Mäkelä’s Bruckner Eighth

About the Work

Bruckner’s Eighth is the last symphony he completed, and for many listeners the summit of his life’s work: a vast, cathedral-like structure of around eighty minutes that travels, as the orchestra’s own programme puts it, ‘from darkness into light.’ Bruckner, a devout Catholic and a former village organist who came late and painfully to symphonic fame, conceived his symphonies as acts of worship on the largest possible scale, building them from great blocks of sound, long silences, and slow, inexorable crescendos that suggest the architecture of a Gothic church rendered in time. The Eighth is the grandest of them all.

Its path to performance was tortured, as so often with Bruckner. He completed a first version in 1887, but when the conductor Hermann Levi, a trusted champion, confessed he could not understand it, the easily-discouraged composer plunged into doubt and revised the work extensively, producing the 1890 version usually heard today. (One famous change: in the revision the huge first movement ends not in triumph but in a hushed, desolate fade, the only Bruckner first movement to die away into silence.) The symphony was finally premiered by Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic at the Musikverein on 18 December 1892, and dedicated to Emperor Franz Joseph I. Though Bruckner never gave it the title, it is sometimes nicknamed ‘The Apocalyptic.’

It calls for an enormous orchestra, with triple woodwind, eight horns, four of the dark, noble Wagner tubas and three harps, and its emotional range is correspondingly immense, from terror and desolation to radiant, hard-won transcendence. Surrendering to its scale and its slow time is the key to one of the great experiences in all music.

What to Listen For

The key to Bruckner is patience: let the long spans unfold, and listen for the great waves that build, recede, and build again toward overwhelming climaxes.

The first movement grows from a quiet, ominous string tremor and a brooding theme; it gathers toward shattering brass climaxes but, in a famously bleak stroke, sinks at the end into near-silence, a dying close that Bruckner’s own letters connect with death. The Scherzo that follows is massive and earthy, driven by an insistent, stamping theme (Bruckner associated it with a good-natured peasant figure he called ‘German Michel’); listen for its contrasting trio, gentler and graced for the first time by the harps.

The Adagio is the heart of the work and one of the supreme slow movements ever written: a vast, glowing meditation, with soaring string melody, solemn Wagner tubas and shimmering harp, building to a colossal cymbal-crowned climax before subsiding into peace. The Finale opens with a blazing fanfare (Bruckner spoke of cossacks, of a meeting of emperors) and proceeds through tremendous contrasts of power and stillness. Listen, at the very end, for Bruckner’s masterstroke: the main themes of all four movements are stacked together and sound simultaneously, the whole symphony gathered into a single overwhelming blaze of C major, darkness finally and gloriously resolved into light.