You don’t see Brahms and Bruckner on the same orchestral program very often. In late 19^th-century Vienna, Brahms and Wagner were musical opposites, and Bruckner was a Wagnerian. Wagner said, “I know of only one composer who measures up to Beethoven—and that is Bruckner.” Brahms, for his part, called Bruckner’s compositions “a swindle” and “symphonic boa constrictors.” So it’s actually a nice idea to pair the two composers—if you can find two works that will fit on one bill. Credit Channing Yu and the Mercury Orchestra for coming up with Saturday’s program at Sanders Theater: Brahms’s 16-minute cantata Schicksalslied (“Song of Destiny”) followed by Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. The two works share a calm luminosity; the symphony actually sounds like a commentary on the cantata. There’s even a conductor link: Hermann Levi led the premiere of Schicksalslied in 1871, and he also conducted the second ever performance of the Seventh in 1885, the one that established Bruckner as a composer. Both pieces struggled on Saturday, but it was still rewarding to hear them together.      

Brahms got the inspiration for Schicksalslied in the summer of 1868, some months after the premiere of Ein deutsches Requiem, when he was visiting his friend Albert Dietrich in the North German coastal town of Wilhelmshaven. Dietrich’s library included a volume of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, and there Brahms found “Hyperions Schicksalslied,” which had started out life buried in Hölderlin’s epistolary 1797–1799 novel Hyperion. This is what the three stanzas look like in translation:

You walk above in the light
on soft ground, blessed Spirits!
Shining godlike zephyrs
touch You gently,
as the fingers of a female musician
touch holy harp strings.

Fateless, like a slumbering
infant, the Heavenly Ones breathe;
chastely guarded
in modest buds,
Their souls bloom
eternally,
and Their blessed eyes
gaze with a quiet
eternal clarity.

To us, however, is given
no haven for our rest;
We vanish, we perish,
we suffering mortals,
blindly from one
moment to the next,  
the way water is thrown
from crag to crag,
all year long, down into the unknown.

Brahms set the first two stanzas as a 4/4 Adagio in E-flat major and the third as a 3/4 Allegro in C minor. He at first thought to follow with a full restatement of the Adagio but felt that too optimistic a conclusion, and the cantata remained unfinished while he worked on his Alto Rhapsody. In 1871, Levi suggested ending simply with the Adagio’s 28-measure orchestral prelude; Brahms enriched the instrumentation and shifted the key signature to C major, offering a ray of hope rather than a full blast of sunshine. Schicksalslied premiered October 18 in Karlsruhe, with Levi conducting.

The Adagio is marked Langsam und sehnsuchtsvoll (“Slow and yearning”), but it begins with timpani triplets suggestive of the timpani beats that open Brahms’s First Symphony, as if to say that even Hölderlin’s schicksallos (“fateless”) Heavenly Spirits are not unburdened by destiny. The altos’ entrance at measure 29 is accompanied by soaring flutes that lift us into a higher sphere. A walking bass in the cellos and double basses depicts the Spirits’ tread; divine harmony accompanies the “shining godlike zephyrs.” There’s no harp in the orchestra but harplike string arpeggios evoke the playing of the female musician. Three darkly exalted trombones bridge the first and second stanzas; solo flute describes the Souls’ eternal blooming, and then the timpani triplets announce the Allegro, which like the “Denn alles Fleisch” movement of Ein deutsches Requiem is a kind of funeral waltz, anguished at first, then resigned in the central fugal section. Solo flute elevates the return of the Adagio, and it seems the timpani has been exorcised, but soon the triplets are back, underlining and undermining the final sequence of rising C-major arpeggios.         

Saturday’s performance was devoted but not transparent. The timpani, which should sound ominous, seemed recessed, and I didn’t hear the crisp enunciation I expected from Holly MacEwan Krafka’s usually excellent New World Chorale. When the orchestra rose to a fortissimo, it was hard to hear the Chorale at all. At the quiet end, however, “wie die finger der Künstlerin” sounded as heartrending as Brahms could have wanted, as did the duet for flute (Frida Linderang) and horn (Jon McGarry) during the second stanza. Yu drove the Allegro section with fervor and energy; the final Adagio seemed to anticipate the “Im Abendrot” of Richard Strauss’s “Vier letzte Lieder.” But the piece needs more finesse and greater serenity.       

In a letter to Hans von Wolzogen following Levi’s Munich premiere of the Seventh Symphony in March 1885, Bruckner wrote that “Levi proposed a toast at the Artists’ Association [reception] to ‘the most significant symphonic work since the death of Beethoven!’ And added: the performance of this magnificent work (as he called it) was the crown of his artistic activity!” That was quite a statement given that Wagner had chosen Levi to conduct the July 1882 Bayreuth premiere of Parsifal. Bruckner was present at that premiere, where he saw Wagner for the last time.

He had by then already begun the Seventh. He would later tell Theodor Helm, “Yes, I wrote the Adagio for the death of the great unique one: partly in premonition, partly as funeral music after the catastrophe.” Wagner passed away on February 13, 1883, and the news was brought to Bruckner immediately. Yet a date in the symphony’s autograph manuscript suggests that he had finished his sketch of the entire movement in January, almost a month earlier. Whatever, Wagner’s shade hangs over the Seventh: the Adagio functions as a funeral ode, and in both the Adagio and the Finale Bruckner calls for Wagner tubas, the cross between a French horn and a tuba that Wagner commissioned for the Ring Cycle.

By September 1883, the symphony was finished, but there was no immediate prospect of publication or performance. The only real success Bruckner had enjoyed to this point was the premiere of the Fourth, which Max Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic had given in February 1881—and that was undone by a second, less well-received performance in Karlsruhe later that year. The Seventh, however, was championed by two of Bruckner’s former Vienna Conservatory pupils, Josef Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe, who played a two-piano arrangement early in 1884. A planned second piano presentation in Leipzig came to the attention of Arthur Nikisch, who, according to Schalk, exclaimed, “Nobody has written anything like this since Beethoven!” Nikisch went on to conduct the world premiere in Leipzig at the end of the year; audience and critical reaction was mixed, but then Levi’s Munich performance in March of the following year was an unqualified triumph. (“May the symphony now find its way through all the concert halls of Germany” wrote the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.) And though Bruckner was apprehensive about the symphony’s prospects in Vienna, the premiere there, in March 1886, scored with the audience if not the critics. Just a few months later, Theodore Thomas led the American premiere in Chicago. The BSO was not far behind, presenting the Seventh in February 1887. That was the first BSO performance of any Bruckner work.

The symphony’s popularity, then as now, is not hard to understand. The Allegro moderato opens in a burst of E-major sunlight, a 21-bar arc that conjures the opening of Das Rheingold. A Rhinemaiden second subject leads to a third that glints like sparks off Siegfried’s forge. The development, mostly in inversion and minor keys, leads to a teasing recapitulation and then a coda, over pedal E in the timpani, that goes from tragic to triumphant. The Wagner tubas start off the C-sharp-minor Adagio, which is modeled on the Adagio/Andante of Beethoven’s Ninth, a somber 4/4 (complete with quotation of the “Non confundar in aeternum” from Bruckner’s Te Deum) alternating with a faster, wistful 3/4. The coda might have been suggested by Siegfried’s Funeral March; at the end, the soul escapes via solo flute. The hobnail Scherzo opens with a cockcrow-like trumpet over ostinato strings; the Trio is a gently rocking Ländler. And then a sense of humor permeates the compact, Haydn-like finale, where a skittering, speeded-up version of the symphony’s opening theme plays hide-and-seek with a galumphing version that might represent Fasolt and Fafnir. The recapitulation catches you off guard, presenting the themes in reverse order.   

Every Bruckner symphony has text and performing issues owing to the composer’s inveterate habit of revising, sometimes with the help of Löwe and Josef and Franz Schalk. The Seventh at least has fewer issues than most. With Levi’s financial help, the symphony soon found a publisher; the Viennese firm Albert J. Gutmann issued the first edition in 1885. The printers worked from Bruckner’s autograph manuscript, in which revisions had been made and metronome marks and tempo indications added—whether in Bruckner’s hand was hard to say. Joseph Schalk supervised the printing, saving Bruckner the trouble, and he had ideas of his own that he may or may not have discussed with the composer. The most controversial point was the autograph’s addition of a timpani roll, triangle roll, and cymbal clash to the fff climax of the Adagio. This idea did not originate with Bruckner. In late 1884, before the premiere, Joseph wrote to Franz saying, “Perhaps you don’t know that Nikisch has insisted on the acceptance of the cymbal clash we wanted in the Adagio (the C major 6/4 chord), along with the triangle and timpani, which pleases us greatly.” But at some point, question marks were written into the autograph alongside the added instruments, and the words gilt nicht (“is not valid”) were written above the timpani part.

Who wrote those words and exactly to what they pertain remains a mystery. How Bruckner really felt about added percussion is impossible to establish; all we know is that Nikisch and the Schalks were strongly in favor and he acceded. It did appear in the Gutmann score and for the next 50 years would have been heard in performances of what was Bruckner’s most popular symphony.

Then in 1944, a new edition of the Seventh appeared under the auspices of the Internationale Bruckner-Gesellschaft, which had formed in Vienna with the idea of “purifying” all previously printed Bruckner scores of external influences—meaning the contributions of people like Nikisch, Löwe, and the Schalks. Nazi Party member Robert Haas based his 1944 edition of the Seventh on the autograph manuscript as it existed in 1883 rather than on the 1885 first printing: no metronome marks, no added tempo indications, no Adagio percussion. Haas’s post-war successor, Robert Nowak, chose to work from the second state of the autograph, arguing that Bruckner must have authorized the changes. Nowak’s 1954 IBG edition restored the controversial percussion and, in brackets, the added tempo indications, but not the metronome marks.

Not everyone applauded Nowak’s decisions. In his 1969 series “The Bruckner Problem Simplified,” Deryck Cooke wrote of the Seventh’s Finale that “the extra tempo indications of the first edition have no place in Bruckner’s score, being simply Nikisch’s ‘conductor’s markings’: Bruckner is supposed to have sanctioned them, but surely only for Nikisch’s own performances.” In a 1977 BSO program note, Michael Steinberg was of a similar opinion: “Here, to hang on to any semblance of order, it is necessary to ignore the many tempo modifications that almost certainly go back to Nikisch rather than to Bruckner, which unfortunately are still to be found in the widely used score edited by Leopold Nowak for the International Bruckner Society, and whose observance produces a distressingly spastic effect.”       

Yet it was Bruckner himself who prompted these “extra tempo indications.” Before the 1884 Leipzig premiere, he wrote to Nikisch: “Recently Messrs Schalk and Löwe played the Finale of the Seventh Symphony for me on two pianos, and I realized that I had chosen too quick a tempo. I became convinced that the tempo should be a very moderate one, and that frequent changes of tempo would be required. With a gifted conductor like you in charge, all of this will no doubt happen anyway.” In a subsequent letter to Nikisch, Bruckner reminded the conductor that “in the score many important and frequent tempo changes are not marked” and asked to be present for the final two rehearsals. He would surely have had some input into Nikisch’s choices. Moreover, a 2003 IBG Revisionsbericht (“revision report”) for the Seventh established that many of the autograph manuscript’s added tempo indications and time signature changes actually are in Bruckner’s hand—meaning that the 1885 first edition is largely authentic. Bruckner presented a copy of the printed score to Karl Muck and sent that conductor further adjustments from time to time, which suggests he was satisfied with it.   

But did his satisfaction include the score’s metronome markings? They must have reflected tempos chosen by Nikisch and Levi and accepted by Bruckner. What’s more, they correspond to Bruckner’s own movement tempo indications. At an opening minim = 58, the Allegro moderato is just that. Quaver = 63 yields an Adagio that is, as marked, “Sehr feierlich und sehr langsam”; dotted minim = 80 yields a Scherzo that’s “Sehr schnell.” The Finale, at minim = 63, is indeed “Bewegt, doch nicht schnell.” Why Nowak didn’t include them these markings, even if only in brackets, is a mystery.

Josef Schalk did think that Levi’s interpretation of the first movement was too quick, and letters Bruckner wrote to Hans Richter, who led the Seventh’s Vienna premiere, show that he was distressed by interpretations that he felt were too fast. The earliest recordings of Bruckner’s symphonies are compact; if the Nazis’ Bruckner ideal was mystical and monumental, with minimal tempo fluctuation, conductors like Oswald Kabasta and Wilhelm Furtwängler appear not to have noticed. Over the past century, performances of Bruckner, like those of Mahler, have got slower and slower. The Seventh, however, has run pretty consistently between 60 and 70 minutes, with, as you’d expect, Leon Botstein (52) at one extreme and Sergiu Celibidache (86) at the other.      

For Saturday’s performance, Yu had an appropriately sized orchestra of 70, with 44 strings. As was the case with the Mahler Ninth that Mercury played last summer, he deployed the violins antiphonally, firsts on his left, seconds on his right; this is the seating that was normal in the late 19^th century and the one that Bruckner and Mahler wrote for. He chose the Nowak edition, which over the past 70 years most conductors have preferred to Haas. (Notable exceptions have included Herbert von Karajan, Günter Wand, and more recently BSO music director Andris Nelsons.) The four movements ran approximately 21, 23, 10, and 12 minutes, totaling a not unusual 66.

All the same, this was a problematic Bruckner Seventh. The orchestra didn’t match the standard of what I remember from that 2023 Mahler Ninth, delivering instead sour string intonation, raw winds, raucous brass, bad balances, and congested climaxes. And Yu’s tempo choices for the first two movements didn’t seem ideal. He basked in the sunlit glory of the symphony’s opening theme; you could practically hear Parsifal waking up on Easter morn. But the first movement is marked Allegro moderato, and Yu’s tempo came nowhere near either that or the opening minim = 58 metronome mark. Most conductors, to be fair, choose a similar tempo, but that doesn’t make it right—besides which, most interpretations of the Seventh have more contrast between sections than Yu’s did. This first movement simply rolled along. A 23-minute Adagio is also not unusual, and not out of line with Bruckner’s “Sehr feierlich und sehr langsam” or the metronome mark, but at that extreme tempo it’s hard to keep the music from stalling.

At times, too, it seemed someone must have sneaked the Haas edition onto Yu’s music stand. Toward the end of the Allegro moderato’s development, a forceful inversion of the main theme enters, in Nowak’s edition, “molto animato,” an indication written in Bruckner’s own hand. Yu actually got slower at this point. The triumphant section of the coda is marked, again by Bruckner, “nach und nach etwas schneller”; here the music came to a standstill. Even the brief ritardandos of the Finale passed by unnoticed. Cooke cited Otto Klemperer’s EMI recording as an example of how observing “the plentifully scattered ritard markings destroys the natural flow of the music.” Klemperer in fact takes a very slow tempo for the Finale, and he exaggerates the ritardandos. They can be done discreetly to humorous effect.

On the more positive side, Bruckner’s softer Gesangsperiode second subjects went well. Yu’s transitions were generally thoughtful; I liked the way the orchestra sighed into the Allegro moderato’s development. The timpani was spot on in that movement’s coda; the orchestra swelled into the Te Deum reference of the Adagio, the second subject of that movement did move along at a faster pace, and the flute solo (Ellen Rakatansky) that released the coda soared. A fine solo trumpet (Andrew Heath) introduced the bustling Scherzo. Best of all was the Finale’s galumphing third theme, faster than the Nowak edition’s “Breit und wuchtig” calls for but powerful and effective all the same.

Boston hasn’t heard, to my knowledge, a Bruckner Seventh since the BSO performances with Nelsons in 2015; Ben Zander and the Boston Philharmonic last did it a year before that. And Schicksalslied doesn’t turn up as often as it might. So for a top ticket price of $30, with free parking thrown in, one could excuse some shortcomings. Yu and Mercury will conclude their season with an August 24^th Jordan Hall concert featuring Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony and the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto with the winner of the 2024 Fou Ts’ong International Concerto Competition.           

Jeffrey Gantz has been writing about music, dance, theater, art, film, and books for the past 45 years, first for the Boston Phoenix and currently for the Boston Globe.