Symphony No. 8 in C minor

Program notes

About the Work

Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is the largest symphony he completed, and for many listeners the summit of his life’s work: a structure of such scale and gravity that it is often described, not idly, as a cathedral built in sound. He composed the first version between 1884 and 1887, in the wake of the public triumph of his Seventh Symphony, and brought the finished score to the conductor Hermann Levi, who had championed the Seventh and whose support Bruckner trusted absolutely. Levi’s response was a blow: he found the new work confusing and could not see how to perform it, and he gently declined to take it up. For a composer as anxious and self-doubting as Bruckner, the verdict was devastating. It triggered one of the most consequential bouts of revision in the history of the symphony.

Over the following years, helped and prodded by friends and pupils, Bruckner reworked the symphony extensively, arriving at a substantially revised version in 1890. The two versions differ in more than detail. Most famously, Bruckner changed the ending of the first movement: the 1887 original closes with a loud, affirmative climax, while the 1890 revision lets the movement die away into near-silence, a hushed, ticking close that Bruckner himself reportedly likened to a ‘death-watch,’ the clock counting out a dying man’s final hours. He also refined the orchestration throughout, added harps, and tightened proportions elsewhere. The first performance, of the revised score, was given in Vienna by the Vienna Philharmonic under Hans Richter on 18 December 1892, and it was a great success: vindication, at last, after the wound Levi’s rejection had left.

The textual history grows more tangled in the twentieth century, because the symphony survives in competing scholarly editions as well as competing versions. The two principal editions of the 1890 score are the one prepared by Robert Haas in the 1930s and the later one by Leopold Nowak, published in 1955. Haas, controversially, restored into his text some passages from the 1887 original that Bruckner had cut in revision, producing a kind of conflation; Nowak’s edition adheres more strictly to what Bruckner left in 1890. Conductors continue to choose between them, and a handful return to the 1887 original altogether. The orchestra’s listing for these concerts names the Haas edition of the 1890 version; the differences between editions, while real, are matters for specialists and need not preoccupy the first-time listener, who will encounter in any reading the same vast, four-part design.

That design is Bruckner’s grandest. The symphony is cast in four movements and runs around eighty minutes. Unusually, Bruckner places the Scherzo second, before the slow movement, so that the work’s still, radiant heart (the Adagio) falls third, prepared by the Scherzo’s earthbound stamping rather than following directly on the opening Allegro. The first movement, marked Allegro moderato, is dark and questioning, growing from a quiet, tremolo-shrouded opening to towering climaxes before that famous fading coda. The Scherzo is built on a relentless, ostinato tread; Bruckner associated its rustic, good-humoured character with a figure he called the ‘German Michel,’ a folk personification of the plain, dreaming German countryman. The Adagio, in the warm key of D-flat major, is one of the supreme slow movements in the repertoire: a long, patient ascent through wave upon wave of song toward a shattering climax, scored with harps and, at its peak, a chorale of Wagner tubas. The Finale opens with a blazing brass cavalcade over a galloping rhythm, sometimes likened to a meeting of monarchs, and across its huge span draws the symphony’s threads together, until in the coda the main themes of all four movements are stacked and sounded simultaneously, the whole edifice revealed at once.

Bruckner, a devout Catholic and a working church organist for much of his life, conceived his symphonies in something like liturgical terms: vast spans of time, great blocks of sound built and rebuilt like masonry, silences as structural as the notes around them. The Eighth is the fullest realisation of that vision: music that does not hurry, that asks the listener to surrender to its scale, and that rewards the surrender with one of the most overwhelming culminations in all of symphonic art.

What to Listen For

In the first movement (Allegro moderato), listen for how Bruckner builds from almost nothing: a shadowy string tremolo out of which the main theme emerges, jagged and questioning, in the low strings. The movement proceeds in great waves: long crescendos that swell toward shattering brass climaxes, then fall back into stillness. Bruckner thinks in blocks of sound separated by silence, so do not expect seamless transitions; let each plateau register. Save your attention for the very end. Where you might expect a triumphant close, the music instead dwindles: a soft, ticking figure in the strings over a held bass, fading to near nothing. This is the coda Bruckner called the ‘death-watch’, the clock at a deathbed, and it leaves the movement suspended, unresolved, in the dark.

The Scherzo that follows (placed second, before the slow movement) is the symphony’s most immediately physical music: a heavy, stamping ostinato that drives forward with rustic energy. This is the ‘German Michel’ Bruckner spoke of: the plain countryman, half comic, half dreaming. Feel the relentless tread of the outer sections, then notice the contrast of the central trio, which slows and softens into a gentler, more lyrical landscape, with harps adding a new glow of colour, before the stamping returns.

The Adagio is the emotional core of the work, and demands patience and surrender. It unfolds in long paragraphs of song in the strings, rising and subsiding, gathering intensity with each return of its themes. Listen for the entry of the harps and, as the movement nears its peak, the solemn, glowing sound of the Wagner tubas, instruments Bruckner reserved for his most exalted moments. The whole movement is a slow ascent toward a single overwhelming climax, often crowned by a clash of cymbals; let the music carry you toward it rather than waiting for a tune to hum.

The Finale opens unmistakably: a blazing fanfare in the brass over a hammering, galloping rhythm in the strings, a cavalcade that Bruckner is said to have associated with the meeting of emperors and kings. From this charged beginning the movement ranges widely, alternating ferocious energy with passages of hushed mystery. Keep your bearings through its vast span by tracking the great brass statements. Then listen, in the closing minutes, for Bruckner’s master-stroke: in the coda he brings back the principal themes of all four movements and sounds them together, layered into a single radiant edifice in C major. The symphony that began in darkness and uncertainty ends by gathering everything it has been into one final, blazing affirmation.