Riccardo Chailly conducts Bruckner’s Ninth

With the ink barely dry on his Eighth, Bruckner set to work on the Ninth Symphony, fearing he would not be able to complete the work should death ‘deprive him of his pen’. In the end, his fear was justified: the composer died before he could flesh out the general sketches of the finale.

While having dedicated his two previous symphonies to earthly rulers, Bruckner told his doctor that he had devoted his swansong to the ‘Majesty of Majesties’: ‘dem lieben Gott… wenn Er sie annimmt’ (to dear God… if He accepts it).

The slow third movement is a dignified ‘farewell to life’, as Bruckner himself noted at a descending line in the brass. ‘It has to be the most beautiful thing I have ever written,’ he said of this moving Adagio. ‘It always grips me when I play it.’

Only the three completed movements are usually performed. The surviving sketches of the finale have served as the basis for multiple reconstructions, most recently that of John Phillips, which we will be hearing for the first time in Amsterdam under the direction of conductor emeritus Riccardo Chailly.