Renes on Bruckner

Munich conductor Hermann Levi rejected Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 in 1887. The self-doubting composer spent the next three years revising it, with the help of a protege, Josef Schalk.

As a result of all that tinkering, Bruckner left five versions of the symphony behind. Austrian musicologist Robert Hass sorted them out in the performing edition in wide use today. Among other things, Hass (1886-1960) restored a long stretch of the slow movement that Bruckner and Schalk had cut.

Guest conductor Lawrence Renes will use the Hass edition of the Bruckner’s Eighth in performances with the Milwaukee Symphony Friday and Saturday evenings (Nov. 13-14). Renes thinks Hass did right by Bruckner, and Renes has studied the various versions.

“Bruckner is always controversial,” Renes said, in an interview Monday. “He had so many friends and advisers. Bruckner was always looking for approval, and his weakness did not always serve his music well.

“I could not live with the cuts in the slow movement. The cuts removed a large part of the emotional architecture.”

Renes spoke by phone from Middleton, Wis., where the young Dutch conductor was visiting MSO music director Edo de Waart, his friend and mentor, at de Waart’s home. From 1994 to 1996, Renes was de Waart’s assistant at the Netherlands Radio Orchestra.

Renes first encountered Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 as a violinist with the National Youth Orchestra of the Netherlands. He played the 80-minute work again and again on a tour of Italy.

“I was 18 or 19,” Renes said. “This symphony carved a pretty deep impression. I felt very touched by it. I still feel very touched by it.”

The piece has become something of a specialty for Renes. Including the MSO, he’s done it with 13 different orchestras.

Bruckner is generally regarded as a late Romantic, but he doesn’t fit the rebellious and megalomaniac ways of , say, Liszt or Wagner. Bruckner was a small-town school teacher for 15 years and a church organist for most of his life. He was a devout Catholic. He traveled little. His politics, if he had any, were not radical. He did not lead a complicated sex life.

Bruckner never wrote an opera, but his music is on a Wagnerian scale. And Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” influenced his thinking in a big way.

And yet, Bruckner stuck to the same sonata and scherzo forms that Mozart employed. For that, many in Wagner’s camp viewed Bruckner as a buffoonish fuddy-duddy, tantamount to the despised Brahms. And many in Brahms’ camp heard Bruckner’s harmonies and enormous length and branded him a Wagnerite.

“Yes, Bruckner was a small-town teacher, but I am not convinced that his ambitions were that small,” Renes said. “They were curbed by his contemporaries.”

Bruckner (1824-1896) was nothing if not patient. From the boondocks and then from the larger city of Linz, he studied with both local and Viennese teachers well into his 40s, when he finally felt qualified to think of himself as a composer. He moved to Vienna, as harmony and counterpoint teacher at the conservatory and as a renowned organist, in 1867. Mahler was among his students there.

Early in his stay in Vienna, one of Bruckner’s former mentors looked at his first symphony, which Bruckner later withdrew, and complained that he could not find the principal theme. That is understandable; though his music is couched in Classical structures, Bruckner’s material is often more motive than melody. He doesn’t give you tunes to hum. It can be hard to know where the exposition ends and development begins.

“Bruckner reached the limits of what is possible in Classical form,” Renes said. “But that is part of the greatness of this piece. It’s so large, and it’s important to convey the architecture.

“But the form is a means to an end. If you only convey the architecture, it’s like watching the sunset with the person you love and thinking scientifically about the way the sun’s rays are refracted by the atmosphere.

“Bruckner, in the Eighth Symphony, asks for three harps, three solo violins; that’s the Holy Trinity. The Eighth Symphony is full of symbolism.

“It’s pure musical love, in a beautiful, religious way, like love for the Holy Madonna. Conducting it for me is a religious feeling for me. It always has been. But now I understand more of how it touches me, although it is very difficult to put into words. I hope that makes me more capable of communicating that feeling to the orchestra and to the audience.”

Lawrence Renes will conduct the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Marcus Center Uihlein Hall, 929 N. Water St. Tickets are $25-$93 at the MSO ticket line, 414 291-7605; at the Marcus box office, 414 273-7206; at at the MSO’s web site.

Research source: The Oxford Companion to Music, Oxford University Press, 2002