Anton Bruckner, the Austrian symphonic composer, was born on Sept. 4, 1824. The 200th anniversary of his birth has elicited celebration in his homeland and beyond — refocusing attention on a complex musical legacy. No one is better equipped to explain the evolution of that legacy than Benjamin Korstvedt, a Professor of Music at Clark University, and author of Bruckner’s Fourth: The Biography of a Symphony, coming this fall on Oxford University Press.
Recognized worldwide as a leading Bruckner scholar, Korstvedt is a member of the Editorial Board of the New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition. The Fourth Symphony, which was famously revised and tweaked by Bruckner and others, is a signature specialty: Korstvedt published the first modern edition of the 1888 version two decades ago. In 2021, he collaborated with the Bamberg Symphony on a 4-CD set that includes all three canonical versions; the package won Best Symphonic Recording at the following year’s International Classical Music Awards.
To celebrate Bruckner’s bicentennial, WRTI will broadcast the Fourth Symphony in its entirety on Sept. 4. But we also knew that Prof. Korstvedt — who earned his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 — could help peel back the curtain on this grand, iconic, often contested work. Earlier this month, on the cusp of a trip to Upper Austria for a Bruckner symposium, he spoke with me from his home office in Massachusetts.
Anton Bruckner’s bicentennial is obviously a moment of worldwide commemoration. What sense do you have of how the classical world, and the broader cultural world, is responding to this occasion?
It’s a really interesting question, actually, and it varies a lot by region. In Austria, it’s a big thing — especially in Upper Austria, the part of Austria that’s considered to be Bruckner Land. There’s a tremendous amount of activity with events of all sorts: classical concerts, choral concerts. And there are popular music groups that play adaptations of Bruckner’s music, jazz groups that create these improvisatory takes on movements from his symphonies. It’s a real cultural happening.
I’d love to learn more about those jazz interpretations of Bruckner, because that’s not something I see happening in the States.
No, not at all. Generally speaking, Bruckner occupies, you know, a fairly marginal place in the classical music repertoire. The great orchestras of the country perform his music — Philadelphia is one of the leading proponents of Bruckner’s music under Yannick Nézet-Séguin — and most orchestras are doing a special concert or two. Atlanta has done some interesting things, and has more coming up in the upcoming season. But I’ve been a little bit surprised by how relatively little traction this has gotten in the United States. And of course, Bruckner’s music is worldwide; there’s a very strong Bruckner tradition in Japan, and in South Korea. So it’s flying under the radar a bit, maybe, in this country, but in other parts of the world it’s a big event.
In 2011 you wrote a piece for the New York Times, which begins with the sentence: “Posterity has not always treated Anton Bruckner kindly.” This is an extremely complex subject, but how would you sum up that unkindness?
In a couple of ways. One is that when Bruckner’s music was new, it polarized opinion in the musical world quite sharply. There was a tradition of criticism that was very negative toward his music, and in many ways that tradition has continued to exert a lot of influence. The idea that his music was over the top, excessive, grandiose — that sort of lingered into the early 20th century. It’s quite interesting how his music went from being regarded during his lifetime as dangerously, radically innovative to becoming turned into a sort of stolid classical figure by the mid 20th century.
Right.
But I think the most fraught and difficult episode in Bruckner history — and the one that has had the longest ramifications, even though we don’t always see it — is the way his music and image was appropriated by the Nazi movement in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. Bruckner was treated as an epitome of the Germanic spirit and music, and there was a very explicit political edge. During the time leading up to the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Bruckner was treated as a symbol of what was claimed to be the spiritual unity that connected these two separate countries. For decades afterwards, his music had something of a taint for some listeners, having been appropriated by the Nazis; movements of his symphonies were performed at the Nuremberg rallies, for example.
This week I was looking at Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise for a bit of context around this. And I came across the idea that this famous image of Hitler, gazing admiringly at Bruckner’s bust in the Walhalla, provided a kind of intellectual on-ramp to the annexation.
Yeah, that’s very well put, I think.
It’s fascinating and chilling to think about the unintended consequence of that. But also, as you said, there is a character in his music that sticks to this idea — a kind of heraldic quality, at times.
That’s a really tricky point in some ways. Is there some way in which Bruckner’s music enables this kind of fascist appropriation? And I suppose there is, in a certain way. Next week there’s going to be a big Bruckner symposium in Upper Austria, and I’m speaking about the question of the sublime in Bruckner’s music, and this idea of something that’s awesome in some way, that has this overwhelming capacity to astonish listeners. It’s clearly an apolitical phenomenon; Bruckner understood this in very Christian terms; he was a devout Catholic, and regarded music as an art that had access to the divine. But in other contexts and other times and places, I think that awesome quality of his music can be misappropriated, in certain ways.
Right.
It’s also part of what appeals to people about it, legitimately and positively. There is a grandeur to the experience of witnessing the collective force of an orchestra bringing this music to sound. There’s a very positive way to read that, as a kind of collective jubilation.
I also think about the visceral experience of sitting in a cathedral with a giant pipe organ, and having that massive sound moving the air in the room. Given that Bruckner was a master organist, is there a clear expression of organ techniques in his orchestration?
Yes, I think so, and many people have made that suggestion. The tremendous contrast in sound registers that occurs is very characteristic of the organ, for example, and I think the very basic thing that you just pointed to — this visceral, tremendous sound quality which literally, and as you very rightly put, moves the air in some way. That is an attribute of the sonic presence of organ music, and that often occurs in his symphonies as well.
There’s a phrase that often comes up in relation to Bruckner’s legacy — “the Bruckner problem.” One thing that you’ve done with your work is bring the Third Reich’s endorsement of his music and intersected it with these questions of the definitive work, or the revised work. My understanding is that this is a complicated story that involves a lot of players. Help us untangle that; how should we think about it now, 200 years after his birth?
As you said, it’s a very complicated, multifaceted phenomenon. It’s also very interesting, and in some ways it’s what drew me into Bruckner studies as a graduate student. There are multiple versions of several of his symphonies, and there was a sense that those that had been published during his lifetime had somehow been tainted, had been edited without Bruckner’s full awareness or agreement, and therefore should be properly set aside and replaced with the original versions. And this is an idea which really only originated in the 1930s. Bruckner never expressed that sentiment, for example. And there are a couple of cases — his Ninth Symphony, which was not finished, was published posthumously, and it was edited, with no questions asked. It was clearly presented as a version prepared by a former student turned conductor.
Right.
But it was in the 1930s when this whole question became a kind of hot-button issue. There was a strong effort, which proved to be very successful, to denounce the previously published versions as inauthentic and corrupt, and to replace them with modern editions based on Bruckner’s earlier manuscript scores. In some cases this was perfectly valid, scholarly work. But in the later stages it became increasingly fraught by political and ideological agendas. The man who was in charge of that was a man named Robert Haas, who was a devout, eager Nazi. He had even been what was called an “illegal Nazi” in Austria — he was a member of the Nazi party before the Germans took over — and he regarded his mission in very ideological terms. And then, after the war, particularly in the 1950s in the English-speaking world, there was a great revival of interest in Bruckner’s music, along with Mahler’s music at the time. A couple of English scholars ended up basically translating Haas's arguments into easily consumable English form, but without awareness that it wasn’t normal scholarship, but very highly ideological. That was sort of the conventional wisdom until the end of the 20th century.
Mmhmm.
And the most complicated of these cases is the Fourth Symphony, which Bruckner revised multiple times over the course of about 15 years. What I found fascinating is that the version that had been published and performed with his approval was denounced as a corrupt falsification of his wishes. As I began to explore this, even as a graduate student, I discovered that there were some very important manuscript sources that had been ignored. So a lot of the arguments were based on false premises. In a way, this work sort of culminates in the book you mentioned of mine, where what I attempt to do is to tell the story of the development of the Fourth Symphony from its very beginning, through its publication and onwards through performances and so forth, in ways that really look at the entire matter from a very matter-of-fact, objective basis, to the extent that’s possible.
You mentioned that this is an issue that began to intrigue you as a graduate student. You earned your doctorate in the music department at Penn — so that’s where you began to do this research?
Yes. When I started graduate school, I was interested in Bruckner’s music; I had discovered it a year or two earlier, and one of the things that was happening very strongly in musicology in this period, the early 1990s, was a growing awareness of the way in which political and ideological factors shape scholarship. The idea that there was sort of this realm of pure research that existed in a kind of ivory bubble increasingly began to be questioned from a lot of directions, and that point of view — understanding scholarship is something that has these political and ideological dimensions — really was eye opening, and in some ways helped me unlock what was going on in in Bruckner studies in the 1930s.
Can you trace any of your realizations around his work back to that time?
Well, there’s one very important idea, which has begun to develop both for myself and more broadly. The traditional view is that a musical work is the creation of a genius working in some sort of pure creative inspiration. But I think more and more as we look at it, a musical work — and particularly a notated work, a published piece like a symphony — inevitably has a social dimension. It’s conceived of by the composer as something to be performed in a way that will communicate, and be successful in performance. One of the things that was really important to Bruckner was getting feedback after he heard a performance of one of his works that was new. Without exception, he made slight adjustments: changed a little bit of the orchestration, or sometimes even made more fundamental changes to the work. And that idea of a musical work, in some ways, as a social text is one that I think is really important, and helps cut through some of the confusion and mythologizing that has gone on for so long.
It’s interesting to reframe that in such a way — because there have been characterizations of Bruckner as this kind of rube, or an indecisive or weak sort of person. Especially as we think about the reputational damage of the associations with Nazi Germany, it’s wild to think about Bruckner in relation to Wagner, who actively participated in these ideologies, but seems to have been a very different person.
You touch upon a really important point. This image of Bruckner as an insecure, maybe somewhat neurotic and manipulated individual is one that really came to the fore during the Nazi era, particularly as a way to explain this otherwise seeming perplex conundrum that a composer would publish and accept versions of his symphonies that now, 50 years later, were being regarded as these false bowdlerizations. When these arguments were first made in the 1930s, there were still quite a few people around who had been students of Bruckner, or had worked with him. By that time they were old, in their 70s, but a number of them said: “This is crazy. If anyone knew Bruckner, one thing you knew was that he was stubborn and knew his own mind.” So some of the ways in which the Bruckner problem has influenced people’s view of him as a person are one of the unexpected consequences of modern reception of his music and his personality.
The damage done by that appropriation registers on multiple levels.
Yeah, it’s true.
So in the spirit of the multiplicity of the Fourth Symphony, I’ve been listening to different recordings, not with any kind of methodology. One was the recording by Wilhelm Furtwängler with the Vienna Symphony. Then as a contrast, I just listened this morning to the Royal Concertgebouw with Mariss Jansons, which of course is a contemporary recording. There’s a certain lightness and lucidity to it.
And it’s interesting, because I’ve been listening without knowing in advance which version of the symphony I’m hearing. I have some idea — because I know there are some telltale modifications at the top of the scherzo, for instance — but to a certain extent I’m wandering around in the dark as a listener, without a map.
Mmhmm.
What can you say to a listener or audience member — how much should we arm ourselves with this knowledge? What’s our responsibility as consumers of the music?
There’s a famous essay by Theodor Adorno called “Bach Defended Against His Devotees.” I thought about writing an article called “Bruckner Defended Against His Devotees,” because there are people who love Bruckner’s music very much and become almost fixated on this question of versions. Sometimes I have the feeling that some folks listen to a new recording not because they want to hear the whole thing, but they’re just sort of listening for these little telltale signs. “Aha! That is the Nowak edition.” And I really think the listening approach you just described is, musically, much more enjoyable. Because each version of the symphonies that Bruckner produced is a coherent and effective piece of music. You just mentioned two recordings, one from the 1950s and one from the last decade or so. I know those recordings; they’re very different from each other, partly because the way in which classical symphonies of all sorts are performed is very different.
Right.
Furtwängler is a very interesting case, because even in the 1940s, he resisted this Nazi dogma about Bruckner editions. There was a very interesting scholar named Alfred Orel who had been involved in the Bruckner edition when it started, and was literally driven off the editorial board because he did not stick with the party line about Bruckner. He did some very important work uncovering the facts behind the Fourth Symphony, and he communicated these to Furtwängler. As a result, Furtwängler never adopted the new original version of the Fourth Symphony, but stuck with the one that had been published in the 1880s. Maybe the most important difference between these versions is not so much in the notes themselves. For example, you listened to these two recordings, and you weren’t hit over the head by how they differed. But where they differ significantly is in the performance markings.
Mmhmm.
The version from the 1880s has a much greater number of tempo changes and inflections, which reflects a much more subjective, intuitive, interpretive approach compared to the more solid, massive style that tends to be more common nowadays.
Now, this book sounds like something you have been laying the groundwork for in your academic life for some 25 years. How do you feel, now that it is coming out in the world? Where is your Bruckner scholarship leading you next?
I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit. Literally a week and a half ago, I finished the final correction of the proofs of the book. It already feels a little distant to me. I basically finished writing it almost a year ago. I think you put it really well; it’s kind of wrapping up a long couple of chapters in my academic career and my personal life. What I want to do now is return to a book that I actually started thinking about a long time ago before other projects. My working title has been Bruckner in Public. I want to look at the ways in which Bruckner’s music was situated in, and actually can illuminate, a number of different cultural moments. His time in late-19th-century Vienna. Also, of course, during the Nazi era and the time afterwards. And really, I guess, the ways in which the public has responded to his music, and the way in which his music communicates to audiences. So a little bit more of a kind of a cultural history approach rather than this very musicological approach.
What could be fascinating, too — you could factor in, whether in a forward or an afterword, the discourse around this big event, and whatever insights have arisen around the commemoration.
I had not quite thought about that. But that would be a really good angle to include. Thanks for that idea.
Then you could talk to the publisher about putting out different versions of this book over the next 15 years, and we can have an argument about which version is best.
No, I think it’s good. I’m happy with it. I don’t want to open that door.
Bruckner’s Fourth: The Biography of a Symphony will be published by Oxford University Press in October.
