Arts
The case of Bruckner
Hans Keller
Bruckner's Ninth Symphony will be played in next Thursday's Prom (16 August). broadcast live on Radio 3 at 7.30 p.m.
Yes, it is still a case, though he is the very 0Pposite of a problematic genius: the problems lie in the ear of the observer. Nothing Short of a psychopathology of anti-Brucknerism will do. It is a creeping disease, not easily recognised nowadays, when the Composer's reputation amongst some Cognoscenti — four of them: the late beryck Cooke. Robert Simpson, Misha bonat, and myself— has turned him into an Imucknowledged bore amongst all those Professionals deaf or alive, who accept him ns an inescapable nuisance in the history. net of music as they love it, but of listening. As recently as 30 years ago. however. our Leading critics proudly presented the tedium nruekner caused them and should, of Course, cause everybody else. That was the time when misunderstanding friend and foe Mike threw him under one hat — vaguely envisaged as one of those Styrian hats eeuntry-loving Austrians are fond of wear with his diametrical counter-pole. 'instav Mahler, a problematic genius if ever there was one. The point was that both of them were ultra-Austrian pains in the neck, ir°eal celebrities whom ungrateful refugees ,c3reed upon the British instead of quietly 'earning to appreciate Vaughan Williams. In the meantime, Mahler has become a 13ritish national obsession, even an EEC Lbsession — with all his complications 41 conflicts, which are used as therapy Lel misused: it is not the purpose of art legitimise what you feel to be your weakilkesses. Bruckner's lack of complications, pl'ckever, has complicated any budding q)nversion; we have to go back as far as l'Iozart to find an equally uncomplicated quislcal genius — who, therefore, was tanderrated until the earlier part of our cenarY, considered a highest-level lightweight. 4 Etruckner, on the other hand, is misheard 44 a lower-level heavyweight who, scherzos 24.11, only wrote slow movements — at which t'ualt I have to wax a little autobiographal. As I sat down to write this article, I telt funny — marginally disorientated. In an ,48Y-ehair in the door leading out to the rs.r,race of Jerusalem's 'Dwellings of Sereniv (to which artists and writers are invited 1order to work in peace), I was facing the si_ld City; and Bruckner, even without a Yrian hat, seemed remote in the heavily Niddle-Eastern atmosphere. The clock of the Dormition Church „ 'tyPosite struck. Maybe that Christian :Minder would bring Bruckner closer. It as not a spontaneous thought. Weeks ago, the Austrian Ambassador had been to visit me, and we had sat on the terrace when that clock struck, and the church bells went into action. They had moved him: in Herzliya outside Tel Aviv where he lives, there are no churches, of course. Through his words, I was now reminded of my childhood's Austrian bells; and corrupted by the history of Bruckner's music, I tried to move back to Austria. What for? He had long since moved out of Austria, into the Western musical world. . .
I'll turn the radio on: perhaps there's something to inspire me. I twiddled around, and suddenly struck the church bells' enforced association — the first movement of Bruckner's Fourth. I listened to the whole symphony. forgetting about the article — which the closing announcement brought back to my mind with an eminently extra-Christian, un-Western bang: 'This is Radio Jordan. broadcasting from Amman. You've been listening to Anton Bruckner's Fourth Symphony. . . If it had come from Jewish Kol Israel; it wouldn't have surprised me; its export into the Islamic world did. I wondered what the late Frank Howes of the late Times would have said.
So Bruckner's solemn weight, at least. makes itself felt across musical frontiers — perhaps, in a clear sense, especially across the more recent frontiers of Western musical sophistication, whose allegiance to complication, to problems, has deepened in proportion as Bruckner's kind of belief — no, the metaphysical knowledge of a man who could simply dedicate a symphony `to my dear God' — has shallowed. Let us not forget that the case of Bruckner started with the torn Mahler himself, who mistook , Bruckner's lack of complications for an absence of complexity, and hence considered him 'half genius, half fool': he might have remembered that his beloved Parsifal. 'the pure fool', was in advance of complications, not lagging behind them.
Bruckner never used any church bells in his music. The complicated Jew Schoenberg did — in the last piano piece of his Op.19, to commemorate the death of Mahler. Bruckner himself was able to commemorate the death of Wagner without the help of extra-musical associations, purely symphonically. But had I had to write an essay on Schoenberg's piano music, the Dormition Church bells opposite would never have bothered to offer their help: their symbolism depends on an unreserved naivety Schoenberg was incapable of. Which was why his own attitude to Bruckner was ambivalent or. at least. ambiguous. True, there is a highly complimentary analysis of the theme of the Seventh in Style and Idea — a book whose very hostility towards undisturbed repetitions and sequences gives one an inkling of what he must have thought of certain transitions and developments in the Bruckner symphonies. Not that we need that inkling: the Schoenberg school has made the master's private view of Bruckner abundantly clear. For example. I well remember an Austrian Schoenberg pupil's horrification at the publication (1949) of the latest 'original version' of the Ninth Symphony: 'What. have they discovered a still longer version?' (Yes, unfinished as the work is. the three movements now play for an hour.) Bruckner's unpopularity amongst English critics, then, had drawn a veil over the nature of the case: the primary problem never was his exportability from Austria, but his all too gradual exportability from naivety into the disintegrated souls of our culture — who admire art that worries about integration: 'unity' is the characteristic aesthetic concept of our time, and our time only. Now, what is the opposite of Bruck ner's or for that matter. Mozart's — naivety? Beethoven's or Mahler's or Schoenberg's whatever-you-call-it: there is no word for it, which is why Friedrich Schiller, chiefly known to the English-speaking world by a mistranslation of his 'Ode to Joy', invented one — which has not, alas, penetrated his or any other language.
Even those who know Schiller as an outstanding poet and playwright. however, are not often aware of his importance as a post-Kantian philosopher — and a preFreudian psychologist to boot. His treatise On Naive and Sentimentalic Poetry contains, in its title as well as its central substance, the neologism (sentimentalisch) we need: the 'naive' artist is nature's — including super-nature's — mouthpiece. whereas the 'sentimentalic' artist is a perpetual striver, in search of lost nature. Although music is never mentioned in his discourse. Schiller's differentiation and polarisation immediately explain the case of Bruckner, i.e. the problem in the ear of our age's `sentimentalic' beholder — without remainder.
What has to be added nevertheless is that naturally; the 'naive* composer is not overconcerned with the development of his music in either the technical or the general sense (no, not Mozart either): he has no need to search and strive. It is Bruckner's themes, therefore, that show his inspiration at its most characteristic, not his developments: there simply is no greater inventor of themes, hardly any genius as sublime in this creative field. Nor is it only the slow-moving themes that are incomparable: as we listen to the — unselfconsciously daring — theme of the Ninth's scherzo, for instance, we realise, with a healthy shock, that Schoenberg's unity of musical space, which is the identity of the vertical and the horizontal dimen sion, has here been realised to a radically innovatory extent — totally to begin with. But then, the 'naive' artist does not struggle for his innovations— and so we don't have to struggle to hear them.
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