Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony (1890), one of the last of the great Romantic symphonies, is a grandly complex masterpiece. Its critical reception has been fascinatingly contentious. Its music, at once extensive and distilled, directly confronts the problem of the symphony after Beethoven and after Wagner. This book explores this many-faceted work from several angles. It documents the complicated and often misunderstood history of the symphony's composition and revision and offers an accessible guide to its musical design. It demonstrates, by means of a study of well-known recordings, how performance styles have evolved in this century. It also revisits the conventional wisdom about the various versions and editions of the symphony and comes to some provocative new conclusions. --Publisher description. Read more... Abstract: This book explores Bruckner's Eighth Symphony (1890) from several angles, offering an accessible guide to its musical design. Read more... Frontmatter Preface and acknowledgments (page ix) A note on editions and terminology (page xi) Introduction (page 1) 1 Placing the Eighth Symphony (page 3) 2 The genesis and evolution of the Eighth Symphony (page 10) 3 The musical design and symphonic agenda of the Eighth (page 27) 4 The Adagio and the sublime (page 54) 5 The 1887 version and the 1890 version (page 68) 6 The 1892 edition, authorship, and performance practice (page 86) Appendix A: Haas's edition of the Eighth Symphony (page 104) Appendix B: Textual differences between The Finale in the 1890 version and the 1892 edition (page 107) Notes (page 111) Select bibliography (page 129) Index (page 132) Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony (1890), one of the last of the great Romantic symphonies, is a grandly complex masterpiece. This book explores this many-faceted work from several angles. It documents the complicated and often misunderstood history of the symphony's composition and revision and provides an accessible guide to its musical design. It demonstrates, by means of a study of well-known recordings, how performance styles have evolved in this century. It also revisits the conventional wisdom about the various versions and editions of the symphony and comes to some provocative new conclusions. In late nineteenth-century Vienna the symphony was fraught with cultural significance; it was widely seen as the musical genre, if not the art form, that most directly could, as Paul Bekker later put it, build a "community of feeling," a process of acute significance in the Habsburg Empire at a time when the old imperial system was increasingly strained by ethnic, nationalist, and democratic impulses. Bruckner's Eighth Symphony (1890), one of the last of the great Romantic symphonies, is a grandly complex masterpiece. This book explores this many-faceted work from several angles, offering an accessible guide to its compositional history and reception and to its musical design. Benjamin M. Korstvedt. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 129-131) And Index.
