The events depicted, if not the details, in this film are factually
correct. It focuses on Bruckner’s nervous breakdown in
1867, and his four-month stay at a sanatorium at the spa of Bad
Kreuzen, where he undertook a strict regimen of cold water therapy
and fitness training from dawn to dusk. At the time he was 43
and a successful teacher and musician in Linz as the city’s
cathedral organist. But he was extremely self-critical, despite
praise from the renowned pedagogue and contrapuntist Simon Sechter
at his annual courses in Vienna which Bruckner attended. His
provincial village (Ansfelden) background manifested itself in
a huge inferiority complex, added to which he had obsessive compulsive
disorder (forever counting), and many disappointments in love.
Ironically his career and reputation were beginning to take off;
his three large Masses were written, the one in D minor already
heard at Linz and Vienna, and the first of his numbered symphonies
(1865-1866) would be played in 1868. So he was overworked, strained
and emotionally fragile when, rather than turning to his deep
religious faith, he went to Austria’s version of The Priory.
He had met Wagner and attended the premiere of
Tristan in
1865, both of which sent him into turmoil. As a result, the ‘Master
of Masters’ (his phrase) became his musical god, and he
improvised and played his music to excess on the sanatorium piano.
The decision (of the film’s title) facing him was which
direction to take at the crossroads he now faced, whether to
stay in provincial Linz as a musician and teacher, or whether
to go to Vienna and try to get a professorship at the University
and become the Court organist, (beyond the scope of this film).
Eventually he did, despite all the musical politics stirred up
by the critic and pedagogue Eduard Hanslick and his adherents.
The film is shot in black and white and has a minimum of dialogue,
like a silent Ken Russell movie. Instead we follow Bruckner in
the months of May and June through voiced-over letters written
between a fellow patient, the architect Otto and his beautiful
wife Sophia, to whom Otto relates what he is discovering about
Bruckner and how he is progressing - eventually she wishes he
would focus more in his/their problems rather than those of a
strange musical genius from nowhere. Cold water dominates the
visual imagery. Buckets of it are poured over him, even up to
ten litres down him. He endures showers, rain, wet towel wraps,
and there is much swimming in or rowing on the lake. The mustachioed
Joachim Bauer as Bruckner looks much like him - if anything a
tad too young and good looking, his chin not weak enough - especially
in the broad black hat and tailed jacket, waistcoat and wing
collar. There are flashbacks to his childhood at St Florian monastery,
where the roots of his awe of Catholicism impacted here on the
young lad, when he was sent there having lost his father at 13.
We also have forward glimpses of his well-received lectures at
Vienna - much chair-thumping mingled with applause - and the
film ends with an anachronism when he faultlessly composes the
highly chromatic
Adagio from the Ninth on the blackboard
in three-stave short score in front of his male students.
Bruckner’s emotional weaknesses are stripped bare. He was
always falling in love, usually for far younger girls. Here one
of the nurses, Josefine, is the object of his crush and he proposes
to her by letter. We don’t hear the reply, instead - to
another anachronistic
Adagio, this time from the eighth
symphony - we see him shocked at the sight of her kissing a man
as they swim in the lake. This is an episode repeated in an erotic
dream, only this time they are naked. Incidentally Josefine features
in Bruckner’s curious plan to go to Mexico, where he purports
to have been offered a conducting post. The Austrian connection
lies also in Kaiser Franz Josef’s brother Maximilian, dumped
and abandoned on the throne of that unfortunate country, a cauldron
of revolutionary activity. When Maximilian is executed and his
body repatriated, Bruckner reveals a morbid curiosity to see
the body - as he would the victims of a fire in Vienna and the
bodies of Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera at Mayerling.
There was a Josefine in his life, but she was back at Linz and
her parents sent Bruckner away with a flea in his ear for a variety
of reasons, not least because he was 43 and she 17. Even younger
was literally babe-in-arms Eva Wagner. There is a brief episode
- related by Bruckner in a letter to his brother Alois - when
Wagner is seen coming out of his house Triebschen on Lake Geneva
with his infant Eva (born 1867) in his arms, and telling Bruckner
that she is his future bride. Wagner was forever teasing him
and indulging his eccentricities, but he also admired the music
and gladly (with typical !!! marks) received the dedication of
the Third Symphony.
This is not a film about Bruckner’s music, indeed on that
point it is very inaccurate because Celibidache and the Munich
Philharmonic Orchestra play symphonies which were written years
after the time of events depicted. Michael Ponti is the credited
pianist, but we see only his (Bruckner’s) hands as he improvises
choral music and plays the
Liebestod. It is a portrait
of a genius, whose mental and physical collapse over the thirty
years remaining to him begins here, as if we are observing early
signs of Alzheimer’s. If only there was not so much water
everywhere.
Christopher Fifield
Featuring Joachim
Bauer; Sophie von Kessel; Michael Ponti; Peter Fricke; Peter von
Fontano; Joachim Kaiser 
[80:00] 
