A final essay from the Musikfest Berlin concerts I attended in September: Sofia Gubaidulina, Bruckner, and Hans Werner Henze, with a coda on Rudi Dutschke, bricks, and windows. Preview below, and full post on Substack.
In his book Strung out with Elgar on a Hill, the poet Jonathan Williams writes:
thinking of Anton Bruckner,
the Master of Sentences,
an old man in Wien,
absolutely alone,
alone his whole bleeding life
The poem ends:
heaven in his heavy heart,
loins locked apart by heavenly art . . .later
he became Hitler’s favorite composer
The ninth has no finale. When Bruckner died, an old man housed in the imperial palace, hangers-on came into his rooms and took what they wanted, so that half the sketches he’d made for the finale vanished. The work becomes modernist by accident as much as by design. Bruckner had apparently planned to use a Te Deum or a fugal, triumphant conclusion. Instead, we have the adagio’s enormous chordal dissonance and a tranquil coda that seems more like an apology for that explosion which has taken us out of the music than a real resolution. An end that is no end. Without the finale, the work is unbalanced, the four-movement symphonic mirror now a kind of broken arch or arc or tower, a bridge that fails to reach the other side of the river but hangs there in space, over the waters. Bruckner’s beginning before the beginning makes a mockery of the idea of fundamental origins, just as the missing finale prevents finished consummation or ending, those twin fantasies of Nazism. Yet that open space is filled in by Bruckner’s fascist appropriation, blasting out over the radio in fascist triumph or fascist mourning.
When I leave the concert, I find out that the Alternative für Deutschland won 44% of the vote on a high voter turnout in Saxon-Anhalt and are posed to become the far first right extremist party in government in Germany since the Nazis. Reading the news on my phone on the way back, everything retrospectively sours. On German radio, Mayday 1945, Wagner blasted out, periodically interrupted by announcements of Achtung, fanfares, drum rolls. Gotterdämmerung, Rheingold, and then the slow movement of Bruckner’s Seventh, immediately preceding the announcement of Hitler’s death. Funeral music for fascism, appropriated by fascists: Hitler who wanted to establish a Bruckner festival to rival Bayreuth, for whom Bruckner’s music raised an Austrian nostalgia, who heard in it stodginess and enforced unity rather than its wild edges. So what, then, did it mean to listen to that music then and what does it mean to listen to it now?
No comments:
Post a Comment