Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, WAB 105 (ed. Cohrs)

Program notes

About the Work

Bruckner began his Fifth Symphony in February 1875, at one of the low points of his years in Vienna. He was fifty, underpaid, and had just seen his hopes of a university post disappointed again. He started, unusually, with the slow movement, and had the whole symphony substantially finished by May 1876; some retouching followed over the next two years. He called it his ‘contrapuntal masterpiece’ and is also said to have referred to it as the ‘Fantastic’, though he never gave it a title.

He never heard it played by an orchestra. A performance on two pianos took place in Vienna in 1887. The orchestral premiere had to wait until April 1894, in Graz, under his pupil Franz Schalk, and by then Bruckner was too ill to travel. That may have been a mercy, since Schalk had reorchestrated the score and cut the finale heavily. Bruckner’s own text was not performed until 1935. The edition used in this concert is a recent one by the German conductor and scholar Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, prepared for the Anton Bruckner Urtext Gesamtausgabe, a new series of critical editions of the composer’s works.

The Fifth is the most severe and the most tightly built of Bruckner’s symphonies, about eighty minutes long. Its peculiarity is that the weight falls at the very end. The first three movements, however grand, are preparation; the summit is the chorale that crowns the finale. A performance has to hold something back for well over an hour to make that work.

What to Listen For

This is the only Bruckner symphony to open with a slow introduction. Low strings walk quietly, pizzicato, under a web of violas and violins; then come a blazing fanfare for the full orchestra and a solemn brass chorale. These three ideas, set down like foundation stones, are the material much of the symphony grows from. The Allegro that follows moves between a restless main theme, a second idea begun pizzicato, and great swells that break off at their peak, a habit this symphony never loses.

The Adagio opens with plucked strings in a slow six, against which an oboe sings a bleak melody in a rhythm of four: two metres at once. The warm, full-throated string theme that answers it is one of Bruckner’s great tunes. The Scherzo starts with the very same string figure as the Adagio, now at high speed, and keeps swerving into a heavy-footed country dance.

The finale begins by remembering. The slow introduction returns, and a solo clarinet interrupts with a cheeky falling octave; fragments of the first movement and the Adagio pass by, much as Beethoven reviews his earlier movements in the Ninth. The clarinet’s octave turns out to be the head of a fugue subject. Later the brass announce a broad chorale, which becomes the subject of a second fugue, and then the two are combined in a double fugue of enormous energy. In the last pages the main theme of the first movement joins them, and the chorale, in full brass over the whole orchestra, has the final word.