February 14, 1875, was the date meticulously appended by Bruckner to the oboe melody, with ground-bass accompaniment, that marked the start of his work on what became the Fifth Symphony. Not that the melody itself carries any erotic charge, such as we might discern in the Adagio themes of the Seventh and Eighth. It is a melancholy thing, an Austrian counterpart to the shepherd’s lonely piping to open the ‘Scène aux champs’ in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique of 1830.

As well it might be. Aged 51, the composer had been living in Vienna for seven years. He had become a celebrity in London, filling the Royal Albert Hall and the Crystal Palace in 1871 with a series of organ recitals, but at home he was still scratching around for private keyboard pupils while unsuccessfully applying for low-level teaching posts at Viennese teaching establishments. He badly needed money.

The day before composing that initial sketch for the Adagio of the Fifth, he wrote to a friend: ‘It is all too late. To run up debts and then to enjoy the fruits of my diligence and lament the stupidity of my move to Vienna in a debtors’ prison – this could be my ultimate fate.’ On completing the symphony’s first draft in May 1876, Bruckner dedicated it to Karl von Stremayr, who as Minister for Education had yielded to the composer’s importuning pleas and opened the door for him to secure a post as teacher of harmony and counterpoint at the University of Vienna.

Finding a pulse

As for the sketch itself: what the eye can see, but the ear cannot always hear, is that the ground bass is written in slow triplets. The time signature is marked ¢, known as alla breve or ‘cut’ common time. Why does this matter? Because Bruckner wants a pulse of two minims rather than four crotchets to a bar. The notion of ‘pulse’ is further complicated by the tension between triple time in the ground bass and duple time in the melody.

In the absence of a metronome mark, what is the conductor to do? In 1981 Herbert von Karajan matches the ground-bass triplets to the slow crotchet beat of the pizzicato quavers that mark out the symphony’s Introduction (headed as such by Bruckner). Two beats become four, and the movement drags. At almost the same tempo, in 1986, Eugen Jochum ties the oboe melody (rather than the accompaniment) to the pulse of the Introduction.

As told to Wolfgang Seifert, Günter Wand puts it like this: ‘If I beat too slowly, I can no longer hear the alla breve. This is really the basis of the entire structure of the movement’s architecture, with its juxtaposed, simultaneous duplet and triplet rhythms. For me, such connections between metre, beat and tempo are the insights on which the whole thing lives, the great symphonic building, the architecture, the spirit of the music, that which lies behind the notes.’

Wand sets a more flowing pulse for the Adagio than Jochum or Karajan, somewhere between the first movement’s Introduction and main Allegro. In 2010 Bernard Haitink brings the Adagio back in alignment with the Introduction, at a pulse that enables the melody to be phrased and felt in a single breath. Some tempo scheme along these lines is the modern orthodoxy.

Much more radical is the solution first adopted by Neeme Järvi in 2009. The Adagio tempo set by Haitink, Wand and others is around minim=60. Järvi, Mario Venzago (2014) and Nikolaus Harnoncourt (2013) will take the unwary Brucknerian by surprise with minim=c72. Quite different in character to his 2004 recording, Harnoncourt now phrases the Adagio in the spirit of a pastorale, and the difference is akin to ‘old’ and ‘new’ Beethoven Ninth Adagios, between (say) Schmidt-Isserstedt and Savall.

Some scepticism at this point is reasonable. Do the finer points of tempo relationships really make such an impression on the listener? There may not be one right way to conduct or hear the Adagio of the Fifth, or the rest of the symphony, but there must be a way that Bruckner felt the music for himself. An appreciation that he wrote the Fifth from the inside out should help us understand it better. The beginning of the Scherzo is simply an accelerated version of the Adagio’s ground bass. In fact, every other melody or germinating motif in the symphony can be traced back to either the oboe melody or the ground bass, too.

So it follows that the tempos of these themes must be as interconnected as their material. More than a wrong note here or there, even more than the particular sound of an orchestra or a recording, it is this overall grasp of form that (I would say) primarily determines the character of the Fifth Symphony in performance. Outlining such formal relationships in different interpretations is necessarily an analytical business, undertaken in much more detail by William Carragan in a 2007 article freely available online.

Body of evidence

Thematic unity on such a scale is unprecedented. Think of the Fourth Symphony of Schumann (1841) and B minor Sonata of Liszt (1853): ambitiously unified pieces in themselves, less than half the length of the Fifth. Bruckner referred to it as his own ‘Fantastic’ Symphony, which as a nickname is more to the point than the ‘Tragic’, the ‘Catholic’, the ‘Symphony of Faith’ – all entirely spurious. Meanwhile, the intra-musical connections between Bruckner and Berlioz remain untapped.

So integrated a form relies on a keen sense of proportion between its elements. The perception of those proportions may be unconscious for the listener (rather than the conductor), but it is there all the same. More than any other Bruckner symphony – more than any other symphony, perhaps – the Fifth has attracted architectural analogies ever since the composer gave his inaugural lecture in his new post. Having compared music to new branches of science, Bruckner talked of breaking down ‘its entire structure into atoms’, thereby forming a new discipline of ‘musical architecture’.

The most insightful of modern architectural blueprints for the Fifth is laid out by Benjamin Zander as a diagram to accompany his 2008 recording. Such analogies have their uses, giving visual shape to a symphonic journey that does not conform to the Romantic archetype of a journey from darkness to light. However, the drawback to the image of the symphony as a cathedral in sound is the impression it leaves of a monumental impassiveness, of a flinty impersonality. Bruckner was the least impassive of creatures.

Performances which privilege majesty and bombast over coherence amplify a sense of quasi-religious abstraction. They may be held at least partially responsible for the Fifth’s reputation, off-putting to some, as ‘peak Bruckner’, the ne plus ultra of a drawn-out rite for the converted. For exemplars in this style, I refer you to Sergiu Celibidache and Lorin Maazel.

Bruckner never heard a full-orchestral performance of the Fifth, but he was present at the Bösendorfersaal in Vienna in 1887, when Joseph Schalk played his own two-piano arrangement of the score with Franz Zottman. Bruckner had been dissatisfied with Schalk – as both arranger and performer – and had insisted on the postponement of the concert, but was mollified by the enthusiastic reception.

Whether or not Schalk and Zottman played the entire symphony, as Bruckner had written it, remains open to question. By the time that Franz Schalk conducted the orchestral premiere of the Fifth, in Graz in 1894, 122 bars of the finale had been cut and the orchestration had been gingered up, not least by adding a battery of extra brass in the coda to the finale.

Rushes of blood

This Schalk version was how the world came to know the Fifth, slowly, during the first half of the last century, and it was how Arnold Bax heard the symphony performed in Dresden in 1906: ‘An army corps of brass instruments, which must have been crouching furtively behind the percussion, arose in their might and weighed in over the top with a chorale, probably intended by the pious composer as an invocation to “Der alte deutsche Gott”.’

A flavour of Bax’s experience comes through in Hans Knappertsbusch’s 1956 Decca recording, cymbals, cuts and all. Kna was no Hitlerite, but the makers of The World at War knew what they were doing when they used the coda from this recording to underscore footage of a pre-war Nazi motorcade. Hitler chose the finale to the Fifth to close out the 1937 party congress in Nuremberg. For him, its triumphal synthesis of fugue and chorale embodied the highest expression of holy German art. We should remember this, and then forget it.

Schalk sacralised his phalanx of brass as the ‘11 Apostles’. Conductors who should have known better, Wand among them, took a while to give up a bad old habit. Irrespective of politics or theatre, the gesture is unmusical because it shouts over the rest of the conversation. Bruckner wrote his counterpoint to be heard, so let’s hear it. As Daniel Harding remarks in an interview for the BPO Digital Concert Hall, the coda is ‘not a military parade but an illumination’.

Wilhelm Furtwängler had given many performances of Nos 4, 7, 8 and 9 before adding the Fifth to his repertoire in 1919. He was among the first conductors to adopt the score as Bruckner had composed it, once Robert Haas’s edition was published in 1935. His two extant live performances reflect the tenor of their time and place. Berlin 1942 is tauter and better played than Vienna 1951 but also more subject to those extreme tempo fluctuations that mark out his wartime interpretations, notably in the rush of blood towards the coda of the finale: thrilling in itself, but more Furtwängler than Bruckner.

At the core of Furtwängler’s reading is a strong feeling for the alla breve pulse of both first and second movements. What he underplays is the Ländler character of the Scherzo’s second subject, which Carl Schuricht also speeds up to waltz tempo. Both conductors set out on the finale’s fugue with an emphatic tread, true to the letter of the score, which risks smudgy ensemble and listener fatigue before long.

Even so, where they succeed is in the steady accumulation of momentum through the entire symphony, so that it does not feel like three preludes to a finale. Otto Klemperer’s 1967 studio recording is an example of the conductor’s late style at its most routine and lethargic. Live in Vienna the following year, four minutes faster overall, Klemperer still pulls sections of the outer movements out of shape with allargandos in places that would never have occurred to Furtwängler, but the bigger picture is always in view.

More open to ebb and flow than Klemperer, less driven by inner demons than Furtwängler, Jascha Horenstein’s live 1971 reading draws on a shared heritage of long lines, but they are shaped with a conversational freshness that feels ahead of its time. Horenstein bides his time through the finale, easing the dancelike second subject into place, never letting the counterpoint sag.

This mastery of transition is even more strongly marked in Eugen Jochum’s final performance of the Fifth. More securely than his earlier recordings, Jochum locks the tempo relationships into place, so that even if the Adagio moves at the slowest possible end of a plausible alla breve, it feels all of a piece. He teases out the inner voices and the sly rustic charm of the Scherzo’s Ländler while taking a diametrically opposed approach to a conductor such as Venzago in the pointing up of local colour, such as the quotations from Mozart’s Requiem in the first two movements. But then Bruckner is an irony-free zone.

Mind over matter

Perhaps in reaction to the Fifth’s forced marriage with Nazi ideology, there arose a classicising approach to the work among post-war German conductors of modernist inclinations. Michael Gielen sounds almost embarrassed by the entry of the chorale in the finale, which is briskly divested of any sacred aura (the irony here is that Goebbels claimed Bruckner as a symphonist whose spirituality ‘frees itself of all ties to the church’). More sympathetic, and better on inner-part detail, is Hans Rosbaud, who brings a proto-Mahlerian, lumpen quality to the Scherzo at the expense of its Schubertian vitality.

It should be possible to hear both Schubert’s Ninth and Mahler’s Sixth in this music. ‘I can hear the village’, said Harnoncourt to Richard Osborne (12/07). ‘If you don’t play it like that, you don’t play Bruckner!’ Stanisław Skrowaczewski strikes a fine balance between these elements, turning the Ländler and Trio with a kind of sturdy charm that tallies with reports of Bruckner when in the mood for dancing. More Schubertian still is Heinz Rögner in probably the most under-appreciated example of this classicising style on record, making elegant distinctions between thematic groups in all four movements, always driving the pulse onwards.

Among a host of modern successors leading second-rank orchestras, Marcus Bosch and Markus Poschner make the most persuasive cases for an anti-monumental Fifth. They point up the correspondence points in the symphony with both ‘Die Nullte’ and the Ninth, underlining the pivotal place of the Fifth within Bruckner’s whole output. What lies beyond their reach is the silky finesse of Viennese or Concertgebouw strings, the deep strength in reserve of the brass in Berlin and Hamburg that set apart the best from the rest.

The sole ‘period’ Fifth so far recorded is a disappointingly tepid and stop-go affair led by Philippe Herreweghe (Harmonia Mundi, 7/09), but in both his recordings with top-tier ensembles, Nikolaus Harnoncourt demonstrates the value of mind over instrumental matter. The proportions of the 2004 VPO recording are precisely calculated along orthodox lines; it’s the unexpected turns of phrase, the attention to specifics of character in one episode after another, that set his finale apart. He ventures further still in Amsterdam nine years later: a truly radical reading, evoking Palestrina one moment, clog-footed country folk the next.

I can’t quite follow where Harnoncourt goes in his dynamic rebalancing of the finale’s coda, but it’s preferable to the anonymously well-upholstered blaze of the Fifth’s homecoming in the hands of Christian Thielemann. ‘The whole symphony seems quite happy’, he says (1/24) – and this is how he conducts it in several versions. He always draws playing of high finish from his orchestras, never less than the latest version in Vienna, linking the notes of the angular opening theme with a seamless legato. An unduly broad alla breve for the Adagio results in a proportionately laboured – or at least more bürgerlich – first movement. Thielemann mirrors the overall durations of Jochum for each movement, without generating comparable momentum through the whole form.

Dental care

My idea of the symphony aligns much more closely to the ideas outlined by Daniel Harding on the Digital Concert Hall, in an interview worth 10 minutes of anyone’s time. ‘You can’t divorce the music from the man,’ he says. ‘Once you think about the story of the piece in the context of who he was, it’s impossible to think of it as something macho and bombastic. When you listen to it that way, it’s less impressive, but more touching.’

The concert film itself shows him almost motionlessly setting the Adagio on its gentle way. His songful phrasing of the second subject is tender and flexible; many of the symphony’s quiet passages are offered up as a private prayer, the antithesis of an echoing cathedral space. He disarmingly compares the rehearsal process for the finale with a visit to the dentist, or a watchmaker’s craft. In this sense, there is more art concealing art to the array of versions led by Barenboim, Haitink and Wand. In each case, they lived with this music for decades, and (as with Jochum, Harnoncourt and others) their readiness to re-examine the piece anew yields fresh insight as well as accumulated wisdom. Experience almost always tells in the Fifth.

All three conductors worked on the symphony with the BPO, but Daniel Barenboim most effectively harnesses the orchestra’s inclination to a corporate sostenuto body of sound, which has survived beyond the Karajan years (the Teldec engineering is also in a class of its own). His Staatskapelle Berlin version comes closer still to Harnoncourt and Harding in a rhythmically buoyant Adagio, drawing out the latent Lohengrin in the score, and he never allows accents or volume to overwhelm the shape of the finale.

Bernard Haitink’s recordings vary a good deal in tempo over the years (broadest and most commensurately self-contented with the VPO), but it’s the contrasting characters of his orchestras that set them apart from each other. Compare the cheeky clarinet solo that introduces the finale’s main theme: neutrally graceful in Amsterdam, honeyed in Vienna, a mischievous Pierrot figure in Munich. This last BRSO version is a miracle of unbroken argument, not aspiring to emulate the lively local detail of Harding or Harnoncourt, but taking time over the finale, like Jochum, to build immense spiritual strength over its progress.

After Günter Wand had won praise for his Bruckner, but fought shy of the Fifth, it was the composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann who insisted: ‘You must do it. This is your symphony.’ And it is. The withdrawn reserve of his Adagio and Trio complement a Scherzo that becomes increasingly fiery over the years, just as he becomes more susceptible to a broadening of pulse at climactic cadences in the outer movements. This is not a Fifth to explore the vulnerable side of Bruckner; rather it celebrates his skill as a contrapuntalist and a master builder of symphonic form. Here is the Bruckner who took justifiable pride in his achievement, who went back and revised several earlier symphonies in the light of what composing the Fifth had taught him about mathematically ordered proportions.

Conclusions

In an unexpected claim given the source, Antonio Pappano recently told James Jolly (7/24) that Bruckner’s Eighth is ‘the greatest symphony ever written’. Before taking it on a recent tour with the Concertgebouw, Klaus Mäkelä said that the Fifth is ‘the greatest achievement as far as the symphonic form goes’. Always allowing for hyperbole, I’m with Mäkelä. With the Fifth, Bruckner brought to perfection the symphony’s potential to stage a large-scale drama of contrasts without words. It cost him dearly – ‘I’d never write something like that again for all the tea in China’, he said – and perhaps cost us a completed Ninth in his protracted attempt to make lightning strike twice. The coda of the finale is, or should be, among the most affirmative of musical experiences, inevitable yet hard-won.

The story of the Fifth is not set in granite. Kirill Petrenko will surely illuminate it with new formal perspectives, opening the season with the Berlin Philharmonic. So will the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Adám Fischer in October. The Fifths that live most vividly in my memory were given by Wand and the NDR SO at the 1998 Edinburgh Festival, and by Claudio Abbado at his final London concerts with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in 2011. Those experiences cannot help but inform my recommendations.

This personal survey of the Fifth on record has not given deserved space to recordings led by Herbert Blomstedt, Riccardo Chailly, Lovro von Mata∂ic´, Franz Welser-Möst and others. Neither has it paid due attention to the matter of balance in Bruckner’s orchestra: his scientific calibration of harmony between parts as well as between the notes and the formal elements of the work. Yet it is this aspect of Claudio Abbado’s conducting that draws me back to his Fifth above all, and especially in the late, live performances with the LFO (for now, alas, only available on film).

There is an authentically Brucknerian, atomic level of detail to Abbado’s shaping of the fugue, to his transitions between episodes of the Scherzo, to his tiny, continual adjustments of pulse and balance according to whichever voice he wants to sing out. Perhaps he still overdoes the flute line in the final bars of the symphony. It’s a tiny quirk of eccentricity in a performance that otherwise squares the circle between competing demands of inward pathos and outward exaltation. When the brass initially sound the chorale in the finale, the strings respond to each line with the prayerful intensity of individual communicants. Contrapuntal detail in the finale’s coda does not obscure the symphony’s goal; in the detail is the apotheosis of Bruckner’s quest for a divine harmony briefly glimpsed on earth.

Top Choice

Lucerne Festival Orchestra / Claudio Abbado

Accentus

The conductor’s almost final engagement with a work that seemed to demand his attention more and more in his last years, capped by the most detailed yet integrated account of the mighty coda.

CD Choice

NDR SO / Günter Wand

Profil 

Günter Wand with ‘his’ orchestra in ‘his’ symphony, still refining turns of phrase here and cadences there after 20 years of living with the piece. He created his own, inimitable performing tradition for the work.

Historic Choice

RCO / Eugen Jochum

RCO Live

In excellent stereo, so hardly historic in the conventional sense, but capturing a grand vision for the piece from a bygone age and the culmination of a relationship between composer, conductor and orchestra stretching back 60 years.

Bruckner’s Fifth 2.0

RCO / Nikolaus Harnoncourt

RCO Live 

A fascinating work in progress, exploring new balances and tempo relationships, informed by the conductor’s affinity with the composer’s Upper Austrian background and by the orchestra’s own rich heritage in this music.

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Gramophone magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Gramophone today