Jochum conducts Bruckner: Symphony no. 8

 

No. 381 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Tuesday Blog. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast381

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This week’s Tuesday Blog is a “Fifth Tuesday” podcast featuring Bruckner’s Eighth symphony, thus concluding our survey of the Jochum/DGG cycle from the 1960’s.

Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in C minor is the last symphony the composer completed. This symphony is sometimes nicknamed The Apocalyptic, but this was not a name Bruckner gave to the work himself.

It exists in two major versions of 1887 and 1890. In September 1887, Bruckner had the score copied and sent to conductor Hermann Levi, one of Bruckner's closest collaborators, having given a performance of the Symphony No. 7 in Munich that was "the greatest triumph Bruckner had yet experienced".

However the conductor wrote back to Bruckner that he found the symphony “impossible to perform” in its current form. “As much as the themes are magnificent and direct, their working-out seems to me dubious”.

By January 1888, Bruckner had come to agree with Levi that the symphony would benefit from further work and completed the new version of the symphony in March 1890. Once the new version was completed, the composer wrote to Emperor Franz Josef I for permission to dedicate the symphony to him. The emperor accepted Bruckner's request and also offered to help pay for the work's publication.

By the time the 1890 revision was complete, Levi was no longer conducting concerts in Munich. As a result, he recommended that his protege Felix Weingartner. The premiere was twice scheduled to occur under the young conductor's direction during 1891, but each time Weingartner substituted another work at the last minute. Weingartner admitted, in a letter to Levi, that the real reason he was unable to perform the symphony was because the work was too difficult and he did not have enough rehearsal time: in particular, the Wagner tuba players in his orchestra did not have enough experience to cope with their parts. At last Hans Richter, subscription conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, agreed to conduct the work. The first performance took place on 18 December 1892.

Today, Bruckner's Eighth remains somewhat controversial. This is a piece that is attempting something so extraordinary that if you're not prepared to encounter its expressive demons, or to be shocked and awed by the places Bruckner's imagination takes you, then you're missing out on the essential experience of the symphony.

If you think of Bruckner only as a creator of symphonic cathedrals of mindful - or mindless, according to taste - spiritual contemplation, who wields huge chunks of musical material around like an orchestral stone mason with implacable, monumental perfection, then you won't hear the profoundly disturbing drama of what he's really up to.

I think you will love this music too.