Josef Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) was an Austrian
composer, organist, and music theorist best known for
his symphonies, masses, Te Deum and motets. The first
are considered emblematic of the final stage of
Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich
harmonic language, strongly polyphonic character, and
considerable length. Bruckner's compositions helped to
define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their
dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving
harmonies.
Although Br...(+)
Josef Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) was an Austrian
composer, organist, and music theorist best known for
his symphonies, masses, Te Deum and motets. The first
are considered emblematic of the final stage of
Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich
harmonic language, strongly polyphonic character, and
considerable length. Bruckner's compositions helped to
define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their
dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving
harmonies.
Although Bruckner wrote a great deal of sacred choral
music (including not only his grandly conceived Mass
No. 3, but also his more intimate Mass No. 2 and his
astringent motets, which fuse Renaissance and
nineteenth century techniques), he is best known for
his symphonies: two unnumbered apprentice works, eight
completed mature symphonies, and the first three
movements of a Ninth (The finale has been reconstructed
by several hands, but most performances include just
the movements Bruckner completed). The symphonies,
influenced to some extent by Wagner and identified with
his school by the Viennese public, are monumental:
expansive in scale, rigorous (if sometimes gigantist)
in formal design, and often elaborate in their
contrapuntal writing. Their sonorities are stately and
organ-like; the Viennese critic Graf wrote that
Bruckner "pondered over chords and chord associations
as a medieval architect contemplated the original forms
of a Gothic cathedral." Despite occasional folk
influences in the scherzos, his symphonies are
uniformly high-minded, even religious, in spirit.
Together, they form the weightiest body of symphonies
between Schubert (whom he greatly admired) and Mahler.
His String Quartet was composed in 1862 at which time
he was, at thirty-eight, a student of Otto Kitzler.
Bruckner regarded the compositions he produced during
this period as exercises. In the case of the C minor
String Quartet, the goal was to master form and the
chamber music idiom. Listeners new to this work will
find virtually nothing premonitory of the essential
Bruckner in it but this piece, highly by the book, is
well-crafted and charming, often looking back to the
late Classical-early Romantic period. If anything
Brucknerian can be divined, it is the very subtle
thematic connections between movements, possibly
intentional.
The Quartet commences with something of a two-part
theme, the first Albinoni-like and the second more
animated, similar in nature to some of Elgar's string
writing. The lyrical second theme has a slightly
brooding character, not yet inhabiting the songlike
world of Bruckner's later second themes. The
development is unusual in its working out of the two
parts of the main theme and largely avoiding the second
theme. The recapitulation is very conventional and the
movement comes to a concise end. The main theme of the
slow movement is searching with a faint suggestion of
Liszt; however, one may detect a premonition of mature
Bruckner in the shifting of tonal planes and a
characteristic slightly clerical closing cadence. The
more animated middle section is very Schubertian in its
use of insistent dotted rhythms and makes for an
attractive contrast. The return of the main theme is
more contrapuntal while retaining its muted lyricism.
The charming scherzo is virtually a minuet, very
Haydnesque and almost anachronistic; interestingly the
clerical cadence reappears, suggesting a possible link
to the slow movement, a device to which Bruckner would
return in later works. The trio is more in the nature
of a Ländler and quite Austrian in flavor. The finale
is a rondo, its first theme bearing a resemblance to
that of the first movement. The lyrical second theme is
followed by an unusual spiraling figure leading back to
the first theme. This in turn is followed by a rhythmic
contrapuntal episode, followed by a repetition of all
three themes in order. A sequence on a fragment of the
third theme leads to the terse coda.
Source: Allmusic
(https://www.allmusic.com/composition/string-quartet-in
-c-minor-wab-111-mc0002386804).
Although originally written for String Quartet, I
created this Interpretation of the Quartet in C Minor
(WAB 111) for Woodwind Quartet (Flute, Oboe, Bb
Clarinet & Bassoon).
SHEET MUSIC