Many consider Ivor Bolton to be one of the best interpreters of baroque music. This image must be corrected, because the Englishman is likewise just as exciting with the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. This is shown by his Bruckner cycle with the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg, currently in production on the OehmsClassics label. Ivor Bolton landed a surprise coup with the first release in the cycle, Bruckner’s 5th Symphony. The international press was thoroughly positive – just as after release of the 7th. The conductor now presents Bruckner’s 9th – a powerful symphonic fragment. During Bruckner’s whole artistic life, he struggled with the symphonic form. At the end, he may have sensed that this work was in the process of bursting all conventions – its Finale remained incomplete. The composer decreed that instead of the Finale, his Te Deum could be inserted, because the symphony is “dedicated to the good Lord”. Ivor Bolton decided to use the three-movement fragment in the critical revision made by Benjamin Gunnar Cohrs using the preparatory work by Alfred Orel and Leopold Nowak.

God himself is to blame

The prophet has no honour – or at least, little – in his own country; especially in Vienna, be it Mozart, Schubert or Bruckner, who for a long time was treated as a village idiot that fabricated „symphonic giant boas“ (Quote Johannes Brahms). But at the latest in 1884/85, with the overwhelming success of the Seventh Symphony at its premiere under Arthur Nikisch in Leipzig, and even more so under Hermann Levi in Munich, then one could after all as a Viennese – by all curious preciosity of being embarrassed – be proud of the Austrian Anton Bruckner. “Now he is surely one of us!”. Then along came big brother Germany and claimed Bruckner, as down to earth German blood, for itself. Famous has become the picture of a lonesome German “Hero and Leader” of Austrian ancestry – Adolf Hitler – before a bust of Anton Bruckner, the Germanic proto-genius drawing from mythical omnipotence. Thus the catastrophal “clinical case of necrophilia” (Erich Fromm) decorated himself with the down-to-earth heaven seeking symbol of creative religio.

In his lifetime, and for a long period afterwards, almost all of Bruckner’s works were played in revised and, in part, extremely falsified and deformed versions. Placed somewhat unfortunately in the interconnections of history, the discovery and publication of the overdue required original versions of the Bruckner works, from 1933 in Vienna by Robert Haas, one of the most commendable musicologists of the 20th century, occurred together with the ascension of Adolf Hitler and the expansion of the “Third Reich”. With the “Anschluss” of Austria in 1938 the head office of the Bruckner Complete Edition was also immediately spirited away from Vienna to Leipzig. This changed absolutely nothing on the artistic necessity of withdrawing from circulation the deformed arrangements and abridgements of the Bruckner symphonies and replacing each of them with the original body of works, and here is where the immense life-time achievement of Robert Haas lies.

On the 2nd of April 1932, in Munich, Siegmund von Hausegger heralded in the new era of authentic Bruckner presentations, with the first performance of the original version of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony – an irreversible process. At last the musicians, the experts and the whole audience could acquire for themselves a realistic impression of Bruckner’s true greatness. Finally it became possible to discover the real dimensions of his creations to their full extent. From that date a noteworthy Bruckner tradition came into being, which in Germany is associated with names such as Hausegger, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Carl Schuricht, Joseph Keilberth, Eugen Jochum, Herbert von Karajan, Günter Wand, Rafael Kubelik and, above all, Sergiu Celibidache. Naturally there were also others, such as Hans Knappertsbusch, who continued to cling to the past and presented the adaptations. Politically comprehensible, but in musical matters unacceptable, is the attempt being undertaken these days by New York circles around the conductor Leon Botstein to advocate that the disfigured versions from Josef Schalk and his peers, which were played in Bruckner’s time, are on an equal footing with the original versions.

Incidentally, the first countries outside Germany in which Bruckner’s music had great success were the Netherlands and – little by little with growing resonance – England. Later on his music made its triumphal procession through the United States of America, to then conquer also the Scandinavian and Russian worlds and, eventually, to become a cultic object of Japanese classical admiration.

After the Second World War the great names of the authentic Bruckner movement, Siegmund von Hausegger und Robert Haas, were engulfed by the extinct “Third Reich”, as if in a black hole. Now back in Vienna, for the freshly started Bruckner Complete Edition a new editor was employed, Leopold Nowak, who undertook everything honest and dishonest to justify his existence on a par with the pioneer Robert Haas. Thereby editions emerged which, in cases of doubt, to a great extent chose unfavourable and atypical solutions – simply to be different. Accordingly, after Nowak’s resignation and under pressure from leading authorities, a reluctant start was made to tackle a third print of the Complete Edition, this time – more than a half century after the epoch-making Haas editions – on the fundament of new findings and diverse research results. This third edition now also forms the basis of the present new recording under Ivor Bolton.

According to today’s synopsis Bruckner wrote not simply nine symphonies only, such as before him Beethoven and after him Dvorák, Mahler and Vaughan Williams. He wrote 19 versions, and the leading Bruckner researcher and music publicist Benjamin Gunnar Cohrs has placed them in a chronology, coming to 19 versions of eleven symphonies (the two early symphonies in f minor and d minor were no longer acknowledged by Bruckner himself ). This timetable brings light onto a very entwined innovative route. Thus emerged from 1887–89, between the 1st and 2nd versions of the Eighth Symphony, the 4th version of the Fourth Symphony and the 3rd version of the Third Symphony, and from 1890–91, as an insertion in composition of the Ninth Symphony, the 2nd version of the First Symphony. It is not surprising that Bruckner did not come to an end with the Ninth Symphony!

A great mythology has grown around Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, his last and uncompleted, which he had dedicated to ’the dear God’. In his very sure-footed Bruckner biography published in 1944, Peter Raabe quoted Bruckner’s physician Dr. Richard Heller:

‘I believe, to be able to clarify some pronouncements from Bruckner, that in his ideas he had to some extent concluded a contract with God. If the dear Lord wanted him to complete the symphony, which is intended to be a canticle to God, then He must bestow life for as long as is needed; should he die earlier, then it is God’s own fault if He receives an uncompleted work. Devoutness was, by the way, a principal feature of this great genius. He prayed diligently, and even when these prayers sometimes took on very peculiar forms, they were nevertheless deeply felt and piously brought forth. As no one could disturb him when he was at prayer, which he carried out on his knees before his large crucifix, I had the opportunity several times, standing quietly in the room, to hear his prayers. He praised a number of “Our Fathers” and “Hail Marys” and closed with a fully freestyle prayer, such as, “Dear Lord, let me be in good health again soon, look, I need my health so that I can complete the Ninth”, etc. He uttered this last passage in a somewhat impatient manner, closing with a triple Amen, whereby, on a few occasions, with the third Amen he struck against his thighs with both hands, such that one couldn’t help but think that he thought to himself: “If the dear Lord does not hear that now, then it is not my fault!” Has the Ninth actually remained unfinished? Contemporary musicologists are of the opinion that it was on hand in at least a first, raw orchestral score and is probably still even in existence – in private ownership in Vienna. Time and again scattered pages from the finale have turned up. The reason for this is that, after Bruckner’s death, the testamentary administrator conducted a loose control and took no steps to ensure that the material remained in an orderly and connected condition. In the meantime there is a group of musicologists who have, piece for piece, filled out the empty spaces between the turned up pages of the finale and improved it step by step. They will not succeed in giving the symphony a really adequate finale, but as an attempt at reconstruction it is a highly interesting exercise in style, one being followed with great interest by many connoisseurs and musicians.