Conducting Haydn and Bruckner
You’ve just heard a performance of Haydn’s ‘Military’ Symphony. No doubt it was a good performance, good notably in the basics. That is to say, the orchestra played with unanimity and discipline. The players agreed on the interpretation, and their togetherness was a tribute to their professionalism.
But probably you also thought some of the qualities of the performance owed something to the conductor. It was his interpretation of Haydn’s symphony he had persuaded the players to agree on. You probably take that for granted, in performances of symphonies broadcast on this ABC Classic FM network.
But perhaps you shouldn’t take it for granted. We may guess that the first performance of this Haydn symphony, in London on the 31st of March 1794, may not have been quite like the one you’ve just heard. And some of that would have been due to there not being a conductor in that performance, or at least, no conductor of the modern kind. Most likely, Haydn himself took part in the performance, but he was not standing in front of the orchestra, directing it with a baton. He was seated at a keyboard instrument, harpsichord or fortepiano, and he joined in where necessary, helping to give the performance its shape. More direction would have come from the leader of the orchestra, Johann Peter Salomon, who was also the impresario who had invited Haydn to London, and commissioned this symphony, along with 11 others. This joint direction probably resulted in a good performance, and indeed in our historically conscious times many performances of Haydn symphonies are given by conductor-less orchestras.
When modern chamber orchestras perform Haydn symphonies without a conductor, they require a lot of rehearsal. The conductor beating in front of the orchestra, and directing the rehearsals is, if you like, a short-cut, an efficiency measure. Because, you see, each of the players in the orchestra has his or her own idea about how the music should go. The conductor persuades them to play the music one way – his or her way. In the last years of the 18th century orchestras had the advantage over their modern successors that most of the music they played was in the same musical language or style. So, the players’ musical instincts as to phrasing and expression tended in the same direction, and that made a conductor less necessary. A performance of a Haydn symphony, then, to be authentic, shouldn’t sound all over the place, every player for himself. All the same, such a performance gives less of an opportunity than a symphony of later times for a highly personal and nuanced performance, reflecting the personal interpretation of a single musician, a conductor who is a star attraction of the concert.
This is by way of introducing what we are to hear next. The concert we’re listening to has a feature which is quite unusual. The program consists of two symphonies, one by Haydn, one by Bruckner, and there is no concerto, no soloist. This throws the emphasis on the orchestra itself, and even more on its conductor. And indeed, in the publicity for the concert, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra has taken its cue from that. Giving a concert without a soloist is often thought a risky proposition, from a selling point of view. But in this case, the orchestra is building on previous success.
It is making a feature of tonight’s conductor. He is Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and his two earlier appearances with the orchestra have been greeted with excitement and praise. So, the theme for tonight, in publicity, has been ‘he’s back!’ And HE is the Maestro, the dynamic, young maestro. The role of the conductor is made a selling point. But there’s another reason for this. Not just what marketers call hype, but a reason that has more to do with the music. When Yannick Nézet-Séguin made his debut with the orchestra a few years ago, he was a replacement for a conductor more famous than he. On the strength of what they experienced, the audience thought Nézet-Séguin too might soon be famous. He amazed the audience by the authority, conviction and impact of his performance of a symphony so long that it often takes up the whole of the concert program. The symphony was Bruckner’s Eighth. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted it from memory. Tonight we’re about to hear a follow-up to that success, with the same conductor.
Return with me, if you will, to the idea that the performance you’ve just heard of the Haydn symphony was at least as good as the first performance in 1794, in terms of togetherness and singleness of purpose, and possibly better. Now let’s re-set our historical focus on the first performance of the symphony we are about to hear. It was a performance with a conductor, giving time with a baton in front of the orchestra. But he was no Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The conductor was the composer of the music, Anton Bruckner. But the first performance of Bruckner’s Third Symphony, which is what we are about to hear, tonight, has been singled out by one of Bruckner’s biographers as the darkest day of that composer’s entire musical life. December 16, 1877.
The performance was a catastrophe, and a scandal. Here are some accounts of what happened, from a review published a few days after the concert.
‘Sunday’s concert was a most enjoyable one, until Hellmesberger laid down his baton. Then came a new symphony by Anton Bruckner, directed by the composer himself. Many of the audience seemed to have sensed something ominous in the air, and, as time was getting on, they headed for the exits. What followed showed how wise they had been...we heard an utterly bizarre work...a motley, formless patchwork fabricated from scraps of musical ideas...the further the performance progressed, the more the hall emptied. At the end a few jokers applauded loudly, calling out “Bis”, and “da capo”.’
This critic was wrong about the ‘jokers’. Those people who applauded loudly at the end were Bruckner’s supporters, mainly his pupils. They were trying to cheer Bruckner up. But the composer was not to be consoled, and kept saying ‘Leave me alone – nobody wants anything of mine’. This event, depressing to hear about, didn’t happen in just a new music concert, worthy but lowly. It took place in a subscription concert like tonight’s, in the august surroundings of Vienna’s leading concert hall, the Great Hall of the Musikverein. The orchestra was the Vienna Philharmonic, that is, the Viennese counterpart of tonight’s Sydney Symphony - the city’s leading orchestra. The Vienna Philharmonic’s audience was used to concert programs with a mixture of shorter numbers. One reason many of them headed for the exits was that they realised the rest of the concert consisted of just one work. They figured it must be very long.
Then there was Bruckner’s conducting. The Vienna Philharmonic players had already made fun of Bruckner at the rehearsals. Even one of his admirers reported that Bruckner had no real idea how to conduct properly, and had to limit himself to giving the tempo, in the style of a marionette. You might wonder, then, why Bruckner was conducting at all. In fact, he was a replacement, but the circumstances were very different from when Yannick Nézet-Séguin first conducted a Bruckner symphony in Sydney. Here’s what happened in Vienna in 1877. It wasn’t the first time Bruckner had conducted one of his symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic. The previous year, he had conducted a performance of his Second Symphony, with mixed success. The audience was quite enthusiastic, but one critic called Bruckner ‘a fool and a half’. The Third Symphony was already composed then, in 1876. It existed four years until its disastrous premiere, in 1877. Bruckner had managed to have the Third Symphony read through, in private, by the Vienna Philharmonic, but the musicians and the management of the orchestra had pronounced it too long and unplayable. They refused to perform it in public. That was in 1874. So it was against strong opposition that one of Bruckner’s champions, the conductor Johann Herbeck, had negotiated with the orchestra management to put the work on the December 1877 concert program. The condition was that Herbeck would conduct it himself. Then, in October, Herbeck died. Another of Bruckner’s supporters managed to persuade the orchestra to keep the symphony on the program. Who else would know it well enough to conduct it? As often happens with new music, the logical answer was - the composer himself.
Now, you remember what I said about the Haydn symphony, that it may or may not be thought to require a good conductor. Much had changed, between 1794 and 1877, in the musical environment and the performance environment. Both Haydn and Bruckner’s symphonies were new music, new for the players and the audience. But the newness of Haydn’s music was within a familiar style, whereas Bruckner’s symphony, for the 1870s, was baffling to many musicians and listeners. Here are some samples from another review of that first performance. ‘A gigantic, enormous work, full of audacities and peculiarities…baffling music, in which no crudity is too great, no logical leap too far…Herr Bruckner murders father and mother with the assurance that it has to be so’. That review sounds like some of the abuse hurled at new music in the 20th century. Today we feel confident that Bruckner’s symphonies will be heard with long-anticipated pleasure and reward, and this is largely because of another historical development, the emergence of the virtuoso conductor. The new kind of conductor came to prominence in Bruckner’s time. The Vienna Philharmonic musicians treated Bruckner’s conducting so badly because they were used to working under better conductors. Orchestral music was now being composed which required a conductor – a dedicated conductor standing in front of the orchestra and using a baton. This was true of the symphonies of Brahms as well as of Bruckner.
Bruckner’s symphonies, however, more perhaps than any symphonic music composed up to that time, needed a conductor. This was partly because their very large orchestral forces needed balancing, from the podium. It was even more because of the length of Bruckner’s symphonies, taking their cue from Schubert’s last symphony, but going much further.
Bruckner laid out his Second and Third symphonies in what are called ‘periods’ – an analogy with literature might be with long paragraphs. Bruckner was wedded to this way of punctuating his music when he was composing the Third Symphony. In its original version he marked off one period from another by long, but measured, silences. The hostile reviewer I just quoted commented, sarcastically, that ‘the things Bruckner achieves by means of the pause border on the fantastic…the listener shakes his head, and from time to time even feels his pulse’ - presumably, the critic was hinting, to make sure he was still alive! Bruckner himself said about these pauses that he needed to take a big breath before he could go on. But the pauses were puzzling to early listeners, and challenging for players and conductors. You’ll notice these pauses in tonight’s performance. More so, in fact, than most times this symphony is performed. That’s because of a very important decision by tonight’s conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. He has decided to perform the Third Symphony as Bruckner first wrote it. And this conductor’s reasons, I would intuit, have a lot to do Bruckner’s relations with conductors. He needed them – as we’ve seen – and Bruckner’s music became accepted because conductors championed its cause. But this was a mixed blessing for Bruckner, because many of these same conductors tried to persuade him that he needed to change his music, to make it more acceptable, to audiences and to orchestras. Let’s see, for example, how Bruckner made changes to tonight’s symphony. I mentioned the read-through of this Third Symphony, by the Vienna Philharmonic. They rejected it, and Bruckner made some changes – then, before the disastrous first performance in 1877, he made still more changes – including shortenings.
The long pauses were gone, filled in to make the music continuous. Gone too were the direct quotations from Wagner, from his Ring music dramas and from Tristan and Isolde. Bruckner had sent the original version of this symphony music to his musical hero Wagner, and visited him in Bayreuth in 1873, where Wagner accepted the dedication of Symphony No.3, which Bruckner always afterwards referred to proudly as his ‘Wagner Symphony’. But by 1877 it seemed prudent to remove the obvious Wagner references. Vienna’s most influential music critic, Eduard Hanslick, was hostile to Wagner and his music, and that hostility was rubbing off on Bruckner. Hanslick was putting Bruckner in the Wagner camp. The prudent precaution didn’t work. Hanslick wrote dismissively of Bruckner’s Third Symphony, even without the Wagner quotes. Bruckner’s revisions continued, so that five different versions of the Symphony exist, the last made as late as the years 1888-9.
Tonight you’ll hear Bruckner’s original idea, with the pauses and the Wagner quotations. I won’t go into all the details – but I do want to draw some observations from this about Bruckner’s relations with conductors. Early conductors of Bruckner’s symphonies fall broadly into two categories. Hans Richter can stand for the first category. Richter was the most famous conductor of the time, associated both with Wagner, and with the symphonies of Brahms, from the opposing camp. Richter gave successful premieres of several Bruckner symphonies, lending them not only his skill but also his prestige. After a rehearsal of Symphony No.4, Bruckner was so pleased that he pressed a small coin into Richter’s hand, saying ‘Take this and drink my health with a glass of beer’. Naïve, simple-minded perhaps, but also a sign how much Bruckner depended on conductors to get his music heard.
Another very famous conductor who took up the cause of Bruckner’s symphonies was Artur Nikisch, and Nikisch was a young violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic when they first played through tonight’s Third Symphony.
In another category of conductors were pupils of Bruckner. They studied with him to hone their skills as composers, so they came to understand his music very much from the inside. But these pupils went on to earn their living mainly as conductors, and they were anxious as to how Bruckner’s music would fare in concerts. These were the men who most tried to prevail on Bruckner to make changes to his music. Sometimes they even made changes themselves, without consulting him. They included the brothers Franz and Joseph Schalk, and Ferdinand Löwe. They are often held responsible for the existence of multiple versions of many of the Bruckner symphonies, complex, even bewildering series of versions. Alma Mahler, never an entirely reliable witness, claimed that these pupils bullied Bruckner, whereas her husband Gustav encouraged Bruckner to stick to his original ideas. But there is some truth in the suggestion made at the time that Bruckner became the pupil of his pupils, in respect of changing his symphonies so that they would make their way in performance. Mind you, Bruckner could be very stubborn. His conductor friends had to really browbeat him to get him to agree to alterations and cuts. Even when Bruckner did give in to the insistence of his friends, he was sure of himself, sure that the changes were good. They may have been made partly as concessions to the spirit and demands of the times, but they seemed worthwhile to him. They enabled his symphonies to be heard.
Bruckner, no great conductor himself, was one of the first great composers to be so dependent on conductors. Around the successive versions of his symphonies, and the pros and contras as to which Bruckner version is the best, a tradition has grown up of Bruckner interpretation. It still depends on conductors – as most symphonic music does, after Haydn, but Bruckner’s more than most. In the second half of this concert, which is about to begin, the conductor is really indispensable. One particularly exciting thing Yannick Nézet-Séguin brings with this Bruckner symphony is artistic conviction and courage in thinking that Bruckner may have got it right first go. He was sure about the Third Symphony, even before hearing it played. He made changes later, at least partly for the sake of having it played. For that, he needed conductors. Tonight, we have one who shares the belief Bruckner often expressed that his symphonies were meant for times to come. And Bruckner said that for times to come, they were meant as HE had written.
Tonight we hear the Third symphony as Bruckner wrote it. First. Before its performance history began.
This talk was first broadcast on ABC Classic FM August, 2009