Hearing Leon Botstein and the LPO dancing their way through the savagely cut and extensively reorchestrated finale of Bruckner’s epic Fifth Symphony in this notorious – and, one had fondly imagined, long-abandoned – Schalk edition is a rum old experience. Anton Bruckner meets Tom and Jerry was my immediate reaction.
The edition is not, of course, without interest, since this is how certain Bruckner symphonies used to be treated and played before scholarship pitched the revisions and performing editions of the various self-appointed guardians of Bruckner’s legacy very firmly into the lumber-room of history. (Or almost. That grand old poseur Hans Knappertsbusch stayed loyal to Schalk, as his 1956 Vienna Philharmonic recording rather magnificently proves.)
Though the Fifth Symphony as we now know it was completed by 1878, Bruckner never heard it performed in concert. In 1887 Josef Schalk and Franz Zottman played a two-piano version but, as a withering contemporary memoir by Friedrich Klose reveals – see SJ’s absorbingly interesting Bruckner Remembered (Faber: 1998) – Bruckner was deeply upset by the whole thing.
It is unthinkable that he would have contemplated, let alone allowed, the cuts that are made in the finale in this edition, prepared by Josef Schalk’s brother, Franz, in 1892-3. Yet it was this edition that was published by Doblinger in 1896, reprinted by Eulenburg, Peters and Philharmonia, and only finally put out of commission when Bruckner’s own original score, prepared by Robert Haas, was published by Breitkopf & Hartel in 1937.
So can any kind of case be made for the Schalk edition? Probably not. Certainly not by Telarc’s essayist, Benjamin Marcus Korstvedt, who kicks off with a gratuitous digression about the Nazis’ endorsement of Haas’s work, before going on to suggest that corrupt old editions may be of interest in decoding old performing styles. (Corrupt old performing styles, possibly? Alas, the argument is not pursued.) There is then a lengthy, and frankly incredible, attempt to argue that the finale of the Fifth is possibly improved by the two whopping great cuts (Haas, bars 324-53, 374-459) made by Schalk.
Leon Botstein’s conducting of this lobotomized relic is nothing if not daring. Quite unlike the Knappertsbusch, this is both dancingly quick and (Schalk invites this) texturally winsome. In his own essay in the CD booklet, Botstein writes: ‘In so far as there is a spiritual dimension to Bruckner’s music, it is understood here as being celebratory and not ponderous, as joyful and lyrical and not overcome by a sense of its own gravity. The lightness, grace, and spectacle which characterised the secular and religious music and habits of [the] life of nineteenth-century Linz and Vienna certainly left their mark on Bruckner.’
Perhaps so. (I can imagine Sir Roger Norrington sniffing the air hereabouts.) But as far as this particular record is concerned – poor value, incidentally, when compared with the better filled and musically superior Knappertsbusch disc – I still can’t help thinking of Tom and Jerry.'