Anton Bruckner -- Symphony No. 3 in D Minor -- Score

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in studying the music of Anton Bruckner is the degree to which he revised his major works, and nowhere is this more problematic than the 3rd Symphony. Bruckner brought his 2nd and 3rd Symphonies with him to a stay with Richard Wagner in September 1873, and asked which one Wagner preferred. Wagner chose the 3rd (although one story goes that Bruckner and Wagner drank so much beer together that Bruckner couldn't remember this at first) and Bruckner completed the score in December, full of quotations of Wagner's operas, as a tribute to the man Bruckner's dedication page described as "the unreachable world-famous noble master of poetry and music".

The 1873 version was not accepted for performance, so Bruckner revised it into a version that was premiered in 1877. Unfortunately, the extended quotations from _Die Walküre_ and _Tristan und Isolde_ were not well integrated, and the symphony as a whole was ungainly and overly-long. The premier performance in Vienna was not helped by the original conductor dying a month before the performance and Bruckner himself stepping in; while a good liturgical and choral conductor, he was out of his depth working with a full orchestra. Most of the audience and even some of the musicians had gone by the time the performance finished; among the few remaining was a 17-year-old Austro-Bohemian named Gustav Mahler.

Bruckner went back to further tinker with this work multiple times before finally arriving at what he (but not necessarily everybody else) considered the definitive version in 1889. This is the third version of three, or the fifth version of six, depending on how they are counted. One thing that _is_ agreed on by almost all scholars and critics is that this symphony unambiguously expressed his personal style, including the expression of the idiomatic "Bruckner rhythm" of a duplet paired to a triplet, first played in the 2nd violins and reproduced as the thumbnail image. It could be said that, although it is chronologically fifth, this is the first "Bruckner Symphony". Fittingly, a performance of the Cleveland Orchestra was selected for this production. George Szell's drive for technical accuracy and rhythmic perfection that secured Cleveland's place in the "Big Five" is well suited for Bruckner's complex, multilayered construction.

0:00 I: Mehr langsam, misterioso
20:17 II: Adagio, bewegt, quasi Andante
35:50 III: Ziemlich schnell
43:09 IV: Allegro

Score sourced through the International Music Score Library Project/Petrucci Music Library: https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ImagefromIndex/563116/hfal

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