Symphony No. 7 in E major

Bruckner's Seventh Symphony begins with an almost endless, elongated, spacious melody, which spreads out in waves and lights up the entire orchestra. Under the silver lining of the feverish tremolos in the violins, the cellos enter, first together with the solo horn, then with the violas, finally with the first clarinet, the melody is almost imperceptibly recoloured and toned down, alternating between sonorous, bronze, pale, glowing tones, in ever new mixtures. If you want to get to the bottom of the mysticism of Bruckner's symphony, all you have to do is listen to this beginning, which marks the dawn of a different time, a different measure of time.

In the (by his standards) short finale of the Seventh, on the other hand, Anton Bruckner places a lively, jaunty theme at the top, catchy and almost whistling along. However, hardly anyone would think on first hearing that it is more or less the same sequence of notes as at the beginning of the symphony, only differently orchestrated, rhythmised, shortened and accelerated: two faces of the same musical personality. Onlyattheveryend,inthelastninebars,doesBrucknerrevealthesecretofhisthematicmetamorphosiswhenhetransformstherousingdescendantbackintothesolemnoriginalformofthebeginning.But this metaphysical relationship also betrays an abysmal side, the desire to turn something into its outright opposite. In the Seventh, the play with reflections, inversions and countermovements can be found in every nook and cranny: The Romantics have always had a penchant for doppelgangers, tilting figures and shadow images, even in music.

At the Leipzig premiere conducted by Arthur Nikisch on 30 December 1884, Bruckner's Seventh was the last item on the programme before the interval and took centre stage in a purely ‘New German’ concert between Franz Liszt's Les Préludes and Réminiscences de Don Juan, alternating with excerpts from Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung. The so-called ‘New German School’ was a progressive music movement led by composers such as Liszt and Wagner. One reviewer promptly sensed echoes of Wagner's works everywhere in Bruckner's symphony and spread the ugly suspicion of imitation. Even today, this symphony is cross-referenced with various Wagner operas: If you want, you can hear the Rheingold prelude from the end of the first movement, Siegfried's funeral march in the Adagio, the Ride of the Valkyries in the Scherzo or Parsifal from beginning to end. These elective affinities are difficult to ignore, as Bruckner himself wrote a confession to Wagner into his symphony when he explicitly referred to Richard Wagner's death in Venice on 13 February 1883 in what he called the ‘funeral music’, the farewell at the end of the Adagio. And the composer subsequently added four ‘Wagner tubas’ to the score, a special instrument played by the horn players, a hybrid of horn and tuba, so to speak, as the deceased namesake had intended for his Ring des Nibelungen.

The day after the Munich premiere of the Seventh in March 1885, the conductor Hermann Levi invited the composer to a performance of Richard Wagner's Walküre at the National Theatre. At midnight, when the hall had long since emptied, Bruckner was still the exclusive guest of honour in the opera house, as was usually the case with the Bavarian King Ludwig II, Wagner's great admirer and mentor and the dedicatee of the Seventh Symphony. And the orchestra played the ‘funeral music’ from the slow movement only for Bruckner. ‘Gentlemen,’ said Levi to his musicians: ’In this house we have often played masterpieces in front of the King alone. We have a prince among us in the realm of sound. I ask you to play another part of the Adagio of his symphony for him.’