Stanislaw Skrowaczewski is the Felix and Eleanor Slatkin Guest Artist.
Ewa Kupiec is the Ann and Paul Lux Guest Artist.
The concert of Friday, March 3, is underwritten in part by a generous gift from Mr. and Mrs. Whitney R. Harris.
The concert of Friday, March 3, is sponsored by UBS.

The Noble Romantics
BY PAUL SCHIAVO 

            Franz Liszt and Anton Bruckner were two of the most remarkable musicians of the 19th century, artists of bold vision and strong personality. Both produced work informed by, and giving voice to, the spirit of Romanticism that dominated the artistic and intellectual life of their era. But whereas their music has points in common, it also is distinct in many important ways. Similarly, the personalities of Liszt and Bruckner shared certain traits--notably an innate piety and generosity--but in other ways were quite different.

            Both Liszt and Bruckner were born into modest circumstances in the Austrian provinces. (Liszt’s supposed Hungarian nationality is thinly founded on part of his father’s ancestry.) Yet the trajectory of their careers could not have been more dissimilar. A child prodigy, Liszt developed into a virtuoso pianist of unprecedented ability and became the most famous performing artist of the 19th century. During his youth he toured throughout Europe, winning such acclaim and wealth as no musician had previously known. Liszt’s celebrity, which was born of charisma as well as accomplishment, guaranteed that he did not lack for female attention, and he had several passionate love affairs during his period as a touring virtuoso. This worldly success made his final years all the more remarkable. Beginning in 1861, at age 50, he transformed himself from a somewhat free‑thinking, and free‑living, man of the world into a pious devotee of Roman Catholicism. Eventually he took up residence in a monastery and received lower orders of initiation into the clergy.

            Bruckner, by contrast, had no need for a later-life conversion to faith, for he was always deeply religious. Schooled in a monastery near the Austrian city of Linz, he trained as a school teacher and church organist, and he spent the first decades of his career working in those capacities, composing only during his spare time. Bruckner’s cloistered existence--he was employed mostly in the same monastery school in which he had studied--could not have been more unlike Liszt’s globe-trotting early life. Then, in what seems a mirror reflection of Liszt’s later career, Bruckner left his monastery for a decidedly cosmopolitan milieu. At age 44 he moved to Vienna, where his creative life took a new turn.

            Prior to his residence in the Austrian capital, Bruckner had devoted his composing mostly to church music. Now he concentrated on writing symphonies, the works upon which his fame rests. Eventually he produced nine compositions in this genre (plus two early ones that are not numbered and not part of his “official” canon). Interestingly, the personality that emerged in those works was entirely unlike the one their author showed the world. In all appearances, Bruckner cut a figure far removed from the 19th‑century ideal of the artist as Romantic hero (an ideal Liszt embodied for much of his career). Modest and self‑effacing, diffident toward anyone who might be considered a superior, the composer spoke and dressed in a dowdy manner, and his personal habits, like his religious and political views, were unfashionably conservative. Socially awkward, he never married; the closest he seems to have come to any romantic liaison were several misconceived marriage proposals tendered to girls far too young for him.

            Yet Bruckner’s symphonies are, without exception, compositions of heroic stature, a quality one would hardly predict from their author’s personal demeanor. Their imposing scale, the bold themes from which they are built, the ambitious development of those themes, and their powerful orchestration create a sense of grandeur and drama equaled by few musical works. It was these qualities that moved Hugo Wolf, a perceptive critic as well as an important composer, to declare that “the symphonies of Bruckner are the most important symphonic creations that have been written since Beethoven.”

            Liszt also was an inherently dramatic composer, though in a different way, and he also had a penchant for grandeur--his detractors claimed it was grandiloquence--and bold musical gestures. We can compare these musicians in other respects. Both were innovators, achieving new concepts of harmony and, in Liszt’s case, compositional form. (Bruckner’s symphonies mostly adhere to established formal patterns, though the large scale on which they are executed arguably counts as a novelty of design.) Both were pilloried for those innovations in an era when musical matters were far more widely discussed and debated than they are today. Liszt may have won adulation among concertgoers, and he had devoted admirers in such musicians as Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, and Wagner. But he found stern opposition in the likes of Schumann and especially Brahms, who once helped publish a declaration condemning what he considered the radical tendencies of Liszt and Wagner.

            Bruckner, too, became a polarizing figure after he moved to Vienna. Those musicians most loyal to the latter-day classicism of Brahms, who also lived in the Austrian capital and dominated its musical life to a considerable extent, found Bruckner’s massive symphonic architecture either incomprehensible or simply distasteful. Eduard Hanslick, the powerful critic of the Vienna Neue freie Presse and a loyal Brahms acolyte, saw in Bruckner “the greatest living musical peril, a sort of tonal Satan,” a man who “composes like a drunkard.” It did not help that Bruckner utterly lacked the temperament and guile to advance his cause in the highly politicized world of Viennese music. Bruckner did have admirers, but most were young musicians (including the teen-aged Gustav Mahler) with little standing in Vienna’s artistic establishment.

            Happily, both Liszt and Bruckner possessed the fortitude to persist in the face of sometimes fierce attacks and, especially in Liszt’s case, to do so with impressive grace. Liszt behaved with extraordinary generosity to his colleagues, even those who did not return the favor. Chopin, Schumann, Berlioz, Wagner and a great many others benefited from Liszt’s advocacy of their music, as did the many young composers he encouraged. He taught many students without ever accepting a fee. In addition, Liszt often donated his time and talent to raising money for worthy causes, ranging from aid to Italian freedom-fighters and Hungarian flood relief to restoring the Cologne Cathedral and supporting various musical organizations. Although Bruckner had far less to bestow on others, his unfailing humility and gratitude toward those who befriended him make him one of the most touching and admirable personalities among the great composers.

            Liszt and Bruckner shared one other trait in common: both were keenly self-critical in their work and often rewrote their compositions in an effort to achieve the best possible realization of their ideas. Each work on our program provides a case in point. First drafted in 1839, Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto in A major underwent a number of revisions and reached its final form only in 1861. Since Liszt was a piano virtuoso of the highest order, it comes as no surprise that the solo part to the A-major Concerto offers passages of dazzling keyboard technique. Yet the work’s chief interest lies not in its pianistic displays but, rather, in its innovative approach to concerto form. The piece unfolds as a single movement, but one that encompasses a variety of moods and tempos in its several sections, thus achieving a satisfying diversity of music within a fairly compressed format. This diversity is balanced and controlled by Liszt’s much-remarked procedure of “thematic transformation,” in which a single melody reappears in various forms repeatedly (or “cyclically,” to use the term favored by musicians) throughout a piece. Such thematic recurrences serve to unify the A-major Concerto, binding its parts into a cohesive whole.

            It should be noted that Liszt’s use of cyclical thematic transformation proved one of the most influential developments in 19th-century composition. It was taken up by a number of important musicians of the generation that followed Liszt’s, proving especially popular with some of the leading French composers (Saint-Saëns and Franck, for example), though it provided grist for the mills of Strauss and other German practitioners also. The Piano Concerto No. 2 provides one of its most successful applications.

            The opening measures present the work’s most important thematic idea, a pensive motif heard in the woodwinds. That figure sounds again almost immediately in the strings between rolling arpeggios from the piano. Orchestra and soloist now join in a rhapsodic extension of this material, the piano providing an embroidery of running filigree. Presently we hear the movement’s second and more dramatic subject, a virile theme leaping widely over gruff scale figures in the bass. The music becomes quite agitated but soon arrives at a tranquil central section that features a lovely duet for the piano and solo cello, and serves, in effect, as the concerto’s slow movement.

            A short solo cadenza that follows gives way to a vigorous march‑like treatment of the principal theme. One might expect Liszt to conclude the concerto on this stirring note, but instead, the piano breaks off for a quiet meditation on the initial melody. Soon it is joined by the orchestral instruments, which lure the soloist back to the unfinished business of providing a satisfactory finale. This they accomplish together in a brief but suitably brilliant coda passage.

            Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 also came into being through a prolonged genesis. The composer began writing this work early in 1874. By November of that year Bruckner had finished the score--or so he thought. Though he felt confident while composing the symphony, his assurance subsequently faltered. Between 1876 and 1880, at the urging of a number of his supporters, Bruckner undertook extensive revisions of most of his early symphonies. Rewriting of the Fourth began in 1878 and entailed alteration of the first and second movements plus an entirely new scherzo. The finale underwent only minor changes at this time, but in 1880 Bruckner completed a substantially new and more dramatic closing movement.

            Early the next year, the renowned conductor Hans Richter agreed to direct a performance of the Symphony No. 4 with the Vienna Philharmonic. It was during the preparation for this performance that there occurred an incident that poignantly illustrated Bruckner’s humility and lack of urbanity. After a rehearsal, the composer felt so pleased with Richter’s direction of the piece that he went to the conductor, one of the most esteemed and successful musicians of the time, and pressed a small coin into his hand as a tip.

            Bruckner subtitled this symphony “Romantic,” a designation that should be understood in a general rather than specific sense. Though pressed to do so, the composer never described his music in terms of any literary program, and he even disavowed such explanations by his well‑intentioned but overly imaginative supporters.