Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 (review)

Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 8. By Benjamin M. Korstvedt. (Cambridge Music Handbooks.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [xi, 133 p. ISBN 0-521-63226-9 (cloth); 0-521-63537-3 (pbk.). $49.95 (cloth); $16.95 (pbk.).]

In this recent addition to the Cambridge Music Handbooks series, Benjamin M. Korstvedt proposes a reexamination of the origins, reception, and musical design of Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony. In his first two chapters, he provides a well-organized presentation of the historical setting and various circumstances surrounding the four different editions of the work. The four interpretive chapters that follow, however, are not as successful.

While the author proposes to "think through anew" the music of the Eighth Symphony (p. 2), he has, in fact, done little to dispel misconceptions from earlier writers about the organic nature of Bruckner's music. Certainly the most negative of these earlier evaluations is the commentary by Heinrich Schenker (republished in Heinrich Schenker als Essayist und Kritiker: Gesammelte Aufsätze, Rezensionen und kleinere Berichte aus den Jahren 1891-1901, ed. Hellmut Federhofer, Studien und Materialien zur Musikwissenschaft, 5 [Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1990], 197-205), which finds that individual components of Bruckner's musical phrases lack necessary connections to identify beginnings, middles, and endings; Schenker ultimately claims in this essay that Bruckner fails to understand Beethoven's musical legacy. A more sympathetic view characterizes Bruckner's musical style as a "radical divergence" from the Viennese symphonic tradition, with discontinuity of harmonic language within larger phrase units (William E. Benjamin, "Tonal Dualism in Bruckner's Eighth Symphony," in The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality, ed. William Kinderman and Harald Krebs [Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1996], 237-58, at 249, 255). Though Korstvedt ostensibly disagrees with Schenker's judgment and champions Bruckner's Eighth, the sad consequence of his analysis is that, leaning heavily on Hugo Leichtentritt's outline of the work (Musikalische Formenlehre, 3d ed. [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1927], 384- 426; English translation, Musical Form [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951], 379-424), it appears largely to substantiate many of Schenker's negative claims.

To illustrate, let us examine Korstvedt's discussion of the first thematic subject of the first movement (pp. 28-30). He maintains that in the first eight measures no definite key can be discerned; citing Arnold Schoenberg as a source, he states that what follows, mm. 9-21, is an example of "roving harmony" that leads the opening motive through a passage of "chromatic progressions that do not employ standard harmonic syntax and 'fail to express a tonality.'" The Schoenberg source Korstvedt cites (Structural Functions of Harmony, rev. ed. [New York: W. W. Norton, 1969], 3, 164-65) is by no means unequivocal in its definition of "roving harmony." A better source would have been Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony (trans. Roy E. Carter [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978]), with its discussion of different harmonic successions and resultant observation that "[i]n one way or another all chords are naturally related to one another" (Theory of Harmony, pp. 123, 228).

Korstvedt's difficulties with tonal definition are apparent from the outset, as he explains the arrival on C at m. 5, with its open fifth and missing third, as a tonic arrival. Hence, he finds both the G of m. 3 and the D of m. 4 to be "chromatic neighbor tones" (p. 29). In fact, in this setting only the G is foreign to the harmony; the context of that pitch provides an implicit reference to B minor through a normative 5-6 motion that remains unharmonized. The D, on the other hand, provides an explicit reference to F minor through a harmonized 6-5 motion in that region. Korstvedt's inattention to these features of the symphony's first gesture causes him to make a series of incorrect, or at least incomplete, observations regarding its significance in determining formal features of the work--that is, its "necessary connections." For example, he fails to recognize the...