Luogo e data di registrazione		Alte Oper, Frankfurt (Germania) - ottobre 1987 (5) & settembre 1986 (Finale 9)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Jeinz Henke - Wolfgang Mohr - Hans Bernhard Bätzing / Michael Brammann - Detlef Kittler (HR)
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Teldec - 8.35785 ZA - (2 CD's) - durata 48' 19" | 43' 20" - (p) 1988 - DDD
	Note		Coproduktion mit dem HR, Franfurt/Main.

Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony, of which only one version exists, is probably to be seen as a résumé of his second period of composition, which ended with symphonies nos. 1 - 4. These years from 1868 to 1876 (Bruckner completed the first written version of the Fifth on 16th May 1876) were marked by the march through the institutions of bourgeois Vienna and the struggle for a teaching post at Vienna University, which culminated in Bruckner’s initially being awarded an “unpaid temporary position to teach harmony and counterpoint”. Eduard Hanslick, the faculty member responsible, has been forced into the role of villain of the story in Bruckner literature, but today, when we know all the circumstances, he has been rehabilitated: even today, it would not be possible to create a Professorship for Composition at the university. There can be no doubt that the Fifth Symphony as a whole makes reference to Anton Bruckner’s personal situation, It “differs from the author’s other symphonies in its almost obbligato polyphonic style and an exceptional wealth of contrapuntal art”, as Josef Schalk observed in the concert program of 20th April 1887. Schalk and one Professor Zottmann played the work, which did not receive its orchestral premiere until 1894 in Graz, on two pianos - a venture that, if one is to believe contemporary accounts, did no great credit to its participants. “Bruckner gave Schalk and Zottmann a dreadful time”, according to the diary of Friedrich Klose. Yet the musical concept is perfectly clear. The main model is Beethoven’s Ninth, which in the finale leads to the most obvious analogy to a historic work that Bruckner ever produced. The themes of the preceding movements of the symphony are cited according to Beethoven’s own scheme. This constructivistic model also applies to the choice of themes. The second theme of the first movement is the basic structure that is taken up again in the subjekt of the adagio as well as in the liberal thematic parallels of the scherzo. The theme of the finale, which is continued in the fugal subject, likewise comes from the same design. The conclusion of the symphony with its resumption of the main subject must be seen as an equally clear reference to the constructivistic unity. The treatment ofthe tremolo within the framework of the Fifth Symphony is also resumptive in nature. It not only alludes to the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth (with a downward jump of a fifth), but also presents every different form of the tremolo developed in the symphonies so far: the symphonic-dramatic tremolo of the First Symphony and the development tremolo of the Third, the echo tremolo of the Second and the formative tremolo of the Fourth Symphony. Bruckner’s varying timbre tremolo, a pendant to the organ’s tremolo stop, even makes a thematic contribution in the first movement, where a new timbre is required, after the numerous attemps to forge a theme, to constitute the main subject. Just as the tempo relation adagio-allegro points clearly to the model of Viennese Classicism right at the beginning of the first movement, the finale is almost metrically struct ured, despite its colossal length and the fugue on four themes. The key number is the 30 bars of the introduction, and every section that follows opens with a multiple thereof: logical balance as the heir of Classical order. It is quite possible that this formal strictness and deliberate look back to earlier models have something to do with the problem of Bruckner’s academic career at the university and with the subjects that he had to teach. One can imagine that Bruckner, driven by the idea of teaching counterpoint, now wanted to prove to himself and the rest of the world what he was capable of in this field. He does this ’in modo antico’, which may have been a result of his understanding of the academic world and perhaps of the academic reality of Vienna University. Offended by the rejections that were actually well substantiated in formal terms, Bruckner may not have realised that in the art historian Rudolf von Eitelberger and the Professor for the “History and Aesthetics of Music”, Eduard Hanslick, he had partners who were very much his equals. But the composer did know to whom thanks was due for his first position: Kard Edler von Tremayr, the Minister of Arts and Education at the time. It was to him that Bruckner dedicated the Fifth Symphony. The unfinisched finale of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony seems to exercise a strong attraction on musicologists and conductors alike: since Alfred Orel’s publication of the sketches in 1934, no less than six attempts have been made to present the symphony’s conclusing fragment, or its reconstruction, to the public. This pursuit of the missing finale began in 1940, when Hans Weisbach wanted to give the fragment, orchestrated by Fritz Oeser, its first performance in Leipzig. Eight years later, Hans Ferdinand Redlich and Robert Simpson completed a piano transcription of the Ninth Symphony. The Austrian conductor Ernst Maerzendorfer attempted a reconstruction in 1969, and in 1974 Hans Hubert Schönzeler presented his instrumentation of the fragment in London. At the beginning of the 1970s, the Italian musicologists Neill and Gastaldi had tried to make something of Bruckner’s sketches, while Peter Ruzicka accompanied his 1977 Berlin radio production with a detailed commentary. The most recent attempt was made between 1983 and 1985 by the Italian musicologists Nicola Samale and Giuseppe Mazzuca, who claim that the result of their research not only reproduces the finale of the symphony in the composer’s spirit, but that it may well correspond for the most part to Bruckner’s intended instrumentation. Samale and Mazzuca took as the basis for their work all the scores, both vocal and instrumental, that Bruckner completed in the last 12 - 15 years of his life, the sketches of the last movement that were deciphered and published by Alfred Orel in 1934, and the surviving sketches of the Ninth Symphony’s three finished movements, which were likewise published by Orel. Where Orel had already tried to arrange Bruckner’s drafts and sketches so that at least the intended structure of the last movement could be made out, Samale and Mazzuca placed their bets on the establishment of an analogy method. Their comparison of the sketches and the finished score for the first three movements was dictated first and foremost by their search for an analogical principle. Accordingly, they had to make use of nearly all the sketchbook pages, unlike Orel, and, straitjacketed by their analogy method, were obliged to arrive at some kind of blueprint plan for the whole work. This means that in Samale and Mazzuca’s reconstruction, the whole fourth movement is 707 bars long: 180 bars of complete drafted score from Bruckner’s hand, 260 bars of unfinished draft (string parts and important wind motifs), 120 bars of sketches up to the end of the reprise and 34 bars of sketches to the development epilogue. This leaves 113 bars of freely added material; for the coda, the two musicologists considered giving a central role to the ostinato motif from the Te Deum that appears at the end of the exposition. As always with attempts to complete or reconstruct music - this is often the case with the editing of source material in manuscript form, too - it is possible to conduct a bar-by-bar investigation, arriving at different results and thus initiating those far-ranging discussions that have become a ritual feature of nearly every complete edition and its practical realisation. Another approach, however, is to pose fundamental questions of principle, to consider whether reconstruction is justified at all. A clear dividing-line can then be drawn between completion and consenvation, as is done in the restoration of old paintings or sculptures. Samale and Mazzuca decided in favour of completion, and - if one reads the introduction to their “Completamento del finale” carefully - have produced thoroughly sensible arguments for their work: sensible in terms of harmonics and part-writing, and relatively logical for the expert on 19th century composing theory. One aspect they neglected, though, was the special nature of the composer Anton Bruckner. Bruckner’s musical lot was not an easy one, and this gave rise to the controversy surrounding the different versions that has continued to the present day. The difficulties were spawned by the composer’s neurotic desire for stylistic perfection. This can be traced at least in part back to three basic factors: Firstly, he was not able to start composing as he wanted until the age of 40. Secondly, he wanted to hold his own alongside the leading composers of his time - he longed to equal the musical authorities of Vienna, and was haunted by Bayreuth and the twin geniuses Wagner and Liszt. Last of all, there was his desire to mould his improvisatory, organ-derived musical thinking into a valid form that would satisfy his own exacting standards and bring applause from concert audiences. The result of this neurotic attitude was the continual correction and improvement of works he had already finished, and of course the dilemma of the different versions, whose relative merits are still a source of argument for musicologists and music-lovers alike. Quite unlike Süßmayr’s completion ofthe Mozart Requiem, for instance, there is no inherent logic that can be followed through in Bruckner’s works. This logic, in the sense of musicological causality, has already proved a failure so far with the versions completed by Bruckner himself and forces the serious music researcher to consider only what came from Buckner’s own pen, rigorously disregarding every other addition and alteration. For Bruckner’s compositional thinking may have been all-embracing in the sense of projecting an idea, but he did not think in detailed structural terms, as Mozart did. Thus for Bruckner the writing process was in the final event the moment in which the music was created, crossing-out or glueing-over represented its erasure, as if the notes now replaced had not existed, and the periodic counting which is repeatedly mentioned was a kind of final check after fixing. A far cry from Brahms and probably from Mahler too, this kind of work construction eludes the application of a progressive, inherent logic - unless of course the composer’s own hand creates with the writing-down of his ideas the causality that the researcher or interpreter subsequently feels to be ’Brucknerian logic’. In this connection, it is striking that, despite the discrepancies between Bruckner’s first and second versions, this Brucknerian logic seems to be quite comprehensible in each case, although completely different results are achieved with almost the same material. Thus, it has to be stated that - irrespective of whether completion is accepted as avalid activity - in Bruckner’s case completions can only reflect the ideas of the individual author. On no account can the author claim to have reconstructed Bruckner’s actual ideas. Accordingly, Alfred Orel was without a doubt right in not daring to arrange the existing sketches in a finale, definitive order. The fact that the sketches were published certainly represented a challenge to musicologists to ’set to Work’ on them. But Bruckner himself would with equal certainty not have agreed to their publication, since, quite unlike some other composers, he accepted only what he had personally put to paper - and had given a specific designation - as the expression of his artistic intent. Manfred Wagner Translation: Clive R. Williams