here - Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra

BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 8
The Viennese had never known what to make of Anton
Bruckner, with his country manners, severe Prussian haircut,
and perilously baggy suits. (Bruckner favoured wide pant
legs because they made it easier to reach the organ pedals.)
Beethoven, once mistakenly arrested as a vagrant, had
already proved how little appearance has to do with musical
greatness. But Bruckner was a more serious misfit in
Viennese society. He lacked the necessary skill for chitchat,
and when he spoke he often said the wrong thing. (When
his idol, Wagner, died in 1883, he could barely string together
two perfunctory sentences to send off to the composer’s
widow Cosima.) Music was his real language. When, at 67,
he was named a doctor of philosophy at the University of
Vienna, he told the rector magnificus : “I cannot find the words
to thank you as I would wish, but if there were an organ here,
I could tell you.”
Bruckner’s Eighth is the largest of his completed symphonies.
It begins quietly, in the same rhythm that opens Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony, although Beethoven would never have
dreamed of starting so far from the symphony’s announced
key of C minor, nor would he have made the journey last
so long. Getting used to the pace of a Bruckner symphony
was hard even in leisurely 19 th century Vienna, where stopping
for afternoon coffee sometimes actually took all afternoon.
There are first movements by Beethoven as long as this one,
but they are so full of energy and so tightly packed with
events that they pass like lightning. Bruckner writes music
that takes its time and demands that we submit ours to it.
He would not understand the person who, finding himself
in a great Gothic cathedral, buys a postcard rather than take
the thirty-minute tour. (He never tired of standing in the
great transept at Saint Florian, the towering masterpiece of
baroque architecture just down the road from his birthplace.)