Bruckner, Schoenberg and Mahler in Australia

Effective programming of classical music concerts is a fraught art. What makes a selection of pieces satisfying to a broad audience, enlightening to connoisseurs, rewarding to players, and even profitable at the box office? These questions involve intriguing, sometimes risk-laden judgments, often needing to be made a couple of years before concerts even take place. In business terms, programming is a bet on the reception by an ensemble’s many stakeholders—themselves often with radically different stakes—of an event or whole season of events to be presented in an uncertain future. As the pandemic years illustrated, any amount of careful planning was not enough when the erratic recurrence of viral variants closed venues, or whole states, for months, driving many an entrepreneur towards insolvency.

Punters tend to buy tickets for concerts which bear the expectation of something enjoyable to them, perhaps suggested by a composer’s name (for instance, Malcolm Williamson), the type of work to be performed (piano concerto), the advertised soloist (Piers Lane), or even just the assuring, open smile of the evening’s gazetted vocalist. Yet ensembles can pay a price in terms of audience fatigue through scheduling too many well-known pot-boilers, performers or work-types in too short a time, just as they can pay a price for a program of pieces or performers that is just too unfamiliar, in too many ways, to its audience. Once upon a time, ensembles relied upon audience loyalty through selling subscriptions to a set of concerts, and so might occasionally push the envelope with new works or emerging artists. After all, there has to be a first time for everything, for everyone, doesn’t there?

Now, even those subscribers of old seem to want something more flexible; they are more likely to be just-in-time purchasers, as more youthful or popular music lovers have been for some time. Simone Schinkel, director of Music Victoria, in an ABC Radio National interview on February 21, speaks of “a new consumer habit that we have to adjust to that just doesn’t work when the business is built on [advanced] ticket sales”. Audiences in 2024 specifically do not like being told by arts leaders what or whom they must see, or being backed into complicated deals packaging both rough and smooth listening expectations.

Programming requirements differ, whether a concert appears as part of a periodic series of mixed events, a thematic festival—such as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s presentation of the Beethoven symphonic cycle this November—or as a once-off gig, often paying homage to a particular composer, performer or style. And rare are the concert programmers who can resist the lure of anniversaries, whether they commemorate the births or deaths of famous artist personages or landmark works in Western music’s history, such as The Rite of Spring. (Marriages, of course, are best avoided!) It is riskier mounting such anniversary events, but great if they are successfully pulled off as once-in-a-lifetime curiosities. Better still is when such events blow dust off an anniversarian figure’s less-known works—such as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s Australian premiere of Schoenberg’s massive Gurrelieder on March 15. Or, which unveil a novel arrangement (say, for saxophones) of a well-known string quartet, or even the first completion of a mysterious, “posthumous” work.

This year is a truly bumper year for musical anniversaries, so much so that for some ensembles they risk derailing conventional scheduling completely. May 7 is the bicentenary of the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth. Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue celebrated its premiere’s centenary on February 12. November 29 is the centenary of the death of Giacomo Puccini, considered the most popular opera composer after Verdi, and July 17 marks the same for the former’s Italian compatriot, Ferruccio Busoni. Puccini and Busoni left incomplete opera scores—Turandot and Dr Faust, respectively—which are now available in various completions or interpretations. But most significant, to me, among these 2024 anniversarians are two titans of Austrian music: the symphonist Anton Bruckner, who was born on September 4, 1824, and the musical iconoclast Arnold Schoenberg, born 150 years ago on September 13.

Bruckner was a conservative Catholic, an organist of well-nigh baroque musical interests, who grew up near Linz, in Upper Austria, before being drawn away to Vienna. His nine numbered symphonies, available in around twenty-five distinct performing variants, are essays in the development of “true cathedrals of sound”, particularly exploring the potential for the massed uses of stringed and brass instruments. Decades after his death, his music was taken up by Hitler, also born in Upper Austria, and Nazi cultural planners, considered demonstrative of the Germanic spirit in music, and a suitable complement to that other, more flamboyant musical icon championed under the Third Reich: Richard Wagner.

Schoenberg was more a revolutionary thinker and modernist. He grew up in Vienna, born to a Jewish family with Bohemian roots. As an adult he lived mainly in Berlin and Vienna, before ultimately settling as an American citizen. Although converting in 1898 to Lutheranism, he re-embraced his Jewish faith in 1933, shortly after Hitler dismissed him in the Nazis’ first major purge of Jewish intellectuals. Not only was his music not featured, he was quickly placed on a list of “degenerate” artists, both alive and dead, whose works were proscribed in Germany (and then, following the Anschluss, in Austria also). In contrast to Bruckner, who preferred abstract symphonies rather than storied music, Schoenberg’s early and, today, most popular works are often ultra-expressionist essays, including anguished plots or texts. His later works, on the other hand, essayed the more abstract potentialities of atonal music and twelve-tone systems, for which he would become famous, or infamous.

According to the Anton Bruckner Society’s latest tracking, nearly a thousand concerts of his works are scheduled for performance, somewhere around the globe, in this anniversary year, from Tokyo to Glasgow and West Palm Beach to Antwerp. Orchestral music’s global trend-setter, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, has already brought out a new boxed set of its recent digital concert hall recordings of all nine numbered symphonies, scheduling fresh interpretations of them all across its 2023 to 2025 seasons, as well as the two early, unnumbered symphonies: the 1869 Symphony in D minor, No. 0, and the 1863 Study Symphony in F minor, No. 00.

Such a comprehensive exercise of programming is indicative of the fascination that central European audiences, in particular, still maintain for Bruckner. A curiosity of this Bruckner year is the impending completion of Gerd Schaller’s “2024 project”, which set out nearly a decade ago to perform all Bruckner’s symphonies, in all their variants, both in staged concerts and for CD release. This project’s enthusiasm also reflects the delight of forensic musicologists in poring over the seemingly endless complexities of the many rival editions. The Oxford Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure and Interpretation, of which I am the Series Editor, is bringing out a new volume, written by Benjamin M. Korstvedt, entitled Bruckner’s Fourth: The Biography of a Symphony. It plots the composer’s work over two decades—and three competing variants—to fine-tune this great symphony, popularly known as “The Romantic”.

Between May and November, the Antipodes also acknowledge Bruckner’s natal milestone, with celebratory performances of that Fourth Symphony (in Melbourne, September 5 and 7, and Geelong, September 6, both conducted by Daniel Carter; and Hobart, November 2, conducted by Eivind Aadland); of the Eighth Symphony (in Sydney, August 7 to 10, four performances conducted by Simone Young); and of the Ninth Symphony (in Auckland, May 2, and Brisbane, August 23 and 24, conducted by Johannes Fritzsch). Compared with those thousand events elsewhere, this is not an enormous homage, but ever-cautious concert planners must hope that the anniversary will flush out a critical mass of enthusiasts, at least in our larger cities. Our larger orchestras, particularly in their brass sections, clearly maintain an appetite for realising Bruckner’s “cathedrals of sound”.

Schoenberg’s sesquicentennial milestone more concentrates its orchestral Australian celebrations in Sydney, but elsewhere spreads its celebrations across a variety of ensemble types, including smaller chamber ensembles. This is not surprising, as chamber music is more common in Schoenberg’s repertory than Bruckner’s; indeed, Schoenberg did not write a formal symphony at all. His orchestral fare seems to start in Sydney on March 15 and 16, with that gigantic, ninety-minute cantata, Gurrelieder (1900–1911), calling for over 300 performers, with five vocal soloists, a narrator, three choruses and an augmented “grand orchestra”, all conducted by Simone Young. Also in Sydney, on May 15, is the imaginative “When George Met Arnold”, involving Gershwin and Schoenberg selections, including the latter’s Piano Concerto, with Simon Tedeschi as soloist, as well as Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande and the Five Orchestral Pieces. On June 28 and 29, Queensland Symphony Orchestra audiences will hear the rarely performed curiosity Accompaniment to a Film Scene, subtitled “Threatening Danger, Fear, Catastrophe”, composed in 1929/30 as Wall Street crashed. The year runs out with performances of Schoenberg’s monodrama Transfigured Night, in Sydney (October 10), Penrith (October 11), and Melbourne (November 7). As mentioned, many other Schoenberg works are scheduled by smaller chamber ensembles or individual soloists.

As I surveyed the final schedules for the 2024 Australian orchestral season, it was impossible not to note the currently overpowering, perhaps even overweening, presence in our concert halls of the third of the Austrian trilogy of musical Titans: Gustav Mahler. He, who learned so much about writing symphonies from Bruckner, and was a major influence upon the emerging Schoenberg, comfortably trumps them both in current programmers’ estimations. Mahler has no compelling anniversary in 2024, but clearly is called on to help reflate the attendance and earnings statistics of our orchestras.

Reviewing the Melbourne performance by the Australian World Orchestra (AWO) of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony last November, I made the off-hand comment that an Australian boxed set of all nine Mahler symphonies seemed in the making. For all nine of his symphonies were, or will be, performed between last and next November. In brief, the First (Adelaide SO), the Second (Sydney, Ku-ring-gai Philharmonic), the Third (Melbourne SO), the Fourth (Canberra SO), the Fifth (Sydney SO), the Sixth (Queensland SO), the Seventh (QSO), the Eighth, “Symphony of a Thousand” (Perth, WASO), and the Ninth (AWO). And I note that it was with five performances of the Resurrection Symphony, conducted by Young, that the renovated Concert Hall at the Sydney Opera House was reopened in July 1992. So, a pan-Australian boxed set, featuring a federally spread array of orchestras, is certainly possible.

It is not just the professional symphony orchestras that are in love with Mahler. One of our youth orchestras, the Queensland Youth Symphony, has in recent years performed three Mahler symphonies. And the Australian Chamber Orchestra is playing Mahler’s hour-long Song of the Earth nine times during May across the four eastern Australian capitals. No ensemble seems to be attempting Mahler’s Tenth, only the first movement of which he had all but completed when he died in 1911, but which has received several more-or-less “authentic” completions over the last century. You can hear an excellent performance of its entirety in Deryck Cooke’s completion, on the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall, conducted by Daniel Harding.

Dika Newlin, a late student of Schoenberg, in her book Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg (1947), looked at the cross-influence of her three Austrian Titans. She recognised that Mahler, though following in the symphonic footsteps of Bruckner, also articulated “the prototype of modernism” that so influenced Mahler’s younger contemporaries, such as Schoenberg, even though they had resolutely turned away from the romantic model of the symphony. When the box-office figures come through from our 2024 Australian season it will be interesting to see whether programmers’ bets on the audience drawing power of Bruckner, Schoenberg, or their current favourite, Mahler, will return dividends or deficits. I have my bets on Bruckner.

Malcolm Gillies is a musicologist and retired vice-chancellor, now living in Canberra.