Symphony No. 8 in C minor, WAB 108

Program notes

About the Work

Anton Bruckner began his Eighth Symphony in the summer of 1884, at the age of sixty, and worked on it mainly during the holidays from his teaching duties in Vienna. The four movements were drafted by August 1885, but the orchestration took him until 1887. That September he sent the finished score to the conductor Hermann Levi in Munich, whom he called his “artistic father”. Levi had just given Bruckner one of the great successes of his life with the Seventh Symphony, and Bruckner hoped he would conduct the premiere of the new work as well.

Levi’s answer was a shock. He found the symphony impossible to perform in its current form: the themes were magnificent, he wrote, but their working-out seemed dubious and the orchestration unworkable. Bruckner was badly shaken, but by early 1888 he had come round to the idea that the work could be improved, and he spent much of the next two years rewriting it. The version played at these concerts is the result, completed in March 1890.

The changes were far-reaching. Bruckner rewrote the end of the first movement, which in 1887 had closed in a blaze of C major; in 1890 it dies away quietly instead, the only first movement in his symphonies that ends softly. He composed a new, slower Trio for the Scherzo, cut and tightened the Adagio and the Finale, and expanded the woodwind to three of each instrument. He also added harps, which he had long said had no place in a true symphony. His pupil Friedrich Eckstein remembered Bruckner greeting him at the door one day with the news that he had put harps into the Adagio because “there was no other way”.

Bruckner asked Emperor Franz Joseph I for permission to dedicate the symphony to him, in a letter so crammed with courtly formulas that it has become famous in its own right. The emperor accepted and helped pay for the printing. Finding a conductor proved harder. After plans in Mannheim and Munich came to nothing, Hans Richter conducted the premiere with the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikverein on 18 December 1892. Bruckner’s supporters were there in force and the reception was warm, though the critic Eduard Hanslick, who had scorned Bruckner for years, remained unconvinced.

The orchestra is the largest Bruckner ever used: triple woodwind, eight horns (four of the players switching to the Wagner tubas that Wagner devised for his Ring), three harps, cymbals and triangle. Performances usually last around 80 minutes.

What to Listen For

First movement (Allegro moderato). The symphony begins in near-darkness: a quiet string tremolo and a short, rising and falling figure in the low strings whose rhythm recalls the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth. A warmer second theme uses Bruckner’s signature rhythm of two beats followed by a triplet. The development builds to huge statements of the main theme on the full orchestra, and near the end the music breaks off to leave trumpets and horns hammering out the rhythm over the timpani. Then, instead of a triumph, the movement sinks into a bleak, pianissimo close in C minor.

Second movement (Scherzo: Allegro moderato; Trio: Langsam). Unusually, the Scherzo comes second. It is built almost entirely from the figures heard in its first bars: a restless pattern in the upper strings over a heavy theme in the basses. The slow Trio, in A-flat major, brings the harps in for the first time and looks ahead to the mood of the Adagio.

Third movement (Adagio: Feierlich langsam, doch nicht schleppend). The heart of the work, lasting around 25 minutes on its own. Over throbbing strings a broad, solemn theme unfolds, answered by harps and a passionate melody for the cellos. Bruckner builds wave after wave toward a single enormous climax in E-flat major, crowned by a clash of cymbals, before the music settles into a long, glowing coda with the Wagner tubas.

Fourth movement (Finale: Feierlich, nicht schnell). The Finale opens with a pounding march rhythm in the strings and a massive brass chorale, with the timpani thundering beneath. It is a long and complex movement that gathers up material from the whole symphony. In the coda, listen for the main themes of all four movements sounding together as the key finally turns to a blazing C major.