Bruckner:
Symphony No. 4 in E-flat Major (Romantic)

Bruckner moved to Vienna, from provincial Linz, in 1868, but his professional fortunes there improved only slowly and despite many setbacks. Forced to earn a living as a teacher and organist, he grew bitter and depressed, yet still composed prolifically, defiantly. Between 1871 and 1876, he completed the original versions of his Second through Fifth Symphonies, the Fourth between January and November of 1874.

Constitutionally plagued by self-doubts, Bruckner subjected all of his symphonies to various stages of sometimes drastic revision — even allowed others to revise them — in the hope of making them palatable to the public. In 1878, he replaced the Scherzo of the Fourth with a new one, and revised the other movements; in 1879-80, he wrote an entirely new finale. At the première, on February 20, 1881, with Hans Richter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, the public was enthusiastic but musicians and critics were divided. So in 1888, Bruckner revised the score again, and he approved the publication in 1889, of a version edited by his student Ferdinand Löwe.

Bruckner never explained his subtitle Romantic, though hinted that the Fourth was programmatic. In the first movement, he wrote, the quiet horn fanfare in the opening bars “announces daybreak”, while a later theme alludes to the “song of the titmouse”. The Scherzo, he added, “portrays the hunt” (with its 6/8 metre and horn sonorities, it does conjure up traditional hunting music). He seems to evoke Nature imagery at various points in the Fourth — in particular, the primeval central-European forests whose darkness, power, and mystery inspired many Romantic artists.

Typically of a Bruckner symphony, the Fourth is monumental and solemn, often coming across as mystical, religious, elemental, and the music offers an original, potent synthesis of traditional forms and the avant-garde idiom of Wagner’s operas. Also typically, it has four movements indebted to Beethoven’s Ninth: spacious, highly dramatic outer movements; a long, intense slow movement with two main themes; a fiercely energetic Scherzo. The influence of the Ninth is unmistakable already in the opening bars, in which motifs emerge gradually out of a hushed, mysterious shimmer of strings and build to a fortissimo statement from the full orchestra. There is a wealth of incident in the first movement, which unfolds organically, often in great blocks, passages of mounting tension leading to explosive climaxes followed by plains of repose. The outlines of Classical sonata form are apparent, albeit projected onto a vast time scale and made to serve idiosyncratic expressive and dramatic ends. Bruckner’s distinctive scoring tends to be massive, organlike, though he requires only a conventional, not particularly large orchestra.

Bruckner had no qualms about taking up time — even his fast movements have a determined, leisurely pace — so it is no surprise that he seems most at home in slow movements. In the Andante of the Fourth, two melancholy themes are set out at length, separated by a long transition that includes a sort of chorale for strings — and this whole complex is reprised (in tightened, varied form) in the latter part of the movement. The highpoints come in the middle and near the end, in heroic restatements of the first theme, though the movement ends quietly. This is music of great psychological and emotional complexity, even if Bruckner’s description of it was curiously telegraphic: “song, prayer, serenade”.

The triumphal Scherzo is in a straightforward minuet-and-trio form: the opening section is repeated following a short contrasting episode. This central Trio, an amiable, stylized Ländler (a moderately paced Austrian country dance), is one of Bruckner’s loveliest concoctions. He enhances the pastoral effect with rustic drones in the strings, and, in his written account of the Trio, offered the image of a hurdy-gurdy playing a dance tune for hunters gathered in the woods for their midday meal.

Bruckner struggled mightily to forge an appropriate finale for this work, and defended the result as “the best and most outstanding movement”. The procession of strongly contrasting episodes here seems bewildering at first, but logic gradually emerges: Bruckner seems to be conjuring up music we have heard in the previous movements. This is a cumulative finale, a summing up of what has gone before and so its magnificent, blazing coda is the point of culmination, of resolution, of transcendence for the whole Fourth Symphony. Indeed, this coda, which plays out in miniature a drama that begins in mystery and ends in glory, might be heard as a microcosm of the very work it crowns.

Liner note by Kevin Bazzana (TSO, April 2008)