Poetry meets exhilaration

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
Concerto for Cello in C Major HVIIb:1 (1761–65) 

 “Haydn the Inaccessible” was Donald Francis Tovey’s assessment of the state of affairs in regards to Haydn’s output as of the early 20th century, during which only the later symphonies and the string quartets were readily available, and those often in poor editions. Tovey didn’t know the half of it. A mind-boggling amount of Haydn has been restored to us over the past century, with major achievements such as his operas receiving their first performances since his lifetime. In the process it has become abundantly clear that the old music-appreciation bromide of dear old ‘Papa Haydn’ has done the man a tremendous disservice. He was a whale of a composer, gifted with magnificent depth, passion, and imagination. His works are as notable for their robust mental health as for their supreme craftsmanship. We’re still coming to grips with Haydn’s opulent legacy. 

Commentators used to devalue Haydn’s concertos as being noticeably inferior to Mozart’s; even staunch Haydn enthusiast Tovey got downright snippy about them. The rediscovery of Haydn’s early yet masterful Concerto for Cello in C Major HVIIb:1 kicked off a process of commentarial rethinking about Haydn’s concerto worthiness. In 1961 the concerto popped up in the Czech National Library in Prague, in the form of a collection of parts signed by cellist Joseph Weigl. Any doubts as to its authenticity were allayed by Haydn’s own 1765 thematic catalog, which lists the main theme of the first movement. Haydn would have no doubt written it for Weigl, his principal cellist during their mutual early years in the Esterházy court, where Haydn served as vice-kapellmeister from 1761 through 1766 before advancing to full kapellmeister. The concerto would have been performed – when and how many times is not known – in the ornate main salon of the Esterházy Palace in Eisenstadt. Then it disappeared for two centuries. 

In the 1760s the concerto was a genre in transition. The Baroque ‘ritornello’ structure was still in force, with its lob-and-volley layout in which a main reprise (the ritornello) in the orchestra alternated with solo passages accompanied by minimal ensemble. However, something new was in the air: sonata form, one of Western music’s signature achievements, which posits a rhetorical duality between two key centers that head for an eventual resolution. Haydn was to play a critical role in the establishment and evolution of sonata form, and even at this early date he was already quite a dab hand at navigating the form’s many possibilities. 

The first movement of the C Major Cello Concerto provides ample evidence of Haydn’s early mastery, as he explores strategies for supercharging the old ritornello style with the almost unlimited possibilities of sonata form. The F Major Adagio that follows gives us a preview of the wonderful opera composer to come, while the zippy, snappy, and scintillating Allegro molto finale is vintage Haydn in his best Olympic-champion mode, greyhound-lean, athletic, and effervescent. 

Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
Symphony No. 7 in E Major (1883) 

Nowadays it’s easy to get to Ansfelden, Austria. Just take the A1 westbound out of Vienna and after a while Ansfelden will be on your left, immediately following the exit for central Linz. Ansfelden turns out to be an altogether nice little place that basks in that middle-class suburban comfort familiar throughout our developed world, complete with parks, playgrounds, shopping centers, and Chinese takeout. 

Anton Bruckner was born in an Ansfelden that was a world removed from today’s pretty suburb. In the early 19th century it was an impoverished rural hamlet with more cows than people and shortages both of food and decent jobs. It must have seemed like the end of nowhere to a talented young chap like Anton, son of a village schoolmaster. His father got him started in music, then in his early teens he was sent off to the nearby Augustinian monastery of Sankt Florian, which was play a critical role throughout his life. (And posthumously as well; he’s buried in the monastery’s crypt.) The sound of the mighty Sankt Florian organ runs throughout Bruckner’s works, as does the monastery’s reverent, timeless atmosphere. 

Organist at Sankt Florian, ditto in nearby Linz. It was a quiet, unassuming life. He studied mostly via correspondence with the renowned music theorist Simon Sechter, and when Sechter died in 1868 Bruckner moved to the Big Apple and took over his beloved teacher’s theory classes at the Vienna Conservatory. The shy and unsophisticated Bruckner, a village and monastery man down to his toes, was a poor fit for Vienna’s toxic musical politics. He had a rough time of it with both the Viennese intelligentsia and the critics; Brahms referred to him as “that bumpkin” and arch critic Eduard Hanslick skewered one of his works as a “symphonic anaconda.” But he persisted amidst a steady shower of brickbats, continued to produce luxuriantly epic symphonies, and eventually found a measure of success with Viennese musicians and their notoriously fickle public. He stayed unmarried – not for lack of trying – and died in his humble but comfortable Vienna apartment at the age of 72. It took a while for posterity to catch on, but catch on it did. Nowadays Bruckner ranks amongst the supreme masters of the late Romantic symphony. His music even survived being appropriated by the Nazis, a tribute indeed to its fundamental nobility and goodness. 

Time is the essential element in a Bruckner symphony. It is not our time; it is Bruckner’s time; it is the time of the unruffled pastures of Sankt Florian; it is the time of nature and the gradual unfolding of the seasons. To expect otherwise from a Bruckner symphony is to wind up with the white knuckles and cracked tooth enamel of a seething driver stuck in rush-hour traffic. Far better to forget about the freeway and think instead of carriages on sun-dappled country roads, where other travelers are rarely encountered and our arrival time is mostly up to the horse.

The Bruckner Seventh Symphony stands apart from its predecessors as having been accepted as a repertory item almost from the get-go. Bruckner finished it in September 1883, and two now-legendary conductors – Arthur Nikisch and Hermann Levi – set it on its way in 1884 and 1885, respectively. Amazingly enough, it had made its way to Chicago by 1886 thanks to that enterprising American conductor Theodore Thomas. Its immediate and lasting popularity isn’t at all difficult to understand. It’s not quite as lengthy as most of its brethren, but most importantly, it has a special sweep and a compelling inner urgency. Even if it might seem silly to describe an hour-plus symphony as economical, the word is actually quite apt. Impressively grand, majestic, and passionate, the Bruckner Seventh propels itself firmly along its destined journey. It isn’t just that it comes off as good. It comes off as right. 

The symphony opens in rapt luminosity. The initial two paragraphs of the first movement are relaxed, unhurried, even limpid. It’s only in the third paragraph (the ‘closing theme’ of a Classical symphony) that there’s a clear contrast as the music acquires an unmistakable spring in its step. That duality between patient expansiveness and brisk alertness continues through the movement, which is structured in an expanded sonata form in which the divisions between exposition, development, and recapitulation are blurred. It culminates in an incandescent blaze of radiant E major chords. 

The minor-mode second movement, in rondo form and marked to be played solemnly and slowly, can be described as peak Bruckner. It is here that Bruckner’s use of low brass – tenor, bass, and contrabass tubas – provides a sonic chairoscuro that perfectly complements the measured tread of the main reprise. But it isn’t all seriousness and gloom, as the contrasting episodes range from sweetly lyrical to nobly dignified. The movement ends in major mode, offering reassuring balm after its prevailing mournfulness. 

Ever since Beethoven it had become the norm for symphonies to replace the ubiquitous minuet with a scherzo, which retains the minuet’s triple meter as well as its overall three-part layout. But that’s where the resemblances end. Classical minuets are either courtly or rustic, but scherzos are fast and furious, sometimes edging on psychotic frenzy. Here Bruckner whips up an absolute corker of a scherzo, almost minimalist in its hypnotic repetition of a martial tocsin in the brass underpinned by nonstop pulsations in the bass. The central trio, a lovely thing that positively hums with Viennese gemütlichkeit, provides welcome relief. 

The finale starts out like a happy-go-lucky variant of the first movement, but before long it begins to demonstrate considerable intestinal fortitude. At climatic moments Bruckner throws the orchestration textbooks out the window by requiring every single instrument in the orchestra to play in unison and at maximum volume. Disconcerting, to say the least. But it’s vintage Bruckner, absolutely and manifestly Bruckner. “They want me to write differently,” he once remarked. “Certainly I could, but I must not.”