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ANTON BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 9 · Mass No. 3
WIENER SINGAKADEMIE · RSO VIENNA RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA · CORNELIUS MEISTER
What a struggle the work posed for the composer emerges from the circumstance that he already embarked on it in the late summer of 1887, but had not completed it by his death nine years later. If we take the existing music of the Ninth to hand, we will notice that only few symphonies evince such apparently ‘autonomous’ movements as this one – perhaps this very fact is a consequence of the absence of a finale rounding off the arch and concluding the dramaturgy. If Bruckner intended to dedicate the Ninth to ‘my dear God’, the Mass in F minor is a work of gratitude to God for recovery after a persistent nervous illness and physical exhaustion. Performed several times during Bruckner’s lifetime, the Mass in F minor has uninterruptedly ranked ahead of its sister works in D minor and E minor among the popular church choral works of late Romanticism.
