Eugen Jochum’s pioneering complete stereo
set of the Bruckner symphonies was issued by DG during the 1960s. A
decade later EMI Classics issued an alternative view of the works from
the same conductor with the Dresden Staatskapelle, which has already
been previously available as a bargain box. It is this latter set which
now re-emerges from Warner, and the first thing to be said is that -
unlike many of the reissues from this source - we are given a booklet
with some notes on both the composer and the conductor. However these
are far from comprehensive - a mere nine pages in total, about three
pages each in English, French and German, with nothing at all about
the music itself. One thing they signally fail to discuss is the edition
of the symphonies which Jochum espoused in both his complete sets, that
by Nowak.
Now the Nowak edition of the symphonies, published after the Second
World War, comes into direct competition with the edition by Robert
Haas published during the pre-War period. They were welcomed at the
time because they were free of Haas’s perceived taint of Nazism.
Unlike Haas, who sought to give us the symphonies at full length - including
some splicing together of different versions even when this led to discrepancies
in the orchestral forces required - Nowak espoused the latest version
that could be shown to be authorised by Bruckner free from the well-meaning
interference of interpreters who were seeking to ‘popularise’
his music. Leaving aside the vexed question of what could be regarded
as ‘interference’ and what as ‘authorised’,
the results are not always happy. Conductors have long felt free to
make their own choices between Haas, Nowak and the original versions
as shown in Bruckner’s original manuscripts. The results can be
startlingly different one from another particularly in the
Third,
Fourth and
Eighth.
Jochum plumps unhesitatingly for
Nowak pure and simple, and although this enables him to get the
Eighth
for example onto one disc the results are not always convincing. I am
not going to get involved in a lengthy discussion about the merits of
the various editions, a subject which even Deryck Cooke got into controversial
hot water over forty years since; I just make the observation that the
matter of editions, which the booklet notes completely ignore, is a
matter of not inconsiderable consequence.
This is not an absolutely complete survey of the Bruckner symphonies,
any more than was Jochum’s earlier DG cycle. The early
Study
Symphony is missing; so, more seriously is the
Symphony No. 0,
a distinctive title which Bruckner bestowed on the symphony to show
that he did not totally regard it as being outside the canon. It was
in fact written
after the
First Symphony, and since it
is a pretty good work with plenty of Brucknerian fingerprints, it really
ought to have been included - as it was for example in Daniel Barenboim’s
first cycle in Chicago, and Solti’s generally more uneven traversal
from the same location - although Karajan also omitted it from his generally
excellent Berlin survey of the symphonies, as did Barenboim from his
later Berlin cycle.
Leaving the vexed question of editions to one side, it must be said
first that the sound on these recordings, more than thirty years old,
still remains highly impressive. The balance is invariably well judged,
and important lines of counterpoint which can ‘go missing’
in Haitink’s contemporaneous Concertgebouw cycle are always clearly
defined. To take one example from among many: in the extraordinary coda
to the
Romantic Symphony, the reiterated
tremolo string
theme which launches the passage towards its Sibelius-like motoric climax
all too often becomes submerged beneath the sustained wind and brass
themes that lie above it. Here it remains clearly audible in all its
inexorable potency right up to the end where the main theme from the
opening movement triumphantly returns.
One’s only complaint about the orchestral sound might be that
the use of modern trumpets brings their lines to the fore in a manner
that sometimes obtrudes. Bruckner generally wrote for the nineteenth-century
trumpet in F, an instrument that had a lower fundamental pitch but had
the concomitant disadvantage of being decidedly treacherous in the upper
register. One suspects that it would have formed more of a unit with
Bruckner’s resonant trombones and horns than the modern instruments
pitched a fourth higher which are employed in modern orchestras.
Jochum was largely responsible for creating the modern tradition of
performance in Bruckner. The earliest conductors of these symphonies
invariably made use of corrupt and tampered editions; indeed they were
largely responsible for the creation of some of them. Even Furtwängler’s
idiosyncratic and mystical approach to the scores tended to obscure
the music’s essentially classical structures, on which Bruckner
himself laid so much emphasis. One thing Jochum did however take over
from the Furtwängler tradition was his sometimes extreme modifications
of tempo throughout, inserting unmarked
accelerandi and
ritardandi
with a liberal hand. The results can often be highly disconcerting,
whipping up a tension which might seem to be diametrically opposed to
the fidelity to the composer’s indications that Jochum is at pains
to emphasise elsewhere. This quality explains the reputation for ‘impulsiveness’
by which Jochum’s Bruckner is sometimes described, an instinctive
reaction to the emotion of the moment rather than the shape of the whole.
Then again, one could quite legitimately claim that Wagner, Bruckner’s
idol, insisted that a principal function of the conductor was to moderate
the basic tempo in accordance with the meaning of the music. Indeed
Bruckner would almost certainly have expected this, even when he did
not specifically indicate it in his notoriously vague notation of his
scores. Time and again Jochum states a theme at one speed and then -
as the music launches itself into one of many passages of repeated patterns
- accelerates through each and every repetition, until sometimes the
music at the end is nearly twice as fast as it was at the beginning.
This surely cannot have been the composer’s intention, otherwise
he would have marked a new tempo for the end of the passage. Some modification
of the speed might well be desirable - although other conductors have
proved that the steady repetition can generate increased excitement
in its own right, without the need for any associated increase in tempo
- but Jochum carries the process to extremes. The fact that he does
it so often means that in due course a law of diminishing returns sets
in. One comes to anticipate and expect the
accelerando with a
sort of resignation. I don’t recall this as being so noticeable
in Jochum’s earlier DG cycle; but it may well be that over the
years we have come to resent this sort of pressure on the listener:
“This music may be repeating the same phrase over and over again,
but don’t you hear how the level of tension is increasing?”
Yes, we can hear it; but we don’t need to have it spelled out
to us every time.
After these general observations, let us finally get down to the business
of the performances themselves. The first of the set to be recorded,
the
Romantic, benefits in particular from the beautiful sound
of the Dresden horns who launch the work with a serenity and calm which
never sounds falsely heroic. In the aforementioned coda - where Jochum
for once restrains his impulse to accelerate through the repeated phrases
- one could imagine a more romantic passion in the beautiful horn
cantilena
which emerges from the texture; Karajan’s Berlin player on DG
tugs at the soul here. The sheer beauty of Jochum’s sound has
a heartache of its own. The strings, sometimes pushed to extremes by
the speed where they are landed at the end of one of Jochum’s
accelerations, are always needle-crisp and strong exactly as they should
be.
To continue our traversal of these recordings in the order they were
taped, a year later Jochum set down the
Seventh, Eighth and
Third.
The
Seventh is quite simply a marvellous performance. The speeds
are just right, and even Jochum’s modifications of the basic tempo
now sound totally natural. The slow movement has just the right air
of dignified mourning, and the Wagner tubas have an aura of nobility;
the scherzo has a sense of lift and lightness which is thrilling, and
the descending chromatic line which is set against the main theme does
not overpower it (CD 7, track 3, 1.01). By comparison Jochum’s
Eighth feels just a little too fast for my own taste, and does
not avoid an occasional sense of hurry. The slow movement is fine, as
is the barbaric folk dance of the scherzo; but the finale in particular
- beginning with a fine sturdy opening - soon becomes just too quick
for a tempo marking of
Fierlich, nicht schnell. Incidentally,
Jochum gets the grace notes in the strings and timpani, one of Bruckner’s
most startling effects, exactly right in the opening section, with the
short upbeat sounding
on the barline rather than anticipating
it. However he fails to capitalise on the similar effect for the solo
horn in the scherzo. In this passage the timpani sound much further
forward than elsewhere in this set, to good effect.
The
Third Symphony is, of all the Bruckner canon, the one where
the matter of ‘editions’ is almost impenetrably complex.
The original version was subjected over the years to a whole succession
of revisions, which generally consisted of abridgement of the music
so that the final result - which we are given here - is a matter of
some fifteen minutes shorter than the original. Jochum does a good job
by what remains, but I must admit that the original version with its
prolixity has a charm all of its own. It can be heard in a pioneering
set by Eliahu Inbal which gave us all the Bruckner symphonies in their
earliest forms, but it is better served by Georg Tintner’s Naxos
cycle which similarly opts for the originals although substituting obviously
better revisions such as the new scherzo for the
Fourth - giving
us some of the earlier versions as supplements.
In the
First Symphony Jochum is fairly straightforward in his
treatment; he slows down slightly for the second subject group in the
first movement and then has to accelerate back to tempo. Although Bruckner
does not indicate this it is certainly implied by the music itself and
does not sound at all unnatural. In the scherzo, with its multiple repeats
- some passages are marked to be played four times over - he gives us
all the repeats until the end of the trio and then omits the marked
repeats thereafter, which is surely right. What is more questionable
is the manner in which he launches directly into the finale after the
coda of the scherzo; assuming that this is intentional and not merely
an editing oversight; it would seem to run contrary to the practice
that Bruckner would have expected. Nevertheless this is a very fine
performance, one of the best in the set, with characterful woodwind
and heroic playing from the violins who Bruckner often cruelly scores
in opposition to the full orchestra.
Much the same sort of considerations apply to the other symphonies in
this set: Jochum’s performances of the
Second, Fifth and
Sixth Symphonies - where the issue of ‘editions’
is less of a consideration - are all excellent, and he surpasses himself
with a performance of the unfinished
Ninth which sets the seal
on a generally magnificent traversal. The scherzo of the
Ninth
is superbly boisterous, and the slow movement has all the heartbreak
that one could desire. Comparison with Karajan’s slightly later
Berlin cycle generally favours the latter - Karajan has a better sense
of architecture than Jochum, and avoids any tendency to rush through
the many repeated patterns which run through the scores. Even so, Karajan
is not devoid of a sense of routine in some of the earlier symphonies,
conveying an impression that he recorded them merely to complete the
set rather than out of any sense of identification with the music. Jochum
certainly identifies with Bruckner’s scores, but his anxiety to
convey this involvement to the listener sometimes leads to less satisfactory
results especially in the
Eighth Symphony. Karajan makes more
pragmatic choices about the editions he uses, which is all to the good
but anyone purchasing any one complete set of Bruckner symphonies will
certainly need to supplement this with some of the alternative versions
of the scores, particularly the original full-length version of the
Third. It seems to me that there might be a place in the catalogues
for a complete ‘variorum’ edition of the Bruckner symphonies,
giving us all the different versions of each symphony; but this would
necessitate a gross over-representation of the
Third, and would
deprive us of Haas’s reconstruction of the
Eighth which
incorporates sections of the earlier score into the later one to give
us an entirely speculative - although convincing - version which Bruckner
himself never contemplated. Of the existing cycles, Tintner on Naxos
comes closest to this, but nevertheless leaves open the question of
how one can satisfactorily decipher the intentions of a composer who
so persistently changed his mind about what he actually wanted.
Having said which, even after nearly forty years Jochum is no bad guide
through this music. Each symphony is contained on its own CD; Karajan,
for example, with his slower speeds and different editions has to extend
both the
Fifth and
Eighth onto a second disc.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Masterwork Index:
Bruckner
symphonies
Symphonies
of Anton Bruckner - a survey by John Quinn and Patrick Waller
