Bruckner, String Quintet - Adagio 1/2

Bruckner, String Quintet - Adagio 1/2

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Bruckner
• String
• Quintet
• Adagio

[GryphonWahle]

I'm sure I constitute for at least 200 of the viewings of this piece.

[ashaam]

@GryphonWahle isn't this the most purely beautiful music written - ever?

[lewars1912]

I first discovered this about 20 years ago. It's lovely.

[ChicagoTheory]

@teagueqc Well, sure. We can't know for certain, but that's what I believe based on available evidence. =) Combine Kitzler's lessons with the quote from Bruckner's student and his increasing involvement with (and pursuit of) Wagner's music---not to mention the errie similarity of the quintet with LVB's Cavatina---and I'd argue that he knew the late quartets by 1878. I'd also have a tough time believing Kitzler showed Bruckner Tannhäuser but not late Beethoven.

[teagueqc]

@ChicagoTheory You may be right, but that's all one can say. Your assertion that Bruckner's studies with the cellist Kitzler would "certainly" have familiarised him with Beethoven's late quartets is simply not justified, with respect.

[ChicagoTheory]

@teagueqc I'm sure you're quoting Watson correctly, but I'd still question that statement. Bruckner had already been teaching in Vienna for a decade by the time he composed the Quintet (1878). And the Linz studies with Kitzler (1861-3), who is credited with getting him up to speed with nineteenth-century repertory (and introducing him Wagner's music), would certainly have familiarized him with LVB's late quartets---as they had the sonatas and symphonies.

[teagueqc]

@ChicagoTheory On another interesting point, have you noticed the striking similarities between this quintet (particularly, but not exclusively, its first movement) and the very first quartet by Hindemith? Not altogether surprising (given that the viola was Hindemith's own instrument) that he should have been familiar with Bruckner's quintet. However, there are some passages in Hindemith's earliest quartet that are clearly very directly influenced by the Bruckner.

[teagueqc]

@ChicagoTheory Perhaps we both have a point. You are doubtless right in correcting my assertion that Bruckner did not know the late quartets of Beethoven. However, it does not follow that he knew them by the time he composed the quintet. In fact, Derek Watson explicitly cites what he calls "the astonishing fact" that at the time he wrote the quintet, Bruckner had not yet heard "any" of the late quartets of Beethoven.

[ChicagoTheory]

But even if we reject that story as apocryphal, we do know Bruckner studied with Kitzler, who introduced him to Marx's analytical theories, which would play a role in his later revisions of his own works, and Zenetti, who was well versed in Beethoven's music. Bruckner's love of Wagner's music also makes it unlikely that he would be unfamiliar with the more adventurous compositions of the century that would have had a direct impact on the development of harmonic language after the 1830s.

[ChicagoTheory]

(cont.) as certain people make it out to be – those people who make an example of it and portray me as an idiot – ” then, maybe, Beethoven might take me by the hand and say, “My dear Bruckner, don’t bother yourself about it. It was no better for me, and the same gentlemen who use me as a stick to beat you with still don’t really understand my last quartets, however much they may pretend to”’.”