9. Form, large-scale harmony and the revisions.

Bruckner's pupil Carl Hrubý recounted important comments regarding his teacher's formal-harmonic innovations and their relationship to the Viennese tradition. After a performance of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’, a symphony which Bruckner revered and had studied closely (especially its metrical and orchestral part-writing aspects), Hrubý recalled:

After he had spent a while sunk in thought, his gaze as it were turned inwards, he suddenly broke the silence: ‘I think, if Beethoven were still alive today, and I went to him, showed him my Seventh Symphony and said to him, “Don't you think, Herr von Beethoven, that the Seventh isn’t as bad as certain people make it out to be – those people who make an example of it and portray me as an idiot – ” then, maybe, Beethoven might take me by the hand and say, “My dear Bruckner, don’t bother yourself about it. It was no better for me, and the same gentlemen who use me as a stick to beat you with still don’t really understand my last quartets, however much they may pretend to”’.

After apologizing to Beethoven's shade for ‘going beyond’ him in terms of form, Bruckner asserted that he had ‘always said that a true artist can work out his own form and then stick to it’. These comments not only document Bruckner's assimilation of the formal innovations of late Beethoven, they also reveal that he consciously ‘went beyond’ them.

After completing harmony and counterpoint studies with Simon Sechter, Bruckner nevertheless felt that his grounding in practical compositional matters remained incomplete; he had acquired from Sechter a solid technique, but he turned to the conductor and cellist Otto Kitzler for instruction in form and orchestration. With Kitzler, the investigation of sonata form began logically with short first groups and proceeded to first groups with bridge sections, lyrical second groups (Gesangsgruppen) and short closing sections. It is noteworthy that Bruckner considered sonata form to comprise essentially two (rather than three) large spatial units, whereby the exposition is one element and the development and recapitulation together form the other. He retained this way of thinking until the end of his career, still referring to the development and recapitulation in the first and last movements of his Ninth Symphony as the second part (‘2. Abtheilung’). Bruckner repeated the exposition in the first movement of the String Quartet and in the ‘Study’ Symphony. But, interestingly, as early as the First Symphony (begun in 1865), Bruckner abandoned the repeated exposition and did not employ it again in his later symphonies.

The ideal of the Classical sonata in practice (in the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) had been dynamism: the music evolved both tonally and motivically to create the effect of goal-orientated forward motion. This dynamism was created both by harmonic motion and logical motivic transformation. But in the later 19th century, sonata form became increasingly segmented or sectionalized into comparatively stable and self-contained thematic-harmonic units. (Perhaps this tendency towards sectionalism combined with sometimes awkward harmonic stasis resulted from the codification of sonata form by theorists in their mid-century Formenlehre treatises.) In the later versions of his symphonies, Bruckner sought to counteract such stasis by restoring the dynamic continuity that had characterized the Classical symphony. His revisions were focussed on improving transitional or linking passages to create greater synthesis and dynamism; more rarely they involved changing the primary thematic materials themselves. Comparing the 1874 and 1878 finales of the Fourth Symphony, for example, reveals that the main themes in their particular sequence and keys remained fixed, while the intermediary passages were substantially recomposed to increase continuity. The same process underlies the 1890 version of the Eighth Symphony: the main ideas were unchanged, but the transitional passages were tightened or cut.

Bruckner's imaginative unorthodoxy with regard to the key schemes of his sonata form was already apparent in the works composed for Kitzler and continued through to the late works. A typical strategy was to present the Gesangsgruppe in an unexpected key, which then fails to set up the ‘redemptive’ tonic at the parallel place in the recapitulation. For example, in the Third Symphony, in D minor, the second theme in the exposition of the finale is presented in the unexpected key of F major ( III/D minor, 1873 score, bars 65ff) instead of the conventional F major (III/D minor). Furthermore, when the Gesangsgruppe is restated in the recapitulation, it does not appear in the tonic but rather is transposed to the even more distant key of A major ( V/D minor, 1873 score, bars 537ff). In this version of sonata form, where the recapitulation fails to secure the tonic, the form's inability to achieve tonic closure sparks a crisis in the ‘redemptive’ symphonic narrative: the pilgrimage is endangered and promised redemption threatened. Only in the coda, which remains outside the sonata space proper, can the triumphant tonic be reasserted and, in terms of the narrative, bring about salvation: hence the considerable importance of the coda in a Bruckner symphony.

It is widely believed that Bruckner made large cuts in the later versions of his symphonies to conform to the contemporary Viennese taste for shorter works. Certainly he was sensitive to critics who, like Brahms, had condemned his works as ‘symphonische Riesenschlange’ (‘giant symphonic serpents’). For example, in an attempt to obtain a performance of the first (1873) version of the Third Symphony, Bruckner even proposed splitting the work between two concerts (letter to the Vienna PO, 8 January 1875). However, it can be strongly argued that his cuts, which decisively affect the large-scale form, the harmony and the symphonic narrative, were made for more fundamental compositional, theoretical and aesthetic reasons.

Bruckner employed sonata form, expressively transformed, in the outer movements of all his symphonies except the ‘Nullte’, which has a finale in rondo form. In the final versions of the outer movements of the symphonies and the String Quintet, Bruckner's larger tonal-narrative strategy was to achieve ‘redemption’ in the coda of the finale by deferring the full force of the tonic until that point. Reversing the recapitulation – as in the finales of the String Quintet and the Seventh Symphony – can postpone the definitive return of the tonic associated with the primary theme group until the end of the movement. Similarly, cutting the recapitulation and eliminating the tonic reprise of the first group, or both the first and the second groups (as in the last versions of the finales of the Third and Fourth symphonies), is associated with postponing the definitive arrival on the tonic until the third group, or the coda.

Another aspect of Bruckner's formal innovations that upset the normative sonata paradigm is the ‘breakthrough’ technique. A striking example is provided by the first movement of the First Symphony. Here the music appears to follow the three-group expositional pattern established by the first movement of the earlier ‘Study’ Symphony: in bars 94–100 Bruckner interpolated a completely new, unexpected melody in the trombones accompanied by filigree passage-work in the upper winds (evoking the chorale in Tannhäuser and betraying Wagnerian impulses). Playing through the score in 1865, Hans von Bülow remarked, ‘This is dramatic!’, to which Bruckner replied, ‘Ah, that's just it!’ The entire passage is ultimately revealed to be completely extraneous to the sonata form since it does not recur in the recapitulation; instead, Bruckner drew upon the breakthrough material for the music of the first section of the development. The concept of the breakthrough is intimately connected with the epiphanic-revelatory connotations of the chorale. A clear example of the interrelatedness of the breakthrough and the chorale is provided by the finale of the Fifth Symphony (1876), where the chorale theme ‘breaks through’ at the end of the exposition space (bars 175–200), inserting itself into the exposition's third group.

With regard to the inner movements of Bruckner's symphonies, the slow movements are often the most popular and considered the most accessible (the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony made Bruckner famous). In the two unnumbered symphonies and in nos.1–7 Bruckner placed the slow movement second (at one point, while composing the Second Symphony, he considered putting the Andante after the Scherzo, but rejected this idea); in the Eighth and Ninth, on the other hand, he followed the model of Beethoven's Ninth with the slow movement preceding the finale. The rondo schemes in Bruckner's slow movements are considerably more varied than one might expect. In the slow movements of the later symphonies rondo and sonata principles are synthesized; the manner in which Bruckner varied and embellished the returns was strongly influenced by the concept later described by Schoenberg (as ‘developing variation’). The Adagio of the Ninth provides a characteristically Brucknerian variation of six-part rondo form in which the first and second subjects are recapitulated in reverse order. The fundamental compositional idea in this remarkable movement is the gradual ‘liquidation’ of the opening theme – which is characterized by an anguished leap of a minor 9th – as the music attains a state of peace and tranquillity. To comply with this larger strategy, Bruckner reversed the recapitulation of the first and second subjects, postponing the final return of the A section (at bar 207) and then truncating its recapitulation to eliminate the initial 9th.

If Bruckner's slow movements exhibit great formal variety, his scherzos display less significant variation in design. In the ‘Study’ Symphony and the First Symphony, Bruckner repeated both parts of the scherzo's ‘two-section form’; but from the ‘Nullte’ onwards he abandoned the repetition. In that symphony he expanded the trio to achieve formal parity with the scherzo. Furthermore, from the Second Symphony onwards, he compensated for abandoning literal repeats in the scherzos and trios by expanding their content. Comparing the colossal, ultimately abandoned 1874 scherzo of the Fourth Symphony with its counterpart in the First Symphony reveals a fourfold increase in the number of bars. In the 1874 scherzo, Bruckner further inflated the scherzo's rounded binary form (ABA') by subdividing both the A and A' components into small-scale ABA' forms. Similar ternary expansions occur in the scherzos of the Fifth and Seventh symphonies, and the scherzo of the second version (1878–80) of the Fourth Symphony.

The strategy of delaying the tonic epiphany, which was observed in the cut finales of the Third and Fourth symphonies, also underlies the scherzos of the Fourth (1874 version) and Sixth symphonies. Especially striking is the manner in which the tonic arrival is postponed until the end of both these scherzos; like the finale of the String Quintet, they are structured harmonically as large-scale perfect cadences. The same idea of withholding the definitive tonic arrival underlies the 1888 version of the 1878–80 ‘hunting’ scherzo of the Fourth Symphony. In the first edition, the tonic at the end of the first statement dissolves into a quiet transition (bars 247–55), which leads into the trio. Then, uniquely in Bruckner's entire output, the whole scherzo is repeated with a fortissimo conclusion, thereby reserving the full force of the triumphant tonic for the end of the scherzo.

Bruckner, Anton