RUDOLF INNIG

Anton Bruckner's path to becoming a symphonic composer

532 pages
(Text volume: 386 pages with many musical examples
Appendix: 148 pages with transcriptions from the Kitzler study book)

Anton Bruckner - Symphony in F minor (WAB 99)

(ca. 80 pages, 30 €)

Unlike today, Anton Bruckner was known in his time not as a symphonist, but primarily as an organist. At the age of 21 (1845) he was appointed organist at the Augustinian monastery in St. Florian, where he had previously been accepted as a choirboy after the early death of his father in 1837. In 1855 he became organist at the cathedral in Linz and finally in 1869 with the title 'k.u.k. court organist' in Vienna.

In December 1861 Bruckner began further studies in free composition with the Linz theater conductor Otto Kitzler, who was 10 years younger than him, which gave him the decisive impulses for composing symphonic orchestral works.

The Kitzler study book, which was only published in 2014, traces this development on 326 pages with handwritten exercises, sketches and compositions by Bruckner. At the beginning (based on the composition and form theories of E. F. Richter, J. Chr. Lobe and A. B. Marx) there were exercises in period structure and the two- or three-part song form. This was followed by song compositions, sets of variations, a piano sonata, a string quartet and studies in instrumentation based on the Piano Sonata in C minor op. 13 by Beethoven.

The two-year lessons with his friend Kitzler ended in the spring of 1863 with Bruckner's first symphonic works, the orchestral pieces (WAB 96 and 97), the overture in G minor (WAB 98) and the symphony in F minor (WAB 99).

Here are the first pages of the Symphony in F minor in my transcription for organ.

Early Orchestral Pieces

(arr. for organ)
Goll Orgel
Marktkirche Hannover

A la vierge Marie

Noriko Fujii, soprano, Rudolf Innig, organ

Arthur Honegger: Trois Psaumes,

Marcel Dupré: Ave Maria, Jean Langlais: A la Vierge Marie,

Jehan Alain: Ave Maria,

Louis Vierne: Les Angélus,

Lili Boulanger: Pie Jesu,

André Jolivet: Messe Pour le Jour de la Paix,

Darius Milhaud: Cinq Prières

Louis Vierne (1870 – 1937) based his work on a spiritual poem by Jehan le Povre Moyne entitled ‘Les Angélus’. The three poems each describe the mood of people at the time of the Angelus ringing and the music tries to convey this.

Lili Boulanger (1893 – 1918), the younger sister of the famous pianist Nadja Boulanger, was the first woman to win the famous French composition prize ‘Prix de Rome’ at the age of just 20. She composed numerous works for choir and voices, but also purely instrumental works. In the last months of her ailing life, she wrote (alongside work on an unfinished opera) her own Requiem Pie Jesu for mezzo-soprano, string quartet, harp and organ (recorded here in a version for organ alone...

Jean Langlais (1907-1991), who had close contacts in America throughout his life, composed a very personal form of the Ave Maria in 1981 for the singer on this CD, Noriko Fujii.

Based on his own text, which freely expands the invocation and request of the liturgical Ave Maria, Jean Langlais wrote a short piece in which the requests are initially sung as if reciting the same melodic phrase, but which is then expanded into a large melodic gesture in the final request.  (Dr. Irmlind Capelle)