The intimate strangers
Bruckner and Mahler

Bruckner and Mahler were titans. Both men were symphonists whose works were unprecedented in their length, assuming monumental proportions. They had neither predecessors nor successors. Both were among the last great Romantics, and yet they explored fundamentally different worlds of expression; they were close and simultaneously distant. It is worth taking a closer look at the lives of these two disparate symphonists.

By the time that Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony received its first complete performance in 1899, its author had been dead for over two years. He had heard it in rehearsal, but during his lifetime only its two middle movements had been performed in public, at a concert at the Vienna Musikverein under Wilhelm Jahn on 11 February 1883. It was a full sixteen years later, on 26 February 1899, that Bruckner’s fellow composer, Gustav Mahler, conducted the first complete performance - albeit with a number of substantial cuts. Despite these editorial interventions, Mahler was one of Bruckner’s most loyal supporters, despite the disastrous premiere of the older composer’s Third Symphony. What he admired about Bruckner’s music, he said, was “the grandeur and wealth of its invention”. He was also impressed by Bruckner’s musical language; when preparing his version of the Sixth, he barely retouched the instrumentation.

Bruckner and Mahler were among the principal symphonists of the late Romantic period. Both struck out in idiosyncratic, individual directions, resulting in works that sound dissimilar. And yet there are remarkable parallels between both the elements that they share and those which keep them apart. Both men had extremely complex, often contradictory personalities, with the result that they frequently argued with their fellow human beings. Mahler, who never saw himself as particularly Jewish and who tended, rather, to believe in a kind of natural religion, was repeatedly forced to deal with Vienna’s rising anti-Semitism. 

In Bruckner’s case, it was his personality that people rejected. Many of his contemporaries regarded him as uneducated, intellectually wanting, and even simple-minded. And then there was his frequently gauche behaviour, his insecurity, and his occasionally grotesque obsequiousness. But he could also be extraordinarily ambitious and irascible, making him a grateful subject for caricaturists, who depicted him wearing trousers that were typically far too short for him.

The same tireless struggle for recognition

But Bruckner and Mahler also fought the same tireless struggle for recognition. As performers, they were both successful; as composers, initially, less so. Bruckner was one of the leading organ virtuosos of his age, and his phenomenal improvisations caused a sensation. For his part, Mahler was one of the most influential conductors of his day; he spent ten years at the helm of what is now the Vienna State Opera. But as composers they both had to fight for public acceptance, not least because such novel works simply overtaxed their audiences. Mahler famously said “My time will come!”, consciously laying down a challenge to his critics. But the fact that he prefaced some of his early symphonies with extramusical programmes suggests that he harboured a deep-seated wish for understanding and recognition, even if he later withdrew these programmes.

Constitutionally incapable of decision-making, Bruckner adopted a completely different approach from that of Mahler, responding to his audience’s incomprehension by constantly revising his scores in the hope of making them more “palatable”. These changes ranged from minor instrumentational retouching to cutting and altering individual passages and, finally, to rewriting entire movements. There are no fewer than three surviving versions of his Third and Fourth Symphonies (there are as many as four of the Third’s Adagio), while there are two distinct versions of the First, Second and Eighth Symphonies - a state of affairs which even today poses problems for Bruckner scholars. 

Although Mahler, too, continued to hone his symphonies, these changes generally concerned corrections to the dynamics and instrumentation that he made in the light of practical experience. Most were undertaken during the first rehearsal or in the context of special concerts with particular orchestras or conductors. Any changes that he made to the work’s compositional substance were a part of its initial genesis. To take an example: the vocal movement Das himmlische Leben was initially intended to be a part of his Third Symphony, but ultimately it served as the final movement of his Fourth. As a rule, however, once a work’s form had been settled upon, there were none of the far-reaching modifications that we find with Bruckner.

The longest symphonies in the history of music

The musical language of both composers likewise reveals a remarkable mixture of elements that link them together but which, when examined in detail, none the less reveal substantial differences. In keeping with contemporary taste, they both cultivated a love of vastness in terms not only of duration – their symphonies are among the longest in the history of music – but also of the gargantuan orchestral resources they demanded. It is at this point, however, that the differences begin to appear. As an organist, Bruckner used his vast orchestral resources like organ registrations in order to invest his recurrent blocks of themes with a characteristic, ever-changing sound. 

Mahler, by contrast, broke down his orchestral textures into a delicate polyphonic web, resulting in a level of transparency that suggests chamber music – an astonishing feat considering the size of his orchestras. Both men shared a certain fondness for pathos, for the sublime, and for an uninhibited display of resplendent sonorities. The magnificent apotheoses of Mahler’s symphonies –the choral finale of the Second Symphony (“Resurrection”) is a good example – would have been inconceivable had Bruckner not set a precedent by building to tremendous climaxes through a series of wavelike structures.

Both composers attest to the same marked sense of discontinuity in terms of their thematic writing, a feature that contributes to their distinctive personal style. In Mahler’s case the musical argument builds through a series of increasingly tension-laden developments and crescendos, but on each occasion, the music collapses at its point of climax. In Bruckner’s case the countless rests in the full orchestra divide the clearly-contoured thematic blocks from one another. In this way Bruckner’s music acquires its typically static quality, which is based for the most part on surfaces of sound, whereas Mahler’s symphonic writing is notable for the way in which it constantly develops and changes. This is also true of the world of nature, which served as a model and as an inspiration for Mahler.

And so we find Mahler and Bruckner – two intimate strangers – standing at the end of an era, where they guided the medium of the symphony to a final, lonely climax. Both composers, in their uniqueness, seemed to emerge out of nowhere, and neither had any kind of followers – they were an epoch all of their own. Here they stand, close to one another, and at the same time infinitely distant.