Symphony No. 7, WAB 107

Cellos and a solo horn rise through E major above tremolo violins. Violas join the melody, then a clarinet. The single melodic line takes up most of the opening page.

Bruckner told Hans Richter that the melody had come to him in a dream, in which his old mentor Ignaz Dorn played it on a viola and promised him success. Bruckner woke, lit a candle and wrote the tune down.

Oboe and clarinet play the second theme together, marked Ruhig (calm), while the strings play separate lines beneath them. Later in the movement the strings play the melody in inversion.

The first page of Bruckner’s autograph is dated 23 September 1881, from his summer holiday at St Florian. He did not complete this movement until 29 December 1882, and in the meantime he wrote the whole of the Scherzo and Trio.

The violins play in octaves over repeated short notes in the basses. Bruckner marks the violin line immer hervortretend (always prominent). The third theme is built from compact phrases and moves more briskly than the long melodies before it.

Benjamin-⁠Gunnar Cohrs, who edited the symphony in 2015, heard in this third theme an echo of the parallel passage in Beethoven’s “Eroica”. He also found traces of Bizet’s Carmen, a Vienna favourite at the time.

At letter I the cellos resume the opening figure beneath sustained flute and bassoon notes. From letter K clarinet, bassoon and horn exchange shorter fragments of it.

In July 1882 Bruckner was at Bayreuth for the first season of Wagner’s Parsifal, and met Wagner for the last time. He later recalled Wagner’s parting words: “Be calm, Bruckner. Goodnight!” Wagner died in Venice on 13 February 1883, six weeks after Bruckner completed this movement.

The opening melody returns inverted, in C minor. Woodwind entries follow one another downwards in canon, and brass and strings play the chords beneath them. Bruckner restores Tempo I, and the quiet development is interrupted abruptly at full strength.

At letter O the opening cello theme returns in horn and trumpet. Above it, flute and first violins play the theme in inversion, so the two forms sound together, one rising and the other falling.

Arthur Nikisch conducted the première with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig’s Neues Theater on 30 December 1884. Works by Liszt and excerpts from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung were also on the programme. Bruckner, then sixty, had his first great public success with a symphony.

Little more than two months after Leipzig, Hermann Levi conducted the Seventh in Munich on 10 March 1885. The two performances marked Bruckner’s international breakthrough. He dedicated the symphony to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner’s great patron.

The timpani, silent until this point in the movement, begin a soft roll on E. Double basses hold the same note while clarinets, oboe and flute climb above them. Bruckner marks the passage sehr feierlich (very solemn).

Wagner’s Rheingold prelude opens on a long low E♭ in the double basses. The Berlin Philharmonic’s note heard it again at the end of this movement, where basses and timpani hold a long E. The same note identified other Wagnerian echoes across the symphony.

E major is held beneath flowing violin figures and broad wind phrases. Trombones, tuba and timpani sustain the bass while the other instruments join the ascent. The marking begins “very calm”, then asks for gradually a little more speed.

Four Wagner tubas and a contrabass tuba begin in C♯ minor, doubled by violas, cellos and basses. The melody rises, pauses and falls back. The violins rest through its four-bar phrase and enter after it.

The violins enter on their lowest string. Bruckner keeps them on the G string as the melody climbs, marked “G Saite immer fort” in the Gutmann first edition (bars 5–⁠9). Their five-bar phrase follows the four-bar opening.

Bruckner later told his former pupil Felix Mottl that he had come home one day very sad, thinking that “before long the Master would die”, and that the C♯ minor theme of the Adagio had then come to him. Wagner died in Venice on 13 February 1883.

Twenty-two bars in, Bruckner quotes the melody he set to “Non confundar in aeternum” (“let me never be put to shame”) in his Te Deum, finished not long before. It appears once only, at a slower tempo than in the Te Deum.

Wagner devised the tenor and bass tubas for his Ring. Bruckner was the first to write for them in a symphony. In this movement four of his eight horn players switch to them.

The strings begin a new tune in F♯ major. The marking is Moderato, three beats to a bar, and the violins play running notes. Low strings play the bass pizzicato while clarinet and bassoon add soft phrases.

Bruckner modelled this Adagio on the slow movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, in which a slow theme in 4/4 alternates with a faster one in 3/4. Benjamin-⁠Gunnar Cohrs identified the singing theme that follows the first tuba chorale as a quotation of the parallel passage in the Ninth.

The Wagner tubas bring back the C♯ minor opening. This time the first violins play a separate line above it, and violas and cellos double the brass melody.

Benjamin-⁠Gunnar Cohrs heard a funeral march in the line of those in Beethoven’s Third and Seventh Symphonies. He suggested that Bruckner may first have mourned the dead of the 1881 Ringtheater fire, and only later connected the coda with Wagner’s death.

The tuba theme returns varied and expanded, with new countersubjects around it. The music builds to a bright outburst in G major.

The three-beat tune returns in A♭ major, a whole tone above its first appearance. Flutes and oboes double the violins’ melody, and bassoons and inner strings play other moving lines. The plucked bass returns.

The tuba theme returns for the third time. Above it, the first violins play a continuous chain of arpeggios, marked to keep an even strength, without swelling. The tubas and lower strings carry the melody beneath them with crescendo markings.

Bruckner finished the sketch of the Adagio on 11 January 1883. Wagner died in Venice on 13 February. By 21 April Bruckner had completed the orchestral score.

The long ascent reaches C major. Winds and brass hold their melody across the bar, and both violin sections continue in rising and falling figures beneath it.

The climax carries the symphony’s only cymbal crash, at its exact midpoint. Bruckner first wrote the movement without percussion and added the cymbals later. In the autograph the part is crossed out and marked “gilt nicht”, “not valid”, though the words are thought not to be his; the crash is usually played.

The last thirty bars are funeral music for Wagner, who died in Venice on 13 February 1883, written “in memory of the highly blessed, dearly beloved immortal master”. Wagner tubas and horns play the closing passage.

On the day after the Munich première in March 1885, Hermann Levi took Bruckner to Die Walküre. The orchestra stayed after the audience had left. Around midnight Levi had the musicians play the Adagio’s funeral music for Bruckner alone in the empty theatre.

At letter Z the low brass hold a C♯ major chorale. Above it the horns play a fragment of the opening melody. The strings sustain the harmony, then play the last chords pizzicato.

On 1 May 1945 Reichssender Hamburg broadcast the Seventh’s Adagio after excerpts from Wagner’s Rheingold and Götterdämmerung. At 10.25 that night the music stopped, drums rolled three times, and the announcer reported Hitler’s death.

The strings repeat a compact figure. After four bars a solo trumpet enters with an octave leap and a sharply pointed rhythm, and the clarinet follows. The string figure continues underneath.

The strings resume quietly and the winds follow in longer phrases. Bruckner inverts the short figures and passes them between high and low instruments.

Bruckner wrote this Scherzo before he had finished the first movement. He completed the sketch by 14 July 1882 and scored it between 12 August and 16 October. He composed the Adagio after the Scherzo.

Soft timpani introduce the trio. First violins play a long F major melody, marked gesangvoll (songful), over a held bass. The tempo is slower, and the trumpet’s pointed rhythm returns among the violin phrases.

On 8 December 1881, Vienna’s Ringtheater burned across the street from Bruckner’s home. Afraid the fire would spread, he gathered his manuscripts. The following day he saw the bodies of victims being carried away, and he described the disaster in a letter to his brother-in-law.

Benjamin-⁠Gunnar Cohrs heard the trio as a picture of the audience in the Ringtheater before the fire. He described it as a lyrical waltz in F major, innocent and intimate, introduced by ghostly timpani, with the people in the stalls in a happy mood and unaware that anything was wrong.

The trio ends in F major. After the pause, the quick string figure in A minor returns, followed by the trumpet call. Bruckner asks for the whole scherzo again, including its quiet wind exchanges and brass entries.

Cohrs read the returning Scherzo as a fire, with the strings’ figure as flames. The trumpet call, long heard as a cock-crow, may in his view be the “red cock”, a folk expression for flames on a burning roof.

Arthur Nikisch conducted the première of the Seventh with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig on 30 December 1884, when Bruckner was sixty. His symphonies had met hostile receptions for years. This performance was a public triumph.

Woodwind and brass join the strings’ repeated figure. Trumpets carry the opening rhythm forward, and trombones, tuba and timpani reinforce the final climb. The scherzo ends in A minor with the whole orchestra playing together.

The first violins play the notes that open the symphony in a quick, double-dotted rhythm, over tremolo in the second violins. The cellos and basses then take up the theme. In the first movement the same notes begin a long melody.

The violins play long, quiet notes in A♭ major. The violas add a second line, and the cellos and basses play a pizzicato bass that moves by semitones. The chords of the chorale change as these lower parts move.

A discarded first page of the finale has no staves for Wagner tubas. According to Cohrs, who edited the score, Bruckner apparently planned the movement without them. The finished finale uses them.

Bruckner finished the sketch of the finale on 10 August 1883 and its orchestral score on 5 September. The first page of the symphony is dated 23 September 1881 at St Florian, nearly two years earlier.

Strings, woodwinds and brass play the third theme in A minor together, in octave doublings. The strings are marked to bow strongly throughout, and schwer asks for weight on the falling phrase.

Cohrs heard an organ toccata in the dotted rhythm of the finale’s opening tune and of this third theme. He described the powerful third theme and its restatement as the centre of the movement.

The strings stop. Flute, oboe and clarinet pass a quiet phrase down through the woodwind, and the Wagner tubas follow. A few soft timpani notes on C carry over from the preceding passage, then the drum also stops.

Bruckner set the finale’s main ideas in E major, A♭ major and C major. These keys lie a major third apart and divide the octave into three equal parts. Relations by fifths play only a minor part.

The composer Hugo Wolf and the conductor Hermann Levi both found certain parts of this finale “incomprehensible”. Both later came to appreciate it.

The conductor Georg Tintner called this finale, next to the rest of the symphony, “more like the finale in a Haydn symphony”. It runs about thirteen minutes, against twenty-two for the first movement. The Fifth’s finale runs twenty-three minutes against nineteen, the Eighth’s twenty-one against fourteen.

The orchestra stops on a held note. Violins begin the chorale again over plucked cellos and basses, and oboe, clarinet and horn join its long phrases. The third theme has returned before the second; in this recapitulation Bruckner brings the themes back in reverse order.

Arthur Nikisch played through the new symphony on two pianos with Bruckner’s pupil Josef Schalk, and decided to conduct it with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. The première took place in Leipzig on 30 December 1884.

Bruckner told a friend in Linz that Hermann Levi had called the Seventh “the most important symphonic work since 1827”, the year Beethoven died. Levi later called it a Wunderwerk and the “crowning event” of his career as a conductor.

A quiet timpani roll on E begins beneath repeated string chords. Horns enter in pairs with the dotted tune and trumpets follow. The woodwinds then sustain the harmony above them, and each new voice adds to the crescendo over the held bass note.

The horns lengthen the dotted tune into the broad opening theme of the first movement. Trumpets and clarinets follow with its descending figure while the violins continue their quick figures. The harmony stays in E major, and the timpani roll through to the last chord.