Only 20 days after the completion of his 6th Symphony Bruckner began with the composition of his „seventh“, which he also completed in St. Florian. Although the influential critic Eduard Hanslick spoke of it disparagingly as a „symphonic boa constrictor“ the work was soon a triumphant success, bringing the composer - now over 60 years old – the recognition as a symphonist that he had long coveted.
The Adagio, in which Bruckner employed so-called Wagner tubas for the first time, and in which one can clearly hear references to „Siegfrieds Trauermarsch“ from Götterdämmerung – Bruckner had become familiar with the whole of the Ring des Nibelungen during his visit to the Bayreuth Festival in 1876 -, was given the title „Funeral Music (in memory of the passing of the master), deeply affected as he was by the death of Richard Wagner on 13th February 1883. Wagner himself had used motifs and melodies from his musikdrama Siegfried in the composition of the Siegfried Idyll, written for the 33rd birthday of his wife Cosima. In the handwritten dedication in the manuscript is also to be found the word Fidi – the nickname of their son Siegfried, born a year earlier: „Tribschen Idyll / with Fidi-birdsong and orange sunrise, as / symphonic birthday greeting / offered to his Cosima / by / her Richard, / 1870“.
Richard Wagner (1813–1883)
Siegfried Idyll in E major, WWV 103 (1870)
Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
Symphony No. 7 in E major WAB 107 (1881–83)
Munich Philharmonic
Valerij Gergiev | Conductor
