The NFM Wrocław Philharmonic 2025/2026 season finale will be an encounter with the work of Anton Bruckner, an Austrian composer of the late Romantic period. Maestro Jacek Kaspszyk will conduct his Symphony No. 9 in D minor – an enigmatic piece that the composer dedicated to his “beloved God”. Along with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, it belongs to a group of masterful works left unfinished by their creators. For this reason alone, they evoke fascination and provoke questions about the form they would have taken had their composers lived longer.
Work on Symphony No. 9 in D minor took a very long time, as many as nine years. The composer began it in 1887, but the need to constantly revise and prepare other works for printing, as well as his deteriorating health, meant that he had to interrupt it all the time. When he realised that death was near, he suggested that the previously written Te Deum should be performed in place of the unfinished finale. Bruckner’s wish is almost never respected, though, and it became customary to perform The Ninth in a three-part version, in which two slow-tempo movements surround the brutal, wildly energetic Scherzo. On the one hand, this music is austere and ascetic, full of solemn brass chorales, and on the other hand, it is extremely individual and contains refined, radical sound solutions. Bruckner himself kept to the sidelines of musical life. An eccentric and naive loner living by faith, full of complexes, modest to the point of exaggeration, allowing subsequent conductors to modify his works according to their wishes – such an image of the Austrian emerges from the sources. What is significant, however, is that his work was enthusiastically received by composers of the younger generation, and one of them, Gustav Mahler, valued Bruckner for the monumentality of his works and the wealth of invention.