“He wrote the same symphony nine times.” "His one-dimensional orchestration is all thanks to his training as an organist.” They're "cathedrals of sound.” "They sound like Schenkerian middlegrounds” … and other such clichés. (Full marks if you got the last one, by the way, but I promise that’s what some musical analysts, especially those disciples of Heinrich Schenker, think of the symphonies. What it means in essence is that Bruckner’s symphonies move like great undigested wodges of harmony rather than being fully finished in proper compositional finery: it’s saying they’re great symphonic lumps, basically, calling to mind Brahms’s hoary old gag that Bruckner’s symphonies sound like “symphonic boa-constrictors”.

So this week, a Bruckner symphony – the sixth - that disproves these lazy received opinions about his music (he wrote 11 symphonies, in any case, not nine: check out numbers “0” and “00” – seriously, the “Doppelnullte” or Study Symphony in F Minor !), and which proves, I think, that his symphonic concerns weren’t always - and I don’t think they ever were – about constructing neo-medieval sonic edifices of mystical contemplation, but rather about connecting the earth with the cosmos, the human with the spiritual, the saucy with the sublime. Saucy? Well, yes, that’s one translation of how Bruckner himself described the Sixth: “Die Sechste ist die keckste”. And the “sauce” of the Sixth Symphony is its dynamism, its astonishing rhythmic invention and subtlety, and the unique orchestral colours in the Bruckner canon. So instead of focusing on its monumentalism or the largest scale of its macro-tonal adventure, I want instead, by focusing on a handful of moments, to try and show how strange and subtle this symphony is.

And let’s start, obviously, with third movement, the scherzo. The sound this music makes is unlike any of Bruckner’s other scherzo movements; not just because of its slower tempo than most of the other comparable movements, but because of its atmosphere of feverish harmonic ambiguity and almost grotesque contrasts of texture: the unsettling trudge in the cellos and the basses that you feel wants to resolve but which never properly does (at least, not until the end of the main scherzo section); those scratchy staccatos in the violas and second violins; the glinting filament of the high unison line in the woodwind; and those searching arpeggios in the first violins, which seem to dream of a harmonic stability that the rest of the orchestral texture stubbornly refuses to satisfy – and all that in the first 10 bars! But this passage – and the rest of the mysterious progress of the rest of the scherzo - symbolises the distinctive soundworld of this symphony, especially its employment of so many simultaneous musical strata. It’s the diametric opposite of a musical monolith, but rather a multifaceted, multi-layered - multi-“sauced” – symphonic experience, whose kaleidoscopic orchestration is a crucial part of how its essential drama is communicated: richer, by far, than anything a supposed “organist of the orchestra” could come up with.

And talking of musical strata, of co-existing lines of musical material, above all material with different rhythmic profiles, listen to this passage from the first movement, the climax of the music’s singing second theme. That theme starts out pitting rhythmic groups of two against three, and three against four, but it gets more complicated than that. As Julian Horton has revealed in a brilliant essay on Bruckner’s orchestration, there are six layers of rhythmic stratification simultaneously happening at this moment, creating a teeming and even grating polyphony of different kinds of time against one another. In one half-bar unit (two crotchets), you’re hearing rhythmic divisions of nine against three against two against one. (Although in reality it’s even more complex that those ratios, since the second violins split their “three” into two[quavers] + three[quavers] +one [triplet crotchet]… Still with me? Never fear: read Horton’s whole article if you can!). That sort of thinking – and that sort of sound – blows out of the water the idea that Bruckner was writing pieces that were rough-hewn or unfinished. That passage rivals Brahms’s Rite-of-Spring moment in his Fourth Symphony for rhythmic sophistication; whereas that’s an uncommon moment in Brahms’s symphony, it’s part of the warp and weft of Bruckner’s entire symphony.

Another cliché-destroying moment is the very opening of the symphony. No timeless mist of string tremolando here, no self-confident theme of simple-minded arpeggios rising out of the gloom, but instead, a rhythmic itch in the violins (itself a compound of divisions of the crotchet into four and then three…), and a profoundly harmonically unstable melody – or better, melodic fragment – in the cellos and basses, a dark cousin of the horn tune at the opening of Bruckner’s 4th Symphony. This is music whose instabilities and collisions catalyse the rest of the movement, and the whole of the rest of the symphony. Again: instead of the monolithic or the monumental, this is a symphony made from its drama and its dynamism.

I said I wouldn’t harp on the sixth symphony’s macro-structure, but a couple of its most thrilling moments are made because of the bigger structural energies that are at stake. One is the way the main tune returns in the first movement, something Bruckner makes you think has already happened by this point – but in fact we’re in the wrong key, and not just a bit “wrong”, but we’re catastrophically far away from home, from where we should be, the key of A major/minor. In fact, Bruckner has spectacularly taken the rug from under your ears by reprising the melody first in E flat major/minor, the furthest end of the tonal spectrum from A. Yet that’s where, miraculously, he drives the music 14 bars later, when the timpani join in, the dynamic level goes up from fortissimo to forte-fortissimo, and A major/minor is triumphantly reclaimed. It’s a spine-tingling moment of perfectly timed musical drama, I think, a passage whose effect is achieved only thanks to Bruckner’s astonishing sense of symphonic theatre. Yet more music that doesn’t belong in a cathedral.

The Adagio that comes second is one of Bruckner’s most heart-breaking slow movements. It includes a repeated melody I’ve always thought of as a funeral march. And making a connection across the symphony, one of the finale’s tunes is a hyperactive transformation of the unforgettable, lamenting oboe line you hear at the start of the Adagio. But best and perhaps most cliché-beating of all is the sense at the end of the finale that all of the threads – and all of those grinding symphonic strata – have not in fact been tied together. Yes, Bruckner brings back the melody from the first movement, and there’s a brief and noisy coda, but the emotional sense of this truncated apotheosis of the symphony is of questions that are left unanswered, of a symphonic drama that is left ambivalently open rather than cosmically closed.

That has troubled some Brucknerian commentators, who want to imagine that every Bruckner symphony ought to be a closed universe of musical and expressive experience. But why should that be the case? Instead of a sign of symphonic inadequacy, that emotional ambiguity is proof that the sixth achieves something completely different from the rest of Bruckner’s other symphonies, and it’s why I think its febrile drama resonates so profoundly after you’ve heard the whole piece. You’ll want to return again and again to this symphony and its stupendous - yet “saucy” - drama.

Five key recordings



Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra/Roger Norrington: Norrington’s no-vibrato crusade pay dividends, I think, in the slow movement, connecting the work with the earlier polyphony that Bruckner knew so well.

Staatskapelle Dresden/Eugen Jochum: Jochum doesn’t take anything for granted in a performance of searing imagination.



New Philharmonia Orchestra/Otto Klemperer: Klemperer's structural authority places the sixth firmly in the tradition of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schubert.

London Symphony Orchestra/Colin Davis: the closely-miked sound of this LSO Live recording amplifies the sense of feverish energy in Davis’s performance.

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Wilhelm Furtwängler [movements 2-4 only]: Sadly the first movement of this performance wasn’t preserved for posterity – but the rest of it takes the breath away with Brucknerian fire and brimstone.