"I couldn't avoid Bruckner," Nikolaus Harnoncourt admits. To a musician schooled in the figures of Baroque rhetoric and small-scale form, Bruckner's massive symphonies long resisted all attempts on his part to engage with them on an active level. Only in the wake of his interest in Brahms's symphonies did Bruckner - that "fantastic composer" - take root in his awareness, as though of his own accord, "like some huge weed". Following his recording of the Third Symphony, which critics hailed as the dawn of a new era in Bruckner interpretation, Harnoncourt has now recorded the Fourth, again with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, an orchestra that can point to a particularly tenacious Brucknerian tradition but which remains sufficiently inquisitive and flexible to accommodate Harnoncourt's fresh approach.
Harnoncourt’s picture of Bruckner rests on deeper insights into the composers enigmatic personality. "People always think of him as God's organist sitting in church and playing the organ. And that’s how he handles the orchestra. That's how we’ve all learnt to see him. And then you get these remarkable scherzo elements, even in his outer movements, and then it turns out that, as a young man, he was a keen dance musician - what the Austrians call a 'Bratlgeiger', in other words, someone who plays the violin in taverns. He must have been a good violinist. This helps me a lot in performing his works. His music has a great deal of physicality to it, in the sense of rhythmic movement."
Bruckner's creative confrontation with Wagner is important not only for his Third Symphony, with its explicit dedication, but also for his Fourth, the "Romantic". "What sparked this symphony was the experience of Lohengrin. For Bruckner, this was the epitome of Romanticism in music. It must have been an incredible experience for him, musically. Yet, God-fearing dogmatist that he was, he was really the typical anti-Wagnerian. The way in which he fell under the spell of Wagner's music reminds me of Tännhauser succumbing to Venus. To be carried away by Wagner in this way was tantamount to a sin for Bruckner. I have the impression that he thought he then had to go and confess his sins."
From this point of view, the second movement of the Fourth Symphony, which Bruckner himself described as a "pilgrims' nocturnal march", can certainly be interpreted as a form of penitential pilgrimage: “It speaks of infinite sadness. I can well imagine that repentance plays a major role here."
In daily life, Bruckner was a simple-minded petit bourgeois and grovelling opportunist, in his art a bold innovator who transcended traditional bounds as though it was the most natural thing in the world, a composer who, in Harnoncourt’s words, was like a meteor in the history of music, a strange piece of lunar rock on the road from Schubert to Berg.
It is, above all, this irreconcilable conflict within Bruckner's personality and the resultant hidden depths that Harnoncourt wants to bring out in his interpretation. "I'm always being asked how religious one has to be to play Bruckner`s music. I don't think it matters. He was a very religious man, but in his art he must have felt like someone who was always doing what was forbidden. That suggests that he was not bound by dogma. Although he would write down how many rosaries he said each day, the sins he committed in his music are so black when judged by the standards of his religious faith that, strictly speaking. he would always have to be praying for forgiveness."
This sense of inner discord also characterises Bruckner’s approach to his own works: "His obsequious tendency to let his interpreters have their own way is well known, of course. Whenever anyone wanted to perform any of his symphonies, he agreed to all their suggestions for changing it. A symphony had barely to be criticised for him to set about reworking it. But what was to be handed down to posterity he kept locked away in his library. He was completely unwavering in terms of what, as an artist, he felt to be uniquely and ultimately correct. I think it's fairly easy to see what prompted these revisions and whether they are of artistic merit or merely of practical value."
Bruclner spent no fewer than fifteen years, from 1874 to 1889, working on his Fourth Symphony, in some cases making such farreaching changes that the result is another, far more advanced piece. Harnoncourt, who recalls some bizarre adaptations from his days as an orchestral musician, considers the second version of 1878-80, on which the present recording is based, to be utterly convincing, even though he is also interested in the first version.
"I can`t say that I prefer one version to the other. Each is of great merit, so that you can’t play off one of them against the other. As a rule, the first version is the most progressive and almost always the most difficult to digest and play - technically and rhythmically, above all for the violins. So I also have to take account of the rehearsal situation."
Harnoncourt long ago revised his earlier view that Bruckner's music had nothing to say in terms of musical discourse: "There’s a lot of dialogue in this music. It’s surprising to what extent it is permeated with questions and with answers that are always sceptical, never unambiguous. Questioning figures, figures of affirmation, gestures of entreaty - this is a musical vocabulary that has grown up over the centuries and that every great composer has at his disposal. Gestures of consolation are very often found in Bruckner, and they are also extremely necessary, since time and again he creates the most terrible scandals that would otherwise be intolerable. And his vast blocks of sound are, of course, also meant to be dialectical." Even the "slowness" of Bruckner’s music that is often quoted in this context acquires a new dimension in this interpretation. For Harnoncourt, it is synonymous with "spaciousness: a lot of things need time to develop. I don’t find Bruckner's music slow, only that it is sometimes played too slowly."
The tempo markings, with their constant modifications and ambiguous references to earlier points in the score are bound to be a puzzle to every conscientious performer (and may perhaps be analysed as examples of schizophrenia). Harnoncourt has examined this question in detail and sees these tempi as part of a system that has allowed him to uncover a whole host of microstructures: "I can see that it's organised along highly sophisticated lines. And these microstructures acquire a specific meaning when they are repeated at the relevant point and thereby produce a sense of architectural form."
In this way, Harnoncourt has come to a clearer understanding of Bruckner's compositional method: "I think that, for him, it was the second stage in composing. First there was the basic idea, which was then put in order. Then the periodisation of the figures was precisely fixed, a bar omitted or another added. The result is a very clear sense of order and periodicity."
A particularly tricky question in performing Bruckner's music has been convincingly solved by Harnoncourt with the help of the Concertgebouw players: "The brass here is really a big problem. The woodwind choir - flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon - is supposed to be able to hold its own in the face of the battery of three trumpets, four horns, three trombones and tuba. With modern instruments this is completely impossible."
When performing the Third Symphony, the Concertgebouw horns had already agreed to forgo the use of modern instruments and to use the simple horns that Bruckner himself had in his minds ear when writing this work. To these were added trumpets with rotary valves and trornbones with the narrowest possible bore, thereby ensuring that even in the loudest passages the dominant impression was still one of transparency and tonal beauty.
The sense of power inherent in this music is not impaired by this. Into his copy of the score Nikolaus Harnoncourt has transcribed a remark of Bruckner`s, copying it out in large letters: “Because the present situation in the world is weaker from a spiritual point of view, I take refuge in strength and write powerful music."