The Bruckner effect

The lady behind me on Kensington Gore clearly felt that she owed her friend an apology: ‘It’s Bruckner. I don’t know how that happened.’ I felt for her. ‘It’s Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdam Phil,’ I’d told a succession of my own musical friends. They’d seemed interested. Since the youngish Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin took over at the New York Metropolitan Opera, he’s vaulted on to the A-list, and while the Rotterdam Philharmonic isn’t a super-orchestra, exactly, people do dimly recall that it was conducted by Valery Gergiev, back when that was still something to boast about. So, the inevitable question: what are they playing? And with one word — Bruckner — the shutters slammed down. I was going to this one alone.

It’s genuinely odd, the effect Bruckner has on some music-lovers — even hardcore Germanophiles who collect Gurrelieders like they’re Pokémon cards, and argue in all seriousness that no, you really can’t have too much Mahler. You either feel that Bruckner wrote the profoundest symphonies since Beethoven, or that it’s all just blunt inarticulate noise and unbearably long, to boot. Any middle ground is vanishingly rare. It’s as if Bruckner generates a sort of cognitive dissonance: that a symphonist can simultaneously be as tender as Schubert and as oceanic as Wagner. Does not compute. And yet there are pieces by Bruckner — the Seventh Symphony, the String Quintet — that flood the heart with their very first notes.

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The Fourth (Romantic) Symphony is almost an entry-level example. Out of silence, shimmering violins open up limitless vistas: a solo horn calls yearningly in the distance. ‘At no time ought it to have been possible not to recognise that the opening of the Romantic Symphony is a thing of extraordinary beauty and depth,’ wrote Donald Tovey back in the 1930s, to which I can only respond: yes, a hundred times yes.