth-century culture and the postmodern Schubert of more recent literature.
This article investigates questions of form in the Finale of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, paying special attention to the reversed recapitulation as a problematic category in contemporary Formenlehre. Counterpointing Timothy Jackson's reading of the movement as a ‘tragic’ reversed sonata against James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's critique of the concept of reversal, it seeks ways of accounting for the movement's novel form‐functional characteristics, which integrate concepts of thematic syntax with a model of chromatic tonality, drawing simultaneously on Schenkerian and neo‐Riemannian theories and the notion of the double‐tonic complex first proposed by Robert Bailey. The argument is contextualised in relation to critical debates about Bruckner's forms that originated during the composer's lifetime, especially claims of material discontinuity and harmonic illogicality, which were common in the symphonies’ pro‐Brahmsian reception and which linger in the discourse up to the present. The article's central claim is that a substantial understanding of both the Finale's form and its critical reception is attendant upon a theory of formal function, which takes seriously the difficulties of harmonic analysis that Bruckner's post‐Wagnerian idiom engenders.
As a composer who had received intensive training in music theory, notably through Simon Sechter and Otto Kitzler, Bruckner's understanding of sonata form as a bipartite design as addressed in Formenlehre manuals is no secret to us. By taking as its point of departure an examination of the treatises of Ernst Friedrich Richter and Johann Christian Lobe, which Bruckner had consulted, this paper broadens our understanding of Bruckner's treatment of form and content in the sonata discourse by exploring his compositional approaches within a specific formal area – the music surrounding the onset of the recapitulation – in order to show how the perception of the development plus recapitulation as a unified formal space is reinforced. Analyses of opening movements and finales of his symphonies have revealed three major strategies of projecting the binary construction: ‘false recapitulation’, Type 2 sonata (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006), and what I call ‘enclosure’; the third strategy provides an additional means of evading the boundary between the development and recapitulation. At a time when composers such as Berlioz and Liszt had already discarded sonata form and were experimenting with new formal criteria, tonal‐harmonic options and alternative aesthetics, Bruckner remained faithful to it and expressed his belief in its potential for the symphonic medium.
Because of their novel harmonic and formal tendencies, Bruckner’s symphonies are often subjected to extravagant analytical practices. Schenker, himself a Bruckner student, viewed them as sublime, but ultimately unworkable, harmonic jumbles: “a potpourri of exaltations.” Darcy has argued that Bruckner’s second themes are largely presented in the “wrong” key, creating a nontraditional “suspension field ... [isolated] from the main line of ... symphonic discourse.” Taking this view as a point of departure, I show (1) that Bruckner’s second theme key choices do not break from tradition—they have precedent in earlier, more canonic literature; and (2) that distinct “profiles” emerge from them: I-to-V in opening movements, I-to-III-to-V in finales. These profiles suggest both that Bruckner conceived of deep structure as chromatically saturated, and that he varied the degree of saturation to differentiate between types of movements. Thus, Bruckner’s chromatic second themes—far from “suspending” a movement’s trajectory—represent powerful, energizing events en route to the dominant.
Formed in the late eighteenth century, medical theories of obsession divided the mind into two components: rational thought and a stubborn fixation. Contemporaneous with the emergence of this medical model of mental pathology, an evocative musical topos of dueling agencies—in which a note or group of notes is stuck, repeating itself within a shifting harmonic context—has been used by composers to depict these obsessional spaces in musical terms. Three compositions, each positioned at different moments within the history of obsession, demonstrate various ways in which each agent may interact with the other: the obsessive agent may be rehabilitated (as in Gaetano Brunetti’s programmatic symphony Il maniático [1780], from an era before psychiatry’s radical reconceptualization of the mind), the rational agent may accommodate the obsessive agent (as in Peter Cornelius’s “Ein Ton” [1854], a reflection of the nineteenth century’s “democratization of madness” [Davis 2009]), or the obsessive agent may assume total control of the musical discourse (as in Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb [1943], a tale of madness for a Freudian age).
In addition to its vital importance for the social and aesthetic development of art music after the Enlightenment, the symphony is also pivotal for the evolution of tonality. As the most prestigious instrumental genre of the nineteenth century, it embodies on the largest scale changes in the way tonal relations underpin instrumental forms. To trace the development of symphonism from the late eighteenth century to the fragmentation of common practice at the start of the twentieth century is in a sense to observe in microcosm the history of tonality in its common-practice phases. Understanding this history requires engagement with a variety of theoretical, technological and historical issues. To the extent that the exploration of chromatic tonal relationships undertaken by composers in the first half of the nineteenth century shadowed an emerging consciousness of tonality as a musical system, it reflects a striking shift of theoretical attitude. Where eighteenth-century theory mingled notions of mode, key and harmonic schema with concepts of topic and melodic rhetoric, nineteenth-century theorists, from Alexandre Choron’s seminal coinage in 1810 onwards, were increasingly concerned with the system of tonality itself. In parallel, symphonists also responded to major advances in instrumental technology and temperament, which are intimately related to the expansion of tonal means gathering momentum by the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, the rise to dominance of equal temperament and the dissemination of instrumental modifications accommodating this change underlies the increasing confidence with which composers constructed forms around remote tonal relationships.
Writing in 1849, Richard Wagner famously announced the symphony’s death at Beethoven’s hands and its transformation into music drama. Chiding contemporaries for misunderstanding Beethoven’s symphonic achievement, Wagner dismissed subsequent efforts as mere form and style without historical significance: The forms in which the Master [Beethoven] brought to light his world-historical wrestling after Art, remained but forms in the eyes of contemporaneous and succeeding music-makers, and passed through Mannerism across to Mode; and despite the fact that no other instrumental composer could, even within these forms, divulge the smallest shred of original inventiveness, yet none lost courage to write symphonies. .. without for a moment happening on the thought that the last symphony [Beethoven’s Ninth] had already been written. A century later, Theodor Adorno compounded such qualms with anxiety over the death of the symphonic listening experience. Adorno fretted that the necessary conditions for absorbing the Beethovenian symphony were being undermined by the practice of radio broadcasts, which for him destroyed the genre’s social identity by reducing it to the condition of domestic music; in effect, the symphony ceased to be a public experience and instead became ‘a piece of furniture’. The initiation of a symphonic argument moreover relied for its perception on a ‘dynamic intensity’, which for Adorno could only be realised in live performance, through the establishment of a species of symphonic ‘time-consciousness’. Denuded of this possibility, the music is ‘on the verge of relapsing into time’, that is, into an atomised succession of musical events. The symphony thus becomes trivialised as an object of mass consumption, thereby assisting the commodification of art music and concomitantly accelerating the ‘regression of listening 2019.
While neither the music of Ignaz Moscheles nor that of William Sterndale Bennett feature in the modern repertoire, the piano concertos of both composers form part of a significant body of works from the early nineteenth century that offer models at variance with conventional accounts of the concerto genre. The opening movements of Moscheles's Concerto No. 7 in C minor (Concerto pathétique, 1835-6) and Bennett's Concerto No. 4 in F minor (1838) are cast in single-exposition concerto form, but each has features that complicate its relationship with the five types of Sonata Form set out in Hepokoski and Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory. Both are similarly unusual in that they return to the tonic minor for the second ritornello statement, which by convention signifies the closure of the 'larger exposition'; and, probably as a consequence of the pre-emptive reappearance of primary material in the tonic here, their recapitulations are drastically abridged, complicating the post-expositional stages of the form. These two works thus provide a rich theoretical and hermeneutical challenge to the historiography of nineteenth-century instrumental form.
This article analyses two works by Schubert, the first movement of his Unfinished Symphony and Der Erlkönig, in terms of the basic emotional category of Fear. Proceeding from the set of acoustic cues associated with the expression of Fear in musical materials, the article explores this emotional category both as an affective state and as a system of action tendencies enacted by the musical persona through a work's formal behaviours. Schubert's emotional processes are analysed from two standpoints: (1) as pathways through the affect space of Russell's circumplex model and (2) as ecological affordances of Öhman's fear-imminence trajectory. The article aims at a holistic approach insofar as it explores the continuum between empirical and aesthetic approaches to musical emotion: between psychological and physiological measurements of Fear evinced by sonic features, and philosophical concepts of Fear inherent in the musical sublime, as unfolded by substantial works of art music.
The present study offers an extended neo-Riemannian examination of chromatic-third relations in selected Bruckner compositions of the 1880s, and it constitutes the first such examination of the composer's music. Owing to its inherent indifference towards the notions of tonal centre and conventional harmonic syntax, a neo-Riemannian transformational model seems particularly apt for the analysis of the music selected – music in which non-functional chord progressions, symmetrical divisions of the octave and the temporary suspension of tonic centricity are featured. The characteristics of the works analysed here suggest an evolution in Bruckner's handling of chromaticism, from the seemingly sui generis mixture of plagal and chromatic-third relations in the coda of the opening movement of the Sixth Symphony, to a more methodical use of hexatonic-polar transformations in the motet Ecce sacerdos magnus, to the exhaustive, almost systematic exploration of hexatonic cycles in the finale of the Eighth Symphony.
This study brings Hepokoski and Darcy's formal/dramatic categories of recapitulatory "success" and "failure" to bear on Mahler's canon of symphonic sonatas. Prior to the Seventh Symphony, Mahler linked expression and formal process with striking regularity: early- or middle-period sonatas ending affirmatively tended to feature properly functioning recapitulations, while sonatas ending tragically showed themselves incapable of such tonal resolution. Just as strikingly, the pattern changes in the composer's late maturity: after 1905, Mahler seems less inclined to dramatize the tonic/non-tonic tensions that motivated his earlier works.
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