Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony: An Interplay of Darkness and Light

Abstract

Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony: An Interplay of Darkness and Light David Greene Those who love Anton Bruckner’s last completed symphony love it greatly, and put it on a par with Beethoven’s and Mahler’s final masterpieces. Many of them say they hear things like “sublime darknesses” and “equally transcendent light” when they listen.”(Stanislaw Skrowaczewski’s presentation of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is accessible online and recommended for this reflection.)1 Yet, they do not hear light driving darkness away. Rather, darkness and light “come together,” mysteriously continuous from one to the other, distinct and still somehow identical. They say that darkness is both “vindicated” and “vanquished,” and light is also both “vindicated” and “vanquished.” Although I would not have come to these descriptions on my own, they ring true to what happens when I hear the piece. Words like “sublime,” “transcendent,” and “mysterious continuity” help me realize that something in the music points me to the Transcendent. Or maybe it is the other way around: relating to the Transcendent empowers me to connect to the music and to hear something I might otherwise not perceive. Two distinctions may help me explain what these “somethings” might be. The first is the well-known difference between mere sounds and musical sounds: to hear music is not to hear just sounds, but to hear sounds interrelated with one another—repeating, contrasting, building to a climax, summoning and answering one another, coming to an end. To hear music is to hear sounds-in-relation.2 The second is the difference, less well agreed upon, between passive and active listening. One is what Buber might call an I-It experience: I hear the interrelated sounds, but they remain something external to me. The other is what Buber calls an I-Thou relationship:3 I relate myself to the interrelating sounds, and as with my relationships with other persons, sunsets, and storms, relating to music defines me for the time of listening and beyond; hearing the music is woven into who I am. If the sounds-in-relation somehow point me to the Transcendent, then relating myself to them is also a relationship with the Transcendent.4 Those who do not love Bruckner’s Eighth dislike it greatly. They complain that the sounds do not relate themselves convincingly to one another, and that the piece is flawed by so many meaningless discontinuities that it is impossible [End Page 181] for them to relate to it. They do not get beyond I-It experience. The group includes some famous critics and conductors, including Herman Levi, who was Bruckner’s first choice to conduct the premiere. Click for larger view View full resolution Piano © 2017 Pal Sovány. I agree: the musical flow does indeed undergo discontinuities, but they do not bother me. That they are problematic for some listeners, however, makes me realize I should think carefully about them. Perhaps what upsets others may be a clue to the “somehow” by which the music, the Transcendent, and I are interrelated. Broken continuity may be the darkness that some of us hear as sublime and that is both vanquished and vindicated. I have looked at the ruptures to see exactly what is occurring at the disjointed places; I have wondered whether something is interrelated with these gaps that warrants calling them “sublime” as well as “dark.” I have asked, is there something like transcendent light woven into the dark ruptures, bringing about a continuity that is so original as to be elusive? Each movement gives me a different answer. For readers to hear these answers, it is obvious they need to hear the music. Fortunately, many good performances are available online at YouTube. com, including my preference, Skrowaczewski’s reading, previously mentioned.5 In the following I try to identify the places where many of us hear darkness and light by citing the number of minutes from the beginning of a movement to these moments. [End Page 182] The opening movement consists of a series of passages each of which suffers a non-sequitur that breaks the continuity, as though it were weaving a story but leaves threads dangling. An example is the...