The facts surrounding Bruckner’s incom -plete Ninth Symphony are well known,

and constitute one of the great tragediesin the history of music. The unprec ed -ented success Bruckner enjoyed with hisSeventh Symphony, following the firstperformance by the Leipzig Gewand hausOrchestra under Artur Nikisch on Dec -ember 30, 1884, motivated the comp oserto continue and complete his Eighth,which he had begun the previous July. Ittook him just over a year to have the newsymphony fully drafted, by August 1885,and another twenty months before thework was finally complete in full score,during which time Bruckner had changedthe order of the two middle movements,placing the Scherzo second and the slowmovement third.

Following Nikisch’s success with theSeventh, it was taken up by Herman Levi,who achieved an even greater triumph forBruckner with the work: secure in hisbelief that in Levi he had found the idealinterpreter for his music, Bruckner senthim the newly completed Eighth, hopingthat Levi would premiere it. But the natureof the Eighth Symphony is quite differentfrom that of the Seventh, and Levi foundhimself almost totally out of sympathywith the character of Bruckner’s latestSymphony. He told Bruckner directly, in aletter, of his considerable reservations, andactually suggested that Bruckner revise themusic. Bruckner must have known in hisheart that in the Eighth Symphony he hadachieved his greatest work, and – as wemay imagine – Levi’s rejection of thescore must have come as a body-blow tothe ever-sensitive composer.

So it was that the conductor’s rep ud -iation of the Symphony produced a longperiod of profound self-doubt in Bruckner:by that time, he had already begun workon a Ninth Symphony, in the sense thathe had written down ideas that were togrow into what we have of the work, butLevi’s rejection of the Eighth and hissuggestion that that work might benefitfrom revision caused Bruckner to abandonany further work on the Ninth – or,indeed, for a time abandon any work onhis own music – and instead to enter into

a period of several yearsduring which time herevised the Eighth severaltimes, eventually prod uc -ing a new version of thework with a completelydifferent coda to the firstmovement. The originalscore of 1887 remainedun-performed until 1973,when it was played in aBBC broadcast conductedby Hans-Hubert Schönz eler.The Eighth was not the onlysymphony that Bruckner revised duringthose years: he also made new versionsof several of his earlier symphonies –some of the revisions, including that of theThird, being quite extensive, and that ofthe Second Symphony being made as lateas 1892.

There can be little doubt therefore, thathad Levi understood the true nature ofBruckner’s Eighth Symphony in 1887 andaccepted it for performance, we wouldnot have had (as we do now) a com -pletely new version of it (nor, surely, newversions of several earlier symphonies),but also a completed Ninth Symphony.The composition and reworking (effect -ively, recomposition) of the Eighth hadoccupied Bruckner on and off for aroundeight years, from 1884-92. The EighthSymphony was published in its newversion and first performed on December18th, 1892 conducted by Hans Richter.Although (as might have been expected)the reception of the symphony was whatone might call ‘mixed’, on the whole it wasreceived far more positively than not.

And so Bruckner, with the problem ofthe Eighth Symphony finally resolved,returned again to the Ninth. But by 1893his health was not what it had been –indeed, it was to become so uncertainthat he was unable to be present at thefirst performance of his Fifth Symphony inApril 1894 under Franz Schalk – eighteenyears after the work had been completed.That lengthy period of self-doubt had ledto a degree of uncertainty which hadundermined his creativity to an extent thatwas not there before – or, rather, had not

sur faced to quite thesame degree. He wasolder, but not necessarilywiser, and the Viennesemus ical world hadchanged somewhat inthat half-decade.

None the less, the firstthree movements of theNinth were virtually fin -ished and in a perf orm -able state long before thetime of Bruckner’s death

in October, 1894. The finale– often the most difficult to completesatisfactorily for any genuine symphonist– was left un fin ished; as we know, leavingthe composer’s successors and con -temporaries with the problem of what todo about the unfinished finale, or indeedwhat to do with the extant completedmovements. Following the premiere ofthe first three movements under Bruck -ner’s disciple Ferdinand Löwe in Viennaon February 11, 1903, and since the Oreledition was published in 1934 of theSym phony’s first three movementstogether with surviving drafts and sketchesof what had been rescued or salvaged ofthe finale, followed by Leopold Nowak’s1951 edition, almost every recording andperformance until the dawn of the 21stcentury had been given of just the firstthree completed move ments.

The essence of the problem is that, ifwhat Bruckner left (and what in fact hascome down to us) is indeed all he setdown on paper, then in that finale heabandoned the compositional habit of alifetime. It was Bruckner’s unchanginghabit first to write out the completemovement in short-score, not in portions.The complete movements, on three orfour staves, invariably demonstrated theoverall plan of whatever movement thecomposer was working on at the time,and whilst those ideas were alwayssubjected to considerable revision andreplacement, the general scope of themovement was clear in Bruckner’s mindbefore the ‘composition’ process itselfbegan. With that in mind, he would havecommenced the composition proper of

16 J U LY- S E P T E M B E R 2015 M U S I C A L O P I N I O N Q U A RT E R LY

“…the original

complete plan in

short score, which

was always subject

to changes in its

ultimate realisation,

is missing.

The Problem of Bruckner’s Ninth SymphonyRobert Matthew-Walker

M U S I C A L O P I N I O N Q U A RT E R LY J U LY- S E P T E M B E R 2015 17

the finale, leaving us with aconsiderable amount of material infull and short score – but theoriginal complete plan in shortscore, which was always subject tochanges in its ultimate realisation,is missing.

It was undoubtedly stolen. Thecon seq uence is that for most ofthe succeeding 80 or 90 yearsafter Bruckner’s death on October11th, 1896, the Symphony hasonly ever been heard in anincomplete version that thecomposer himself did notimagine or intend. There is nodoubt that a great per for manceof the first three movements canproduce a result that is pro -foundly satis fying – and we donot have to list favourite rec -ordings in order to demonstratethat – but to experience thework in a three-movementform was never the comp -oser’s int ent ion.

Bruckner was working onthe finale in the morning ofthe very day he died: therecould be no more convinc ingdemon stration of his desire tocomplete a four-movementsymphony than that simple, and in theevent tragic, fact. We have mentioned thevery likelihood of the theft of some of hisworkings on the finale by well-intentionedadmirers and disciples, knowing that themovement was in com plete, and doubt -less being unwilling to purloin materialfrom the first three completed move -ments. But Bruckner was above all amethodical man, and we know that hemaintained carefully numbered folios ofhis work in progress – as he did on theincomplete finale. Indeed, once thoseextant folios have been put in order, wehave around 560 bars of continuousmusic, leading to the work’s coda, thesymphony’s missing summa cum laude.It is that crucial concluding element that ismissing, but from descriptions by severalof Bruckner’s disciples from what they sawin the weeks following his death we have

an idea of what that coda would contain. One has to take the comment by

Bruckner’s pupil Max Graf (1873-1958)concerning his sight of an extended sketchof the coda very seriously indeed. Un -fortunately, that sketch has disappeared,and would appear to have been, fromGraf’s description, one of a number ofautograph extended drafts of parts of thefinale which were subsequently stolen.Perhaps also, if that were so, the thiefexperienced more than a pang of guilt: ontaking the draft, which of its nature wouldhave been unfinished (albeit reasonablyfully sketched) he could hardly haveowned up later, once it became clear thatthe first three movements were in a moreor less performable state, for such anadmission would have meant social andmusical ostracism.

Nevertheless, we do have the first 560-

odd bars of continuousmusic of the finale inBruckner’s hand, tan tal -isingly ending with theapproach to the coda.What would have been inthe composer’s mind atthat point? For someprospective answers wehave to look at the codasto the finales of his earliersymphonies, which, cert -ainly in the more recentscores, tend to end with asummation of the comp -lete work – in the Fifth andEighth Symphonies cert -ainly.

There is also the questionof self-quotation in the un -finished Ninth. In the Adagiomovement Bruckner quotesidentifiable and not so ob -vious phrases from earlierworks. If he had not beensubjected to Levi’s crit icisms,and wasted (in effect) five orsix years in making what arenow regarded as unnecessary(how ever con vincing) newversions of works which wereperfectly capable of standing

by themselves in their original form,during that half-decade Bruckner wouldhave had ample opportunity to completethe Ninth and very probably begin a Tenth.If that were true, and there is no reasonto suppose it is an untenable proposition,then the coda to the Ninth might wellhave taken a different course.

This is because when Bruckner waseventually working on that finale, heknew that the Ninth would be his lastsymph ony. This may have been a spurwhich was not an entirely new departurefor him. In his earliest symphonies,notably the Third, he quoted a passagefrom his Mass in D minor, and the codaof the Fifth demonstrated his completecontrapuntal mastery in bringing togetherthe entire melodic content of the work ina final peroration.

We have a clue that that kind of ▼

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concluding coda was what Bruckner hadin mind, as a consequence of the verylong-held pedal note which underpins themusic as the coda approaches. Bruckner,of course, would have learned this fromBach, as the final strettos in his fugues getunder way, but it is the immense lengthof Bruckner’s tonic pedal that suggestsanother, newer approach to the conc lus -ion of the Ninth. This is that the nature ofthe pedal is to hold the music to theharmonic fundamental over as long aperiod as the music can bear and as thetexture widens before it finally comestogether.

What Bruckner would surely have hadin mind is a much wider harmonic spect -rum, hinted in the first movement, andfurther implied – and achieved – in theAdagio; that, in itself, surely demonstratesthat in the Ninth Bruckner was thinkingover a broad tonal area, approaching it inthe finale, and at last coming together inthe coda – over the immense tonic D inthe timpani, that pedal being one which

we have every reason to believe isauthentic.

Graf reported the long tonic pedal, andalso that so far as he could see, the broadsketch of the finale’s coda would havebrought together all the main thematicmaterial of the work – as Bruckner hadachieved in the finale’s coda in the Eighth,but probably over a somewhat longertime-scale – though this last point ispurely conjectural, although implied bythat long timpani tonic.

None the less, and despite as much interms of informed conjecture as we mayimagine, the challenge of creating a codaworthy of the immensity of the taskcannot be gainsaid. But, to get as close toBruckner’s avowed intent as we can, wecannot maintain that the three-movementNinth represents the composer’s abschied,however tempting it may seem. Whilstnone of the worthy completions whichhave been made by various dedicatedBrucknerians would claim to be ‘what thecomposer would have written’, there is

much to be learnedfrom a study of thosecompletions. In thatregard, we must hopethat there will not bea never-ending clutchof ‘finales’ from whicha conductor maychoose, as if sel ect -ing a hand in a rubb -er of bridge, we canno longer merelyacc ept a three-movement BrucknerNine as the last wordon the subject. Per -haps an inter nat ionalsymposium on thesubject could beheld, in Austria, andan agreed comp -letion put forward asthe nearest we can

get to a solution. It may be possible that at some point

those missing passages from the finalewill come to light – hopefully, of course,the short score of the complete draft ofthe finale. When we can see – as hasbeen the case in quite recent years – thatpreviously unknown works by Mozart, Lisztand others have been found, there maywell be lurking somewhere that elusivefolio in Bruckner’s hand.

Such a collation of existing manuscriptpages as have been located and put backin order as revealed the long-thought-lostThird Piano Concerto of Liszt, and AlmaMahler’s release in 1962 of no fewer thanforty additional pages of manuscript fromMahler’s unfinished Tenth Symph ony, halfa century after his death – if such as thesecan eventually come to light, it may stillreside within the bounds of possibility thatthat first draft (and more) can emerge.Until such time we can only hope, and doour best to discern just how the shapeand content of that coda would havesounded. ■

“Nevertheless, we do have the first 560-odd

bars of continuous music of the finale in

Bruckner’s hand, tan talisingly ending with

the approach to the coda.

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