Critics have reached for metaphysical explanations thanks, in part, to the music’s daunting complexity, a property that is displayed to the full in the major work of tonight’s programme, the Fifth Symphony. In the Fifth, Bruckner synthesises a vast diversity of styles and materials in a way that has long challenged comprehension. Reviewing the premiere, given as a piano-duet performance in Vienna in 1887, the critic Theodor Helm complained that the work exceeded the limits of ordinary musical understanding, remarking that ‘in no other work … has [Bruckner] been so unconcerned about conventional aims and proportions and the receptive ability of normally endowed listeners’. The Symphony is at its most intellectually enigmatic in its Finale, which takes symphonic fugal polyphony to a level of complexity unsurpassed in its time. The Fifth also has much to offer listeners seeking a characteristically Brucknerian metaphysical experience. No secular work of Bruckner engages more overtly with the musical symbols of his Catholic faith. Sacred styles are threaded into its design from the outset; and the chorale that crowns the Finale’s coda lends a decisively Christian flavour to the Beethovenian notion of a summative symphonic ending. The Adagio, in contrast, offers moments of intense spiritual reflection, which furnish a private counterpart to the very public expression of faith with which the Symphony ends.

The Fifth Symphony occupies a pivotal place in Bruckner’s symphonic oeuvre. Begun in 1875 and completed three years later in 1878, it marks the culmination of an intense phase of experimentation, commencing with the 1872 version of the Second Symphony, through which Bruckner forged his mature symphonic style and with it a radically new approach to the genre. Many Brucknerian hallmarks – the formation of main themes ex nihilo, the partition of the sonata exposition into three large, distinct thematic areas, the use of sustained orchestral sonorities to mark climactic events, a concentrated engagement with harmonic chromaticism, and a greatly expanded sense of symphonic time – are consolidated in this period. After the Fifth, Bruckner turned temporarily away from symphonic composition, composing the String Quintet, his only mature chamber work, in 1878–79 before commencing work on the Sixth Symphony, which was finished in September of 1881.

Unlike the Second, Third and Fourth symphonies, which were extensively revised between 1872 and 1880, the changes Bruckner introduced to the Fifth, following completion of the first draft in 1876, are usually regarded as part of an ongoing compositional process, rather than wholesale revisions. The 1878 manuscript remains the authoritative score; changes that Bruckner entered onto the manuscript – which include numerous small cuts and the introduction of a bass tuba – are not normally considered widespread enough to justify a partition into two separate versions, although few sources for the work’s earliest conception survive. Discouraged by the disastrous premiere of the Third Symphony in 1877 and the subsequent failure to secure a performance of the Fourth, Bruckner laid the Fifth aside at its completion. It remained unperformed until 20^th April 1887, when a two-piano arrangement was played by Joseph Schalk and Franz Zottmann at Vienna’s Bösendorfersaal. Preparations for the concert were not harmonious. Friedrich Klose reports a heated exchange between the composer and Schalk in Gause’s restaurant, as a result of which the performance was postponed. Bruckner also insisted on attending all the rehearsals, at which, according to Klose, his behaviour was ‘unbearable’. Bruckner’s attitude only softened after the concert, which was enthusiastically received by the audience. The first orchestral performance followed in Graz on 9^th April 1894 under Franz Schalk’s direction, which the composer, now in failing health, was too ill to attend. Schalk introduced cuts, most extensively to the Finale, from which he excised the recapitulation of the first and second themes, a truncation of more than 100 bars, for which there is no evidence of Bruckner’s consent. Schalk also made substantial changes to the orchestration, most blatant of which was the inclusion of an off-stage brass group to reinforce the chorale’s entry in the Finale’s coda. This garbled version of the work was published in 1896, the year of Bruckner’s death, and became the standard performing version until Robert Haas published his edition, based on the 1878 manuscript, in 1935, which undoes Schalk’s cuts and restores Bruckner’s original orchestration.

The Fifth is perhaps the most rigorously integrated of Bruckner’s symphonies: in no other work does he go to such lengths to relate the movements and secure their overarching coherence. The Symphony’s inner and outer movements are paired by theme and key, producing a design in which one phase of the work’s drama is nested inside the other. The first movement and the Finale are focused on the tonic, B flat major, while the Adagio and Scherzo are centred on D minor. The main themes of the outer movements also share harmonic properties, a similarity that becomes explicit as the Finale’s coda approaches, where the two themes are combined. The solemn pizzicato figure initiating the Adagio is accelerated to produce the string figure that commences the Scherzo; and the Scherzo’s main theme is a variant of the plaintive oboe melody, which the Adagio’s processional pizzicato accompanies.

The Fifth is additionally significant because it is perhaps the nineteenth century’s most substantial contribution to what might be termed the ‘contrapuntal’ symphony, a subset of the genre preoccupied with incorporating fugal techniques, the locus classicus of which is discovered in the Finale of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. The importance of counterpoint for Bruckner’s Fifth is initially signalled in the first movement’s imitative slow introduction, and emerges more fully in its development section, where the main theme is combined both with itself and with a motto drawn from the introduction. Counterpoint comes substantially to the fore in the Finale, the vast design of which combines sonata form, fugue and chorale with breathtaking virtuosity. The Finale incorporates three fugues: the first exposes the main theme; the second initiates the development section and is constructed from the chorale melody tentatively introduced at the exposition’s end; the third supplies the development’s central action and combines the main theme with the chorale. Bruckner subjects his material to a bewildering variety of contrapuntal manipulations. Both themes are presented in their prime form and in inversion – that is, with their interval content turned upside down – and this occurs both separately and simultaneously. The prime form and the inversion of the first theme are also set in counterpoint with themselves, a technique called stretto. Even more astonishingly, the stretti on the first theme, in both prime and inverted forms, sometime happen simultaneously with presentations of the chorale.

In this evening’s concert, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment will perform Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony on period instruments, reflecting as closely as possible the instrumental forces and technologies prevalent in Vienna during the composer’s lifetime. In so doing, they contribute to a widening interest in the period-instrument performance of Bruckner’s music, which builds on Philippe Herreweghe’s seminal 2009 recording of the Fifth with the Orchestra des Champs-Élysées. Contrasts with the sound of orchestras favouring modern instruments include softer yet more transparent string and brass textures, and differences in the balance between the orchestral groups, which will come especially to the fore in the Finale’s contrapuntal passages, allowing many of their complex, interweaving lines to be heard with fresh clarity. Although there is much in Bruckner’s music that remains mysterious, uncovering the orchestral sound of late-nineteenth-century Vienna may allow a more transparent, if no less fascinating Bruckner to emerge.