by Paul Pelkonen I don't make it much of a secret, but I usually sleep with "music in."
The composer Anton Bruckner at his piano in 1894.
Really, he looked just like this.
Each night, I program my iPod and tuck it under my pillow. I block the noise of the "blower" with SkullCandy ear-buds, (yes, that's an endorsement) usually playing Bach or Mozart though I can sleep through Wagner, Bruckner, and even Mahler.
Getting proper sleep in the last four years has led to another new experience--the return of REM sleep and lucid dreaming. Today, taking a mid-morning nap on the machine, I dreamt that I met Anton Bruckner.
In this dream, Herr Bruckner was a house-guest at the summer cottage in Sparta, New Jersey that my mother used to own. He was there as a friend of this couple (I'm not sure who they were but they were probably visiting academics) who were also staying at our house. My partner Emily was in the dream too, and we were all sitting around the big dark dining room table where I used to play cards and chess with my parents. A recording of what I believed was Bruckner's Seventh Symphony was playing on the living room stereo, or maybe it was the Eighth.
Herr Bruckner spoke surprisingly good English and looked remarkably healthy considering he died in 1896, 35 years before the house was built. He was an affable houseguest. We were drinking beer (I think I was introducing him to Yuengling Black-and-Tan) and telling jokes, although he looked at me askance when I dropped the "F-bomb" into the conversation. More importantly, the great man noticed how much I enjoyed his music.
We engaged in a lengthy conversation about the nuance and structure of this particular symphony. The symphony that we were listening to (probably the DG Eugen Jochum recording as it was on vinyl) featured the "Dresden amen," an idea which he included as a homage to Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal (which uses the same theme.)
"Wait a minute!" I thought, (still asleep). "Bruckner didn't use the 'Dresden Amen' in the Seventh!'"
In fact, the composer did incorporate the theme into the Adagio movement of his (uncompleted) Ninth Symphony, but it was too late: I had had my moment of cognition and realized it was a dream.
The Dresden Amen as it appears in Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony.
It turns out I wasn't listening to Bruckner at all.My iPod had been serenading my subconscious with the first movement of Mendelssohn's Fifth Symphony. (It was Claudio Abbado's 1985 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra.) That work, which is nicknamed the Reformation for its pro-Martin Luther programme and its incorporation of the "Dresden Amen."
On a biographical note, Mendelssohn never actually met Anton Bruckner. In fact, Felix Mendelssohn died in Leipzig in 1847 from a series of strokes. He was 38. At that point, Bruckner (who was born in 1824) was teaching at St. Florian's in Linz, Austria and working as its church organist. The first connection between them is that both men wrote religious music, with Mendelssohn being famous for his oratorios and Bruckner choosing to express Catholic devotion through three Masses, the Te Deum and his cycle of symphonies.
If there is a connection, it may come through Bruckner's admiration of Wagner's music. the opera composer (who worked as kapellmeister in Dresden) inserted the "Dresden Amen" into his early opera Das Liebesverbot. More famously, it appears twice in Act III of Tannhäuser and much later into Parsifal. Its appearance in Wagner's operas may account for my making that subconscious connection between the Reformation Symphony and the latter composer's epic symphonic struggles to understand the Almighty through the application of large orchestral movements.
It can certainly be argued. Both composers make use of the major-to-minor transitions, isolated passages for wind band and pounding rhythms. Also, like the Bruckner works, Mendelssohn speaks in big paragraphs, taking pauses in between as if for breath. Finally, the use of the "Amen" theme (which Mendelssohn incorporated long before Wagner inserted it into Tannhäuser and Parsifal eventually appeared on Bruckner's symphonic path: it finally shows up in the last completed movement of his Ninth.
