‘To revise or not to revise?’ is one of the oldest of all problems: the freshness of first thoughts pitched against the shapeliness and sense of perspective revision can bring. The confident craftsman makes his own judgements, and if (like Brahms) he is prudent too the homework is tidied away. Less certain souls leave a clutter of papers and a variety of choices. And then the scholars move in, and, after them, the purveyors of received opinion.
Received opinion used to teach that Words-worth’s great autobiographical poem The Prelude is better read in the sappier, early edition of 1805 than in the tautened, foreshortened, late rewrite of 1850. In Bruckner’s case, the presumption was all the other way: the later the better. Then, as the editions began to accrue (tardily, over several decades) questions began to be asked, not of the Fourth or Eighth Symphonies but of the First and the Third, of which the Third, the magnificent so-called ‘Wagner’ Symphony, has proved to be by some distance the harder case.
For many years, the 1889 Bruckner/Schalk version was the preferred edition. It is the shortest and the most heavily revised orchestrally. It also happened to be, pre-1950, the most widely available. Bohm, Szell, Karajan and Wand have all made fine recordings of this edition.
The post-war performing history of the symphony might have been very different had the engraved plates of Robert Haas’s edition of the original 1873 version not been destroyed (or lost) in printing works in Leipzig in 1944. One suspects that loyal Haasians like Karajan and Wand might well have taken up 1873 ed. Haas as a matter of course. As it is, this original 1873 version was not published until 1977, 18 years after Leopold Nowak had further boosted the status of the 1889 text by giving it priority in the new Anton Bruckner Gesamtausgabe.
The very fine Inbal recording followed in 1983 and has remained unchallenged until now, partly because by the early 1980s, a further layer of received opinion had begun to form and harden. Increasingly, commentators and conductors were turning to the less heavily cut and reorchestrated first revision c1877 which the Bruckner Verlag had published in 1950 (ed. Oeser). The problem with this was that the real damage was done, if it was done at all, by Bruckner’s original decision to change the score post-1873.
Roger Norrington’s decision to record the 1873 version, as opposed to either of the revisions, must be assumed to be self-explanatory. The question of the rival versions is raised in the booklet only in passing by his co-essayist Gunnar Cohrs and not at all by Norrington himself who concentrates, as usual, on discussing orchestral dispositions (Vienna Philharmonic c1873) and interpretative aims. These, again not unfamiliarly (see the booklet-note to his very collectable Wagner disc – EMI, 11/95 – and his Gramophone interview that same month), take the form of justifying the performance in hand and politely but resolutely rubbishing “most” (his adjective) of the extant competition.
The broad profile of Norrington’s performance can be quickly drawn. There is an extremely rapid – or, should one say, rapidly launched and, where appropriate, rapidly pursued – first movement (Bruckner’s marking is Gemassigt, misterioso, “Moderate, mysterious”), 19'00'' to Inbal’s 24'00''; a beautifully paced Adagio (Feierlich then Andante), Norrington admitting to the constraints imposed by the slightly bizarre episode in 12/8 time at fig. K (12'22''); a Scherzo and Trio, perfectly judged as to tempo and integration of tempo; and a finale that starts as a plain Allegro but which is (or, rather, remains) pretty quick in the movement’s famous polka-cum-chorale (knees-up on one side of the street, the corpse of a local worthy lying in a chapel of rest across the way), one of Bruckner’s wittiest and most touching inventions.
“Nor do we feel it necessary to go suddenly slower in the Trio”, writes Norrington of the third movement, which is such a delight here (and in the Inbal recording, too). Nor should he. The 1873 text specifically requests that the Trio stays in the “Same tempo”. The versions of 1877 and 1889 have no such marking, presumably because Bruckner has so altered the phrasing and legato-staccato allocations that it makes it much more difficult to do so. The finale’s polka-chorale raises a similar problem. Norrington takes it very quickly, his response to Bruckner’s Etwas langsamer (“Somewhat slower”) coloured, he says, by his desire to “humanise” Bruckner, to steer clear of the tradition that treats Bruckner symphonies as “religious tracts”. As in the Trio, he gets away with this (just) because the 1873 text is again much more sweetly phrased and pointed than in the revisions (where, incidentally, the marking remains etwas langsamer in 1877 but becomes, simply, Langsamer in 1889). In his note, Norrington criticizes rival conductors who take bars 65ff. at “half speed to make [the music] more ‘reverent’ and ‘sublime’... at the ‘reverent’ tempo I have experienced up to now... humanity is sacrificed on the altar of respectability”.
This is nonsense and unfair nonsense, since here one is not comparing like with like. Actually, only one conductor in my experience drops that tempo by half and that is Bohm with the VPO. And he conducts the music with a most perfectly judged Austrian lilt to the dance rhythm, the tempo Langsamer as the 1889 text specifies. Norrington’s London Classical Players play superbly throughout (did the VPO in 1873 sound as good, one wonders?) and the layouts and instrumental sonorities (the horns not dissimilar to the modern VPO horns) are a joy; but Bohm and the modern VPO give the more human and characterful reading of the polka-chorale, with a less promising text.
In the end, the relevant competition is with the superbly played and very well recorded 1983 Inbal recording, now at mid price. The performances are not dissimilar, except in the first movement where Norrington’s very fast initial tempo is clearly at odds both with the tempo marking (“Moderate, mysterious”) and with the nature of a Brucknerian allegro. As Robert Simpson says in the revised edition of The Essence of Bruckner (Gollancz: 1992), the greatness of the 1873 Third lies in the achievement of a formal command that is “grand and calm, the steady momentum maintained with a spacious mastery”. Later he argues, “Bruckner’s sense of motion is naturally slow”; only when he is unsure of his ground does he resort to speed, to agitation, to unnecessary cuts.
Most conductors take the opening at approximately minim=64. Norrington, in his essay, makes the astonishing claim that this is the equivalent of an Adagio moderato and goes on to talk about the need for a sense of “striving”. Curiously, Bruckner does add just such a word to the 1877 text (“Moderate, mehr bewegt, mysterious”). Harnoncourt picks up on this in his not very successful account of the 1877 text with an opening tempo in the region of minim=72; but even this is way below Norrington’s Rossini-like minim=88.
No, minim=64 is a perfectly good tempo, provided it is phrased and projected with point and spirit as it is by conductors like Bohm, Jochum (DG, 2/90) and Inbal.'