In Memoriam - Günter Wand conducting Bruckner 9

In case anyone wonders, it's in the 3rd movement, time index 1:32:08 on the DVD Günter Wand, NDR Sinfonieorchester playing Schubert 8th and Bruckner 9th (TDK), which i had to buy after seeing this! The Maestro's facial expressions are utterly captivating. Rest in peace (with the occasional Bruckner Symphony played by the angels), Maestro Wand!

These bars are for me the best in music history....

This climax is truly terrifying! Bruckner's 9th is outstanding.  I rank it even greater than Beethoven's 9th.

souraint et serein ?

This music ,in my mind part of the greatest symphony ever composed was so way out of line that the publishers of the score could not believe what they were listening to,and tried to "clean it up".

Never happened, and there are plenty of piled up dissonances (the opening of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth, for one) that were "out of line", as you put it. Have you never heard the clashes in Mozart's Dissonance Quartet or Beethoven's Grosse Fuge? How about the finale of Chopin's Second Sonata?

Bruckner had serious psychological problems. He was what one would call an obsessive character. He couldn't pass a church without feeling he had to count every window and he had a morbid fascination with dead bodies. He had a full scale breakdown when studying for his counterpoint exams and ended up in a mental institution. Yet, he was also VERY simple, pious and not at all an "intellectual", as Mahler was. His symphonies are, like Haydn's, dedicated mostly to God. But a failure? I think not.

The actual reason that Bruckner did not complete the 9th had to do with the reaction of the conductor, Levi, to his first draft of the Eighth. It was so negative that Bruckner first went into a deep depression and when he emerged began to revise all of his symphonies. This took away he time he would have spent on the Ninth. As to Bruckner's "failure", I'm afraid I don't see it that way. He may have been a late bloomer, but he was not a failure. (continued)

The Furtwangler 1942 tape-recording of S9 makes this similarity clearer than others. Others prefer to make S9 into "pretty" music. Schubert "unfinished" is kindred to B9 in that no sane composer could seriously compose a continuation of either. There's nowhere left for them to go on emotionally. Austrian society was extremely conventional and so S and B were repressed from publishing their true thoughts, such as the "revised" ending of 1st mvt of B8 removing the conventional "proper" ending.

Ok, I've managed to see idue's original comment. It's off the mark in that this does not represent being in hell either. Just failure. Brucker's life was a tragic personal failure notwithstanding his great fame. Some people lack the emotional/empathic means to see this.