To distant observers, Bruckner’s symphonies can seem like variations on the same monolithic concept, composed by an Austrian Catholic who (depending on who’s talking) either ‘never got off of his knees’ or was ‘a pious revolutionary’. Manfred Honeck, Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, gently but firmly disputes any such reductive ideas of Bruckner, especially with regard to his Seventh Symphony, which unfolds with relatively few of the tortured hammer blows found in his other works, flowing between musical paragraphs with a shifting array of musical influences readily identified by fellow Austrians.

Honeck’s new recording of the symphony (paired with Mason Bates’s Resurrexit) is the latest in a series of Bruckner albums that are part of his lifelong commitment to a composer with whom he shares nationality and religion but whose music is as hard to explicate and discuss as late Beethoven. While intuitively pinpointing music details that are connected to the composer’s inner and outer lives, Honeck readily risks being told he’s wrong. Better to be wrong than non-committal, he says. Honeck comes to these works not only from playing them during his decade as a Vienna Philharmonic violist but also with knowledge of Austrian folk music. It’s not widely known that he plays the zither.

Bruckner was born near then-provincial Linz, a haven for ideas earthy and ethereal: one motif in the Seventh’s third movement came from a cock crowing outside his window. The searching opening melody came to him from longtime colleague Ignaz Dorn in a dream in which Dorn played it on the viola and promised Bruckner success with it. More significant is that Bruckner’s adult life was spent in Vienna, then the centre of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the kind of musical crossroads reflected in what Honeck finds in the symphony’s details. Honeck hears madrigals, Hungarian dance, possibly yodelling and more – suggesting that the composer had kinship with later world-embracing symphonies of Mahler (a Bruckner student).

‘When Bruckner is played only one way, you miss so many other things,’ Honeck says. ‘Bruckner was highly regarded as an organist, so it’s said that everything must sound like an organ. He was a professor, so he must sound very disciplined, with a lot of counterpoint. He was very religious, so everything sounds spiritual. I think this is wrong. A mission of mine is to show Bruckner as a whole, as a man who loves to eat, dance, pray, and loves being a professor – to spread the full spectrum of his music.’

Whether or not Bruckner can be called an eccentric, he definitely wasn’t a mainstream person, but he was not about to apologise for it, even stopping composition classes to pray. ‘He was true to himself,’ says Honeck. ‘He didn’t care what people thought.’

Discovering the multiplicity of his influences begins amid ongoing disagreement as to what notes belong on the page. Among the composer’s many revisions, one can’t always determine if he was discovering a better idea or succumbing to opinions of well-meaning friends. Heeding the exact letter of the score was less common in Bruckner’s time. Some conductors made changes without asking. Numerous performance elements (rubato, tempo flexibility) were common enough that Bruckner didn’t think to write them into a score the way Mahler later did. As a rule of thumb, Honeck adheres to the composer’s final thoughts, specifically in Leopold Nowak’s 1954 edition, which, among other things, includes a second-movement cymbal crash (bar 177, 17'53") that scholars argue is the product of peer pressure, and is perhaps uncharacteristically vulgar. Honeck defends the cymbals: ‘It’s a release from darkness into light … His final decision was to go with it.’

Much of our conversation on Zoom covers the same ground as Honeck’s extensive booklet notes that cite specific bar numbers and timings for details that can go by in a flash. Bruckner subsumed his many influences so completely that they blend in with the music’s core. Example: in the first movement, a flute motif at bar 171 (8'01") that could be passed over as a merely constructive element is, to Honeck, an echo of dance. Bar 221 (10'52") is where Honeck hears a Hungarian accent – and gets his musicians to play the music with accents suggesting that.

On to a weightier element, Honeck likes to quiz musicians about why Bruckner didn’t introduce the timpani until bar 391 (18'18"), ‘Nobody can give me an answer,’ he says. That’s where Bruckner’s and Honeck’s Catholicism come together, as the conductor gives his own interpretation of this part of the score. Beginning with the timpani, Bruckner begins his own enactment of the Mass at its most sacred. ‘The centre of the Catholic Mass is the Eucharist, the moment when the priest holds the bread and moves it slowly up and then down – very celebratory but very solemn. We have to know that every phrase that Bruckner composes has a special meaning here.’ Even for those not currently engaged in Catholic rituals, Honeck’s interpretation of the musical events seems so obvious that after listening to what he has to say on the matter, can one hear it any other way?

The big revelation of the second movement comes with knowing that Bruckner had already sketched his Te Deum when he was writing it and that the death of his idol Wagner coincided with its creation. Thus, he quotes the Te Deum music that he wrote to the Latin text that translates as ‘Let me never be confounded’. Honeck hears that music as early as bar 4 and in numerous later instances. Other ears may hear the conspicuous modulations into C major – one at bar 177, 17'53" – as ecstatic; but in the lamenting progression of the movement, Honeck hears hope and triumph. Chorales are a frequent presence in Bruckner symphonies, but perhaps the most famous is the one here at bar 184 (18'55"), the so-called Wagner memorial chorale, which comes to an aching triple-forte climax when Wagnerian tubas are joined by French horns. Here, Honeck quotes Bruckner: ‘In memory of my unattainable ideal in that bitter time of mourning.’

Though some listeners could hear much of the third movement as hunting music, Honeck hears folk-influenced dance – the double-dotted rhythms have a particular spirited bounce. He also hears bird motifs at many turns, though one has to listen or observe closely (bars 165-84, 2'14" to 2'31") to hear what he means when he talks about the rooster crow being passed among various wind instruments.

In the final movement, the different worlds in which Bruckner lived – sacred, secular; country, city; past, present – seem to come together. For example, Honeck calls the sudden shift in both dynamics and manner at bar 35 (1'06") a reference to the madrigals the composer would have heard in church services.

In performance, Honeck’s Bruckner has a readily identifiable demeanor. Germanic music in general requires space, he says. More specifically Viennese are the relatively soft edges in his performances: ‘When I was a viola student, my teacher always told me, “Don’t hurt the instrument.” When I played a strong attack, my teacher would say, “No, no, no, Mr Honeck. You have to play your instrument the way you would treat your wife.” The idea was to make the sound round and full.’ In keeping with the manner of the Viennese spoken dialect, perhaps? Many musicians learn the fine points of a musical language from its associated spoken language – so it is with Honeck: ‘The Viennese mentality is a bit more smooth.’

Such are the kinds of things that Honeck thinks about when trying to capture what Bruckner might have expected to hear in his music – the elements he didn’t write into his scores. He believes that technical accuracy, often emphasised in Bruckner performances during the 1950s and ’60s, is not the answer.

Never the revisionist, never the radical, Honeck characterises himself as someone who enables the telling of great, grand stories – as witnessed by the Mahler and Strauss pieces in his Pittsburgh discography. Bruckner’s story was especially blemished during the Scond World War when Third Reich officials tried to co-opt Bruckner as embodying their ideals. Plans were afoot to turn Linz into a Brucknerian counterpart to Bayreuth. With the politicisation of organised religion in more recent years, Honeck believes it’s important to point out that Bruckner’s religiosity was deeply personal – and not susceptible to evolving religious doctrine. Solid on the inside, steeped in tradition but always transcending it, too open to suggestions and a highly sociable loner, Bruckner and his sensibility may always be elusive. ‘You have to search,’ says Honeck. ‘It takes a long time. It has for me.’

This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today