Symphony No. 3 in D minor, WAB 103

Program notes

About the Work

In September 1873 Anton Bruckner called on Richard Wagner, whom he revered, with two symphonies under his arm and asked him to accept the dedication of whichever he preferred. Wagner chose the one in D minor, the still unfinished Third. A much-repeated story adds that the two men drank so much beer that Bruckner could not remember the next morning which had been picked, and had to send a note asking whether it was the symphony ‘where the trumpet begins the theme’. Bruckner finished the score soon afterwards. In its first form it included quotations from Wagner’s operas, and it has been known ever since as the ‘Wagner Symphony’.

Getting it played was another matter. By most accounts the Vienna Philharmonic tried the piece in rehearsal and turned it down. Bruckner shortened and revised it, and a performance was at last arranged for 16 December 1877 under Johann Herbeck. Herbeck died shortly before the concert and Bruckner, an inexperienced orchestral conductor, had to direct it himself. The evening was the worst humiliation of his life: the audience drifted away during the performance, and at the end only a small group of supporters remained, the seventeen-year-old Gustav Mahler among them.

Bruckner kept returning to the score. He removed most of the Wagner quotations and cut the outer movements heavily, and in 1888 and 1889 he reworked the whole symphony again, shortening the finale still further. In that last form Hans Richter conducted it with the Vienna Philharmonic on 21 December 1890, to great success. The result is that there is no single Third: three versions are in regular use today, the long original of 1873, the version of 1877 and the tauter one of 1889. The orchestra’s announcement does not say which of them Vladimir Jurowski has chosen. Whichever it is, the work is where Bruckner first sounds wholly like himself.

What to Listen For

The opening is one of Bruckner’s most characteristic. The strings set up a soft, circling pattern over a held bass note, and out of this mist a solo trumpet plays a plain, signal-like theme built from the simplest intervals. The music swells in two great waves to a jagged statement for the whole orchestra in unison. That trumpet theme is the motto of the symphony. A second, gentler group of themes follows in the strings, and it uses the rhythm Bruckner made his own, two even notes followed by three. The movement ends starkly, on a bare open fifth, neither major nor minor.

The slow movement, in E-flat major and marked ‘solemn’, begins as a warm string hymn and alternates it with a more flowing melody first given to the violas. The scherzo is short and fierce: a whirling figure in the violins grows from a murmur to a stamping dance for full orchestra, while the trio in the middle is a relaxed country waltz, the sound of Bruckner’s Upper Austrian home.

The finale sets off in a storm, but its most famous passage is the second theme, where two kinds of music are heard at once: the strings play a light, skipping dance while the horns and brass intone a slow chorale beneath it. After many struggles and sudden silences the key turns to D major, and the trumpet theme from the first bars returns in triumph to end the symphony.