Bruckner: The curse of the ninth

It's 100 years since its premiere, but Bruckner's unfinished Ninth Symphony still poses more questions than it answers. Bayan Northcott on the birth of an incomplete masterpiece

It is curious how much of the history of music has turned on matters medical. Had Beethoven's liver held out for a few more months in 1827, he might have completed part or all of the 10th Symphony he was sketching. Even if the full score had remained unfinished or only reached posthumous performance, at least we should have been spared the pervasive notion that ninth symphonies are fated to be summatory and terminal.

Both Schubert and Mahler sketched 10th symphonies more completely than Beethoven – even if Schubert's Seventh and Eighth were unfinished and Mahler sought to cheat destiny by subtitling his song-cycle Das Lied von der Erde a symphony as well. Bruckner, meanwhile, preceeded his canonical nine with two preliminary works he dubbed his "Study Symphony" and "No 0".

In fact, just about the only major composers over the last 200 years to have composed exactly nine symphonies with the last as visionary testament are Dvorak and Vaughan Williams. So presumably it was the unprecedented scope, not to mention the extra-musical "message" of Beethoven's Choral Symphony that induced the ninth symphony syndrome, quite as much as the timing of his death. Bruckner, to whom Beethoven was musical God the Father, certainly approached his own Ninth in a comparable spirit of awe. As he once said, "I'll write my last symphony in D minor, just like Beethoven's Ninth. Beethoven won't object." The work was to be built on a still vaster scale than his Fifth and Eighth symphonies and dedicated "to the dear Lord God".

If such touching consecration also sounds a bit absurd, this was typical. Raised in provincial simplicity, lacerated by the Viennese sophisticates who mocked his unworldliness, Bruckner was a mass of insecurities, tending, in dark periods, towards obssessive mania. What for the most part held him together were, firstly, his belief in his musical mastery and vision and, secondly, his profound Catholic faith. But after a middle period of increasing confidence and dawning success in which he produced the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies, he was knocked back in 1887 when the conductor Hermann Levi turned down the Eighth.

This threw Bruckner into resurgence of self-doubt and a time-squandering mania for revision, in which the Eighth Symphony itself was arguably improved, but the First and Third certainly were not. As his health declined, some observers also divined a crisis of religious faith from the increasing desperation with which he broke out in prayer. Against these odds, it is amazing the first three movements of the Ninth reached completion in full score between 1889 and 1894, even if Bruckner might have gone on to revise these, too. But the voluminous sketches and drafts of the finale which preoccupied his increasingly fevered last two years resisted pulling together. And although at least one visitor claimed to have heard Bruckner playing the movement at the piano to the end, no indication of its last pages, in which he planned to synthesise the motifs and skills of a lifetime, has ever been found.

There was another cross Bruckner had to bear. Always a prey to conductors who wished to cut or otherwise "improve" his scores, he was more or less bullied by a junta of his pupils into accepting editions in which they systematically filleted his discursive forms and smoothed over his idiosyncratic orchestration. Bruckner was by no means entirely acquiescent and made sure his own definitive scores were parcelled away "for later times". But at his death on 11 October 1896, the collaborators were faced with a score that was both colossal and incomplete – and of a boldness uncompromising even by Bruckner's standards.

It was not till 11 February 1903 that one of them, the conductor Ferdinand Loewe, premiered and then published his own version of the three completed movements, with whole sections cut or recomposed and scarcely a bar of scoring unchanged. Instead of attempting a completion of the finale, Loewe substituted Bruckner's Te Deum. Astonishingly, Bruckner's original score had to wait until 1932 for its first hearing. As for the draft finale, more than one attempted completion has been heard since the last war. But, as Robert Simpson suggested in his pioneering book on Bruckner, there seems to be something ambiguous about the material, perhaps stemming from Bruckner's religious doubts, that refuses to kindle into the blazing affirmation he was aiming at.

Or could it be that, though formally unfinished, the Ninth is emotionally complete as it is? There have always been questions about Bruckner's finales. Why are the forms so full of disjunctions and leadings up the garden path? Why does he so often resort to material sounding like less fully-characterised reminiscences of things heard earlier in the work? Was Simpson right in suggesting Bruckner's finales were conceived as a kind of musical ground to the figures presented by their preceeding movements? Was Bruckner even searching for a new kind of finale which he never quite found?

The Ninth's first movement is in the form of a gigantic structural upbeat: an exposition reworked as a counter-exposition and crowned with a tumultuous coda. The tension invoked is suspended for a time in the icy iterations of the scherzo and ultimately discharged in a complementary downbeat only in the slow movement's last pages. On its way, the music passes though regions of unprecedented strangeness, culminating in a climax of terrifying dissonance, not the only hint that Bruckner might have steered 20th-century harmony in quite different directions from those it took. The final ebbing away could not be more conclusive; Bruckner called this Adagio his "farewell to life". Nor does the opening material he sketched for the finale suggest any convincing resuscitation.

Compared with this, the farewell gestures that conclude Vaughan Williams's Ninth remain questioning, enigmatic; even the heartbreaking expiration at the end of Mahler's Ninth seems less final – we know there was to be renewed life and love in his 10th. As for Beethoven, the triumph at the end of his Ninth expresses renewal; the late quartets were still to come and he was full of fresh plans. In the end, it is surely Bruckner's that remains the Ninth of Ninths.

'Discovering Music' – Stephen Johnson on Bruckner's Ninth is on Radio 3 this Sunday at 5pm. The symphony is performed by the Bournemouth SO on Radio 3 next Friday at 7.30pm