Bruckner: Symphony No. 8

by Benjamin M. Korstvedt

• ISBN13: 9780521635370
• ISBN10: 0521635373
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-05-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgments	ix
A note on editions and terminology	xi
Introduction	1	(2)
Placing the Eighth Symphony	3	(7)
The genesis and evolution of the Eighth Symphony	10	(17)
The musical design and symphonic agenda of the Eighth	27	(27)
The Adagio and the sublime	54	(14)
The 1887 version and the 1890 version	68	(18)
The 1892 edition, authorship, and performance practice	86	(18)
Appendix A: Haas's edition of the Eighth Symphony	104	(3)
Appendix B: Textual differences between The Finale in the 1890 version and the the 1892 edition	107	(4)
Notes	111	(18)
Select bibliography	129	(3)
Index	132