S.t Michael’s Cornhill, London
Monday, 9. September 2024 1 pm
Organ recital
Hommage à Anton Bruckner on occasion of his 200th Birthday
Program
Anton Bruckner Overture g-Minor WAB 98 (1863)
(1824-1896) (Transcription for Organ by Rudolf Innig, 2018)
Richard Wagner Feuerzauber aus Die Walküre (1857)
(1813-1883) (Bearbeitung für Orgel von Rudolf Innig, 2023)
Anton Bruckner Symphony f-Minor WAB 99 (1863)
(Transcription for Organ by Rudolf Innig, 2018, )
Andante molto
Scherzo: Schnell
Otto Kitzler Trauermusik 'Dem Andenken Anton Bruckners' für großes Orchester (1905)
(1834-1915) (Bearbeitung für Orgel von Rudolf Innig, 2022)
Rudolf Innig, Organ
(www.rudolf-innig.de)
Program notes
Unlike today, Anton Bruckner was known in his time mostly as organist, not as a composer of important symphonies. As cathedral organist in Linz (1855-1868) he met the ten years younger theater conductor Otto Kitzler (1834-1915), who gave him the decisive impulses for composing symphonic orchestral works between December 1861 and July 1863. This development is recorded in the so-called Kitzler Studienbuch, which contains 326 pages of exercises ranging from simple eight-bar periods to sketches for his first four-movement symphony in F minor. Based on current textbooks Kitzler taught him especially the Sonatform - as Bruckner called it - as part of a four movement symphony. Kitzler also introduced him to Richard Wagner's opera Tannhäuser (1845), the performances of which in February 1863 became a key experience for the further musical development of the almost 40-year-old Bruckner. The Overture in G minor, completed in early 1863, is based on this sonata form (decisively influenced by Ludwig van Beethoven), preceded here by a slow introduction, which Bruckner added on Kitzler 's advice. But the first sonata movement by the already 38 years old composer deviates already from tradition and focuses primarily on the coda of the overture, in which the main theme is surprisingly heard in a new sound form.
For Anton Bruckner, Richard Wagner was the most important composer of his time, the 'master of all masters'. However, he was not interested in Wagner's librettos or the stage productions of his music dramas, but only in his music, especially his harmonic innovations with their preference for previously unknown chord combinations reaching into remote keys. The Fire Magic (the final scene from The Valkyrie) therefore became one of Bruckner's favorite pieces: Here Wotan puts his daughter Brünnhilde into a deep sleep and encloses her in a ring of fire. Wagner illustrates this scene with some of his most sophisticated 'leitmotifs'. The slumber motif, which sounds in half notes at the beginning, consists of a descending chromatic scale, the harmonization of which does not allow for any orientation. On the other hand, Wagner depicts the fire god Loge in fast sixteenth-note passages that also elude precise perception.
Immediately after the Overture, in the spring of 1863, Anton Bruckner began his first four-movement Symphony in F minor. Its second movement in E-flat major (Andante molto) is the first of the solemnly slow movements that are so characteristic for all his symphonies. Both themes of the first part are characterized by expressive suspensions. After a contrasting middle section in G minor, they are heard again in a varied repetition. The movement ends with an extended coda: a horn solo recalls - as if sounding from a distance - the triple suspensions of the beginning. The Scherzo (Schnell) is a monothematic sonata movement of just 90 bars. The theme in three-quarter time in a chamber music like dialogue between woodwinds and strings culminates at the end of the first part in a symphonic 'outburst of power' from the entire orchestra in fortissimo. Here we hear for the first time the composer who in his later scherzos seems to be 'playing dice with rocks'. In the middle section (Trio), the sweetness of the thirds in the woodwind theme contrasts with the sophisticated asymmetry of the movement periods.
Otto Kitzler's three-part Funeral music - In memory of Anton Bruckner (Adagio - Andante con moto - Adagio) does not use direct quotations from Bruckner's symphonic works, but adopts typical stylistic elements of his symphonic music: short 'impulse motifs' with their tendency towards sequencing, the advanced 'alteration harmony' inspired by Richard Wagner with a preference for fallacious turns in distant third relationships, as well as the tendency towards pedal points or general rests, techniques that Anton Bruckner had been familiar with as an improviser on the organ since his youth. (Dr. Rudolf Innig)