Symphony No. 9 in D minor, WAB 109 (ed. Cohrs)

Program notes

About the Work

Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony is his last word, and one of the most profound farewells in all of music. He began it in 1887 and was still working on it when he died in 1896, leaving it unfinished: the first three movements are complete, but the finale survives only in extensive sketches. Bruckner, a deeply devout Catholic, dedicated the symphony ‘to the dear God’ (dem lieben Gott). The three completed movements form a coherent and overwhelming whole, so the work is almost always performed, as tonight, in three movements. Tonight’s performance uses the scholarly Urtext edition by Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs.

The symphony returns to the D minor of Beethoven’s Ninth, and shares its sense of confronting the ultimate. It is vast, granitic and visionary, built from Bruckner’s characteristic great blocks of sound, long-breathed paragraphs and shattering brass climaxes, but pushed here to new extremes of harmonic daring and emotional depth. Bruckner called the slow movement his ‘Farewell to Life’. It is an Adagio of unprecedented harmonic adventurousness and spiritual intensity, ending in serene acceptance: a fitting, if unintended, close to the symphony and to Bruckner’s life. Its early history is notable too. The first performance, in Vienna in 1903, used a heavily ‘improved’ version by the conductor Ferdinand Löwe, and Bruckner’s actual score was not heard until 1932.

What to Listen For

The first movement (Feierlich, misterioso: ‘solemn, mysterious’) grows, as so often in Bruckner, from a hushed string tremor, with horn calls emerging out of the mist. Listen for how it builds through vast paragraphs to a tremendous, dissonant climax and a hammering D minor unison of overwhelming power.

The Scherzo is one of Bruckner’s most extraordinary. It is not a genial dance but something demonic and obsessive: stamping, dissonant chords and a relentless, almost mechanical drive, framing a strangely fleet, ghostly trio. It is among the most modern-sounding music Bruckner ever wrote.

The Adagio is the heart of the work and Bruckner’s farewell. Listen for the great leaping theme that opens it (a yearning rise in the violins), for the noble, chorale-like passages on the Wagner tubas, and for the shattering, grinding dissonance at its climax, perhaps the most anguished moment in all Bruckner. Then the music subsides into a long, glowing, peaceful coda, quoting earlier works and dying away into acceptance. With no triumphant finale to follow, this quiet, transcendent close becomes the final word of the symphony and of the composer.