Bruckner's Decision
A film by Jan Schmidt-Garre (1995)
featuring: Joachim Bauer; Sophie von Kessel; Michael Ponti; Peter Fricke; Peter
von Fontano; Joachim Kaiser
Picture format: NTSC 4:3 B/W
Sound format: Dolby Digital 2.0
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Menu language: English
Video language: German, French
Subtitles: English, Spanish
ARTHAUS MUSIK DVD 101369 [80:00]
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