Gerd Schaller celebrates the completion of his Bruckner cycle with a resplendent Eighth (first version)

Germany Bruckner: Philharmonie Festiva / Gerd Schaller (conductor). Ebrach Abbey, Bavaria, 20.7.2025. (KW)

Bruckner – Symphony No.8 (first version, 1887. Ed. Schaller)

In September 2025 there will be a concert to celebrate 35 years of the Ebracher Musiksommer (Ebrach Summer Music Festival). Haydn’s The Creation will be performed, as it was in the first ever concert of this Ebrach Festival. That momentous event is preceded by a concert that marks the completion of the Philharmonie Festiva’s very generous Bruckner cycle, including as it does all versions and some variants of the symphonies under the baton of Gerd Schaller, founder of the Ebrach Festival. It has been a long journey, commencing with a recording of the Fourth (1878/1880), eighteen years ago in 2007, and was instituted in 2011 as a project to perform and record the symphonies in all versions under the title BRUCKNER2024 in co-operation with Bayerischen Rundfunk – Studio Franken and Profil Edition Günter Hänssler. Completion of the cycle was delayed beyond Bruckner’s 200th anniversary due to Maestro Schaller’s brief period of indisposition, but as soon as he was well again he returned energetically to the project and completed it triumphantly with this concert. The recordings have met with considerable critical acclaim.

There is plenty in such a context to ensure a grand celebratory event, and it did not disappoint. But additionally, the atmosphere at Ebrach is always very special, situated as the performances are in the vast and magnificent Ebrach Abbey, massive stonework on the outside, glittering with Baroque decoration on the inside, in a small Bavarian village in the Steigerwald, Franconia. And what symphony more appropriate than Bruckner’s longest (in duration) and most monumental symphony, the Eighth? But not the Eighth as we most often hear it and, indeed, as we heard it a year ago in Ebrach, but the Eighth in its first version, the one that Bruckner finished on his 63rd birthday, wrote ‘Hallelujah!’ at the end of the score, and sent off to conductor Hermann Levi, ‘hoping it would find favour’. It did not: Levi could make neither head nor tail of it, couldn’t confidently present it to his musicians and audiences. Bruckner, devastated, spent two and a half years which might have been well spent working on his Ninth to produce the second version of the Eighth which is the one we usually hear.

So those who love Bruckner are blessed with two Eighth symphonies that use the same thematic material to cover the same trajectory but are nevertheless in many ways two different symphonies. Dermot Gault describes this first version as ‘darkly phantasmagorical’, contrasting that with the ‘monolithic severity, relentlessly stern’ revision. The astounding climax at the end of the first movement recapitulation, (that is the one that ends with the horns and trumpets continuing alone as they blaze out the rhythm of the first theme, described by Bruckner as the Annunciation of Death), is a passage that displays remarkably the difference between the two versions. In the first version the treatment of the material pushes the constraints of form and proportion to the limit, threatening its formal coherence. In the bass there is an enormity, the cellos and double basses, fff , stomping  minim by minim, from a low F up a scale of two octaves, 25 notes, and then up a scale again with the rest of the strings added; at the same time, in the high treble, flutes, oboes, clarinets, also fff , together with fortissimo first trumpet repeatedly iterate a falling semitone motive, at first in minims and then intensified into crotchets, and it is a wailing, despairing sound. Neither of these gestures survived into the second version which became more polite, less scandalous and a little more sophisticated in its theatricality – I am thinking here especially of the drum roll that was added to sound with those final brass fanfares, absent in the spare, desolation of first version. In the first version the crisis is nakedly exposed; in the second version an element of decorum and proportion mitigates the extremity of the drama.

Schaller and the Philharmonie Festiva gave that climax full weight, the conductor encouraging the basses and cellos in their implacable upward advance, the trumpet and woodwind shrill above the tumult below, revealing this first version as ‘Bruckner without compromise’. And almost as if to reply to this appalling vision, the storming C major coda suddenly rose up and hammered away relentlessly as though trying to drive out the horror that had arisen, furiously attempting to reply to the Annunciation of Death with an Annunciation of Resurrection. The musicians played it for all it was worth!

They had given the first movement a very strong performance, with Schaller displaying again – as in his performance of the 1890 second version a year ago – how adept he is at managing the transitions, the move from the first theme to the second sounding absolutely natural. This wasn’t as urgent and purposeful a performance as that of the 1890 version had been, but it nevertheless carried the music seamlessly forward, the exposition paragraph all of a piece, and the somewhat more complex development of this first version carried off well – even though it enters some rather strange meandering territory in the transition from development to first theme recapitulation.

The Scherzo was very exciting to listen to, resounding as it did in a halo of the Abbey’s reverberation. The descending violin figure sounding like peals of bells, the cellos and violas introduced the theme with appropriate vigour, and the enthusiastic timpanist did great work, as exciting to watch as he was to listen to. In this version there are more repetitions of the theme, once again seeming to strain at the limits of sane proportionality. The Trio in this first version is more of an earthbound melancholy song than the dreamy visionary meditation of the 1890 version, hence there are no harps to be heard. It contributes to the somewhat darker tone of this version and was sung beautifully by the strings of the Philharmonie Festiva.

There is nothing sentimental about Gerd Schaller’s approach to the Adagio, and it is certainly not overtly ‘religiose’. Much of it had a feel of sober nobility, and there was no concession to the ‘dying fall’ that closes the movement: he conducts it in strict tempo, and the diminuendo barely became the very quiet ppp that Bruckner wrote. It is only in the paragraph that contains the big climax that things get very disturbed as Bruckner negotiates his path over crags and valleys towards the big climax, with the help of Siegfried along the way, and the achievement of the climax celebrated with a whole series of cymbal clashes. He worked long and hard on this section of the movement, there is considerable difference between its topography in 1887, the so-called ‘intermediate Adagio’ of 1888, and the 1890 final version. They are all splendid, but the more complex route to the summit in 1887 is consistent with the version’s more troubled and less smoothly fashioned character.

The Finale is a long and often brassy movement, even longer in the first version than it became in 1890. It has a metronome mark for its first two themes – a rare thing in Bruckner’s manuscripts – and Schaller’s opening tempo sounded slow enough to be in the region of the tempo Bruckner asks for. It gave the movement an impressive grandeur, loud, assertive, forthright. He navigated a steady path through the variety of disparate motives that form the three thematic groups, and when the first theme recapitulation was reached, there seemed added intensity to the playing, the destination now in sight. The grand peroration that ends the symphony closes in the second version with an emphatic unison four note descending motive, a motive that pervades the symphony from its first theme onwards. In 1887 Bruckner was happy that the blazing C major overlay of themes should continue for a dozen bars and cease abruptly without the addition of that significant unison. The effect is to close the symphony with music of unmitigated celebration.

The audience, silent and attentive throughout, remained silent at the close as the conductor slowly lowered his arms and the musicians lowered their instruments – and then the enthusiastic applause filled the abbey. It was a great way to finish the now complete cycle.

Ken Ward