Sept 1824 - Anton Bruckner born in Ansfelden (then a village, now a suburb of Linz) on 4th.
*
1826 – Bruckner’s schoolteacher father teaches him to play the organ
*
1833 - After Bruckner receives his religious confirmation, his father sends him to another school in Hörsching, where he improves his organ skills.
*
1835 – Bruckner writes first composition, a choral work, at age 11. His father becomes ill and Bruckner leaves school to help him.
*
1837 – Father dies when Bruckner is 13, and he is sent to the Augustinian monastery in Sankt Florian to become a choirboy. In addition to choir practice, his education included violin and organ lessons. Bruckner is in awe of the monastery's great organ, which was built during the late baroque era and rebuilt in 1837, and he sometimes plays it during church services. Later, the organ is to be called the "Bruckner Organ".
*
1841 – Despite his musical abilities, Bruckner's mother sends her son to a teaching seminar in Linz. After completing the seminar with an excellent grade, Bruckner is sent as a teacher's assistant to a school in Windhaag. The living standards and pay are horrible, the duties are non-musical, and Bruckner is constantly humiliated by his superior, teacher Franz Fuchs. Despite the difficult situation, he never complains or rebels; a belief of inferiority is to remain one of Bruckner's main personal characteristics during his whole life.
*
1843 - A local bishop notices Bruckner's bad situation in Windhaag and awards him a teacher's assistant position near Sankt Florian. He is sent to Kronstorf for two years of training, and here he has more part in musical activities and significantly improves his compositional ability, writing numerous songs and short choral pieces.
*
1845 – Bruckner returns to Saint Florian where, for the next ten years, he works as a teacher and organist, learning the standard repertoire for organ, composing numerous choral works, and gradually improving his teaching credentials to allow him to teach at higher levels.
*
1855 - Bruckner, aspiring to become a student of the famous Vienna music theorist Simon Sechter, shows the master his Missa solemnis, written a year earlier, and is accepted. The education, which includes skills in music theory and counterpoint among others, will have a profound influence on Bruckner. Later, when Bruckner begins teaching music himself, he will base his curriculum on Sechter's book Die Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition. He is also appointed organist at Linz Cathedral.
*
1861 – Bruckner, now 37, studies further with Otto Kitzler, nine years younger than he, who introduces him to the music of Richard Wagner, which Bruckner studies extensively from 1863 onwards. Bruckner considers the earliest orchestral works (the "study" Symphony in F minor, the three orchestral pieces, the March in D minor and the Overture in G minor, which he composes in 1862-1863), mere school exercises, done under the supervision of Otto Kitzler. He continues his studies to the age of 40. In May 1861 he makes his concert debut, as both composer and conductor of his Ave Maria, set in seven parts. From 1861 to 1868, he alternates his time between Vienna and Sankt Florian, wishing to know how to make his music modern, but he also wanting to spend time in a more religious setting. He becomes aquainted with Franz Lizst, by this time also a staunch Catholic. Bruckner’s reputation as an organist begins to grow during this time.
*
1863 - Bruckner hears Wagner’s Tannhauser for the first time.
*
1864 – Bruckner, aged 40, ends his studies under Sechter and Kitzler, and writes his first mature work, the Mass in D Minor.
*
1863 - Bruckner hears Wagner’s Tannhauser for the first time.
*
1865 – Bruckner meets Richard Wagner after the world premiere of Tristan und Isolde, and overcome by the new opera, falls at Wagner’s feet with admiration.
*
1866 – Bruckner’s mother dies and he requests a picture of her corpse be made. This begins his morbid fascination with dead bodies, which continues throughout his life. Later in the year, he suffers a nervous breakdown, spending three months in a sanatorium. He continues to have periodic depressions throughout the rest of his life.
*
1868 – Sechter dies and Bruckner reluctantly accepts his post at the Vienna Conservatory. His first two symphonies are performed (conducted by him) and receive hostile receptions as “wild” and “nonsensical”. The second symphony is scrapped by Bruckner and decades after his death is rediscovered and jokingly renamed “Die Nullte” (Symphony # 0)
*
1869 – Bruckner continues his teaching at the conservatory and also makes a successful tour of France as an organist.
*
1871 – Bruckner, now gaining renown as an organist, makes another triumphant tour, this time of England, performing at the new Royal Albert Hall. He receives several marriage proposals from women because of his playing. His symphonies frequently have their genesis in his organ improvisations.
*
1873 – A third symphony (later renamed as Symphony #2) is premiered with Bruckner conducting the Vienna Philharmonic to positive reviews but contempt from the orchestra. Franz Lizst rejects the dedication. Bruckner travels to Munich and asks Wagner to accept a dedication of his not yet completed Fourth symphony in D-minor, (later renamed as Symphony # 3 “Wagner”). After a beer-drinking binge, Wagner accepts, and the two become firm friends.
*
1874 – Bruckner completes a first version of an E-major Symphony, (later to be revised and renamed as the Symphony # 4 “Romantic”)
*
1875 – Now aged 51, he accepts a post at the Vienna University in 1875, where he tries to make music theory a part of the curriculum. Vienna, at this time, is musically dominated by the feud between advocates of the music of the musically revolutionary, but politically nationalist and anti-semitic Wagner and the more musically-conservative but pro-Jewish Johannes Brahms. By aligning himself with Wagner, Bruckner makes an unintentional enemy out of the powerful, pro-Brahms critic, Eduard Hanslick, also a dean at the University.
*
1876 – While teaching at the University, Bruckner becomes obsessed with several teenage female students, one of whom takes him to court for sexual harassment. The charge is eventually dismissed, but Bruckner suffers humiliation and a stain on his reputation. Accusations of Bruckner being a drunkard are also hurled at him. During this troubled time, he takes refuge in his composing and completes a new B-flat major symphony begun the year before. It is eventually known as the Symphony # 5.
*
1877 – The D-minor symphony dedicated to Wagner four years earlier is finally completed and premiered in Vienna. The conductor was to have been Johann Van Herbeck, but he dies a month beforehand, so Bruckner himself steps in to conduct. The concert is a complete disaster: although a decent choral conductor, Bruckner is a barely competent orchestral director, and the Viennese audience, not sympathetic to his work to begin with, gradually leaves the hall as the music plays. Even the orchestra flees at the end, leaving Bruckner alone with a few supporters, including the seventeen-year-old Gustav Mahler, a pupil of Bruckner’s. Stunned by this debacle, Bruckner stops composing for a year, but eventually makes several revisions of his work, leaving out significant amounts of music, including most quotations from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and Die Walkure. The original 1873 score is not published until 1977.
*
1878 - Bruckner begins an extensive revision of several of his earlier symphonies, with the aid of several young followers, including the Schalk brothers, Joseph and Franz, aged 20 and 14, Ferdinand Lowe, 13 years old. Gustav Mahler, 18 years old, begins work on a two-piano transcription of Bruckner’s disastrous “Wagner” symphony.
*
1879 - His spirits rejuvenated by his young followers, Bruckner begins work on a new symphony in A Major, (which will eventually become known as the 6th symphony). He also composes some more religious music for chorus, as well as his most well known chamber work, the String Quintet.
*
1880 - Bruckner completes an extensive revision of the “Romantic” symphony, including a completely new scherzo and a completely rewritten finale.
*
1881 - The revised E-flat major “Romantic” symphony (later known as the 4th) is world-premiered at Vienna in February, the first time Bruckner does not conduct his own work. In rehearsal for the performance, Bruckner is so impressed by the conductor, Hans Richter, that he naively tips him a coin. The amused/moved Richter keeps the coin for the rest of his life. Even Eduard Hanslick, who hates Bruckner and had savaged the “Wagner” symphony, grudgingly admits that the performance of the new “Romantic” symphony was a success. Later that year, the 17-year-old Franz Schalk persuades the conductor Felix Mottl to perform the still unpublished work in Karlsruhe, and also helps organize the first public performances of the string quintet, playing viola. Bruckner also completes the A-Major symphony (later know as the 6th) and begins work on the Te Deum and a new symphony in E-major (later known as the 7th symphony).
*
1882 -
DB Password - mtbox56
Bruckner chronology
-
Black Irish
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Re: Bruckner chronology
Sept 1824 - Anton Bruckner born in Ansfelden (then a village, now a suburb of Linz) on 4th.
*
1826 – Bruckner’s schoolteacher father teaches him to play the organ
*
1833 - After Bruckner receives his religious confirmation, his father sends him to another school in Hörsching, where he improves his organ skills.
*
1835 – Bruckner writes first composition, a choral work, at age 11. His father becomes ill and Bruckner leaves school to help him.
*
1837 – Father dies when Bruckner is 13, and he is sent to the Augustinian monastery in Sankt Florian to become a choirboy. In addition to choir practice, his education included violin and organ lessons. Bruckner is in awe of the monastery's great organ, which was built during the late baroque era and rebuilt in 1837, and he sometimes plays it during church services. Later, the organ is to be called the "Bruckner Organ".
*
1841 – Despite his musical abilities, Bruckner's mother sends her son to a teaching seminar in Linz. After completing the seminar with an excellent grade, Bruckner is sent as a teacher's assistant to a school in Windhaag. The living standards and pay are horrible, the duties are non-musical, and Bruckner is constantly humiliated by his superior, teacher Franz Fuchs. Despite the difficult situation, he never complains or rebels; a belief of inferiority is to remain one of Bruckner's main personal characteristics during his whole life.
*
1843 - A local bishop notices Bruckner's bad situation in Windhaag and awards him a teacher's assistant position near Sankt Florian. He is sent to Kronstorf for two years of training, and here he has more part in musical activities and significantly improves his compositional ability, writing numerous songs and short choral pieces.
*
1845 – Bruckner returns to Saint Florian where, for the next ten years, he works as a teacher and organist, learning the standard repertoire for organ, composing numerous choral works, and gradually improving his teaching credentials to allow him to teach at higher levels.
*
1855 - Bruckner, aspiring to become a student of the famous Vienna music theorist Simon Sechter, shows the master his Missa solemnis, written a year earlier, and is accepted. The education, which includes skills in music theory and counterpoint among others, will have a profound influence on Bruckner. Later, when Bruckner begins teaching music himself, he will base his curriculum on Sechter's book Die Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition. He is also appointed organist at Linz Cathedral.
*
1861 – Bruckner, now 37, studies further with Otto Kitzler, nine years younger than he, who introduces him to the music of Richard Wagner, which Bruckner studies extensively from 1863 onwards. Bruckner considers the earliest orchestral works (the "study" Symphony in F minor, the three orchestral pieces, the March in D minor and the Overture in G minor, which he composes in 1862-1863), mere school exercises, done under the supervision of Otto Kitzler. He continues his studies to the age of 40. In May 1861 he makes his concert debut, as both composer and conductor of his Ave Maria, set in seven parts. From 1861 to 1868, he alternates his time between Vienna and Sankt Florian, wishing to know how to make his music modern, but he also wanting to spend time in a more religious setting. He becomes aquainted with Franz Lizst, by this time also a staunch Catholic. Bruckner’s reputation as an organist begins to grow during this time.
*
1863 - Bruckner hears Wagner’s Tannhauser for the first time.
*
1864 – Bruckner, aged 40, ends his studies under Sechter and Kitzler, and writes his first mature work, the Mass in D Minor.
*
1865 – Bruckner meets Richard Wagner after the world premiere of Tristan und Isolde, and overcome by the new opera, falls at Wagner’s feet with admiration.
*
1866 – Bruckner’s mother dies and he requests a picture of her corpse be made. This begins his morbid fascination with dead bodies, which continues throughout his life. Later in the year, he suffers a nervous breakdown, spending three months in a sanatorium. He continues to have periodic depressions throughout the rest of his life.
*
1868 – Sechter dies and Bruckner reluctantly accepts his post at the Vienna Conservatory. His first two symphonies are performed (conducted by him) and receive hostile receptions as “wild” and “nonsensical”. The second symphony is scrapped by Bruckner and decades after his death is rediscovered and jokingly renamed “Die Nullte” (Symphony # 0)
*
1869 – Bruckner continues his teaching at the conservatory and also makes a successful tour of France as an organist.
*
1871 – Bruckner, now gaining renown as an organist, makes another triumphant tour, this time of England, performing at the new Royal Albert Hall. He receives several marriage proposals from women because of his playing. His symphonies frequently have their genesis in his organ improvisations.
*
1873 – A third symphony (later renamed as Symphony #2) is premiered with Bruckner conducting the Vienna Philharmonic to positive reviews but contempt from the orchestra. Franz Lizst rejects the dedication. Bruckner travels to Munich and asks Wagner to accept a dedication of his not yet completed Fourth symphony in D-minor, (later renamed as Symphony # 3 “Wagner”). After a beer-drinking binge, Wagner accepts, and the two become firm friends.
*
1874 – Bruckner completes a first version of an E-major Symphony, (later to be revised and renamed as the Symphony # 4 “Romantic”)
*
1875 – Now aged 51, he accepts a post at the Vienna University in 1875, where he tries to make music theory a part of the curriculum. Vienna, at this time, is musically dominated by the feud between advocates of the music of the musically revolutionary, but politically nationalist and anti-semitic Wagner and the more musically-conservative but pro-Jewish Johannes Brahms. By aligning himself with Wagner, Bruckner makes an unintentional enemy out of the powerful, pro-Brahms critic, Eduard Hanslick, also a dean at the University.
*
1876 – While teaching at the University, Bruckner becomes obsessed with several teenage female students, one of whom takes him to court for sexual harassment. The charge is eventually dismissed, but Bruckner suffers humiliation and a stain on his reputation. Accusations of Bruckner being a drunkard are also hurled at him. During this troubled time, he takes refuge in his composing and completes a new B-flat major symphony begun the year before. It is eventually known as the Symphony # 5.
*
1877 – The D-minor symphony dedicated to Wagner four years earlier is finally completed and premiered in Vienna. The conductor was to have been Johann Van Herbeck, but he dies a month beforehand, so Bruckner himself steps in to conduct. The concert is a complete disaster: although a decent choral conductor, Bruckner is a barely competent orchestral director, and the Viennese audience, not sympathetic to his work to begin with, gradually leaves the hall as the music plays. Even the orchestra flees at the end, leaving Bruckner alone with a few supporters, including the seventeen-year-old Gustav Mahler, a pupil of Bruckner’s. Stunned by this debacle, Bruckner stops composing for a year, but eventually makes several revisions of his work, leaving out significant amounts of music, including most quotations from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and Die Walkure. The original 1873 score is not published until 1977.
*
1878 - Bruckner begins an extensive revision of several of his earlier symphonies, with the aid of several young followers, including the Schalk brothers, Joseph and Franz, aged 20 and 14, Ferdinand Lowe, 13 years old. Gustav Mahler, 18 years old, begins work on a two-piano transcription of Bruckner’s disastrous “Wagner” symphony.
*
1879 - His spirits rejuvenated by his young followers, Bruckner begins work on a new symphony in A Major, (which will eventually become known as the 6th symphony). He also composes some more religious music for chorus, as well as his most well known chamber work, the String Quintet.
*
1880 - Bruckner completes an extensive revision of the “Romantic” symphony, including a completely new scherzo and a completely rewritten finale.
*
1881 - The revised E-flat major “Romantic” symphony (later known as the 4th) is world-premiered at Vienna in February, the first time Bruckner does not conduct his own work. In rehearsal for the performance, Bruckner is so impressed by the conductor, Hans Richter, that he naively tips him a coin. The amused/moved Richter keeps the coin for the rest of his life. Even Eduard Hanslick, who hates Bruckner and had savaged the “Wagner” symphony, grudgingly admits that the performance of the new “Romantic” symphony was a success. Later that year, the 17-year-old Franz Schalk persuades the conductor Felix Mottl to perform the still unpublished work in Karlsruhe, and also helps organize the first public performances of the string quintet, playing viola. Bruckner also completes the A-Major symphony (later know as the 6th) and begins work on the Te Deum and a new symphony in E-major (later known as the 7th symphony).
*
1882 – Bruckner does revisions of his three Masses for Chorus and Orchestra, and continues work on the E-major symphony.
*
1883 – Wagner dies, and Bruckner finishes the E-major symphony (7th) and dedicates it to Ludwig II. The second movement, Adagio, is a tribute to Wagner. Gustav Mahler, aged 23, completes his two-piano arrangement of the “Wagner” symphony.
*
1884 – The E-major (later the 7th) is world-premiered in Liepzig under Arthur Nikisch’s direction and is a resounding success. It is the first of Bruckner’s symphonies to feature extra percussion instruments, the cymble and the triangle, plus four Wagner tubas. It is also conducted with great success by Bruckner’s friend Harold Levi. Bruckner begins work on a new C-minor symphony, the last one he will complete.
*
1885 - Bruckner completes the “Te Deum”, which is generally considered his greatest work for chorus. He calls it “the pride of my life”. It will receive thirty performances during Bruckner’s lifetime. He revises the E-major symphony (later 7th) with much help by Nikisch, Ferdinand Loewe, and Franz Schalk. It is then published.
*
1886 - Bruckner receives the Order of St. Joseph, the nation’s highest honor. Two movements of the D-major symphony (later Symphony # 5) are performed publicly to an indifferent reception. Hanslick lambastes the music publicly.
*
1887 – Bruckner finishes a first version of the C-minor symphony (later known as the 8th). He sends it to friend and conductor Harold Levi who rejects it as un-performable. Stunned, Bruckner contemplates an extensive revision. A two-piano arrangement of the B-flat Major Symphony (later 5th) is performed by Joseph Schalk and another pianist.
*
1888 – More revisions
*
1889 – Bruckner produces a third and final version of the “Wagner” symphony. Begins sketches for a new D-minor symphony (eventually known as the 9th) that he will not complete.
*
1890 – Produces a second, extensively revised version of the C-minor symphony with help from Joseph Schalk. Retires from his post at the Conservatory.
*
1891 – Completes a revised version of the Symphony # 1, which he calls “The Saucy Maid”.
*
1892 – Bruckner, aged 68 and suffering more frequent health problems, retires from his teaching post at the University of Vienna. The C-minor symphony (later 8th) is dedicated to Emporer Franz Joseph, who helps fund it’s publishing. After several cancellations by conductor Felix Weingertner, Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic give the world-premiere performance to a mixed reception. Eduard Hanslick leaves after the adagio and later slams the work as too long, peculiar, and drawn out. The work is performed two more times during Bruckner’s lifetime, then falls into obscurity.
*
1893 – Writes the choral work Helgoland and considers writing an opera based on the novel “Astra” by Gertrud Bolle-Hellmund. Also creates a third and final version of the Symphony # 1.
*
1894 – The first orchestral performance of the D-major Symphony (later Symphony # 5) is conducted by Franz Schalk in Graz, eighteen years after it was written, and with extensive cuts and revisions by Schalk. Bruckner is too ill to attend the event, and never hears the work performed. Bruckner, in declining health, returns to the University for a last lecture.
*
1895 – Emperor Franz Joseph’s daughter Valerie, grants the ailing Bruckner use the ground floor flat at the Oberes Belvedere in July. Bruckner spends his last sixteen months there and his health improves enough to complete the first three movements of the Ninth Symphony. The other Symphonies are all published together (except the second, later known as Die Nullte, which is scrapped) and numbered as follows:
Symphony # 1 in C-Minor
Symphony # 2 in C-Minor
Symphony # 3 in D-minor
Symphony # 4 in E-flat Major (“Romantic”)
Symphony # 5 in B-flat Major
Symphony # 6 in A-Major
Symphony # 7 in E-Major
Symphony # 8 in C-Minor
Bruckner works occasionally on the 9th when his health allows.
*
1896 – Hers a performance of the 4th, but is too ill to enjoy it. Hears a performance of Te Deum, the last time he will hear a work of his performed. With three movements of the Ninth Symphony complete, he begins to tackle the finale.
*
1826 – Bruckner’s schoolteacher father teaches him to play the organ
*
1833 - After Bruckner receives his religious confirmation, his father sends him to another school in Hörsching, where he improves his organ skills.
*
1835 – Bruckner writes first composition, a choral work, at age 11. His father becomes ill and Bruckner leaves school to help him.
*
1837 – Father dies when Bruckner is 13, and he is sent to the Augustinian monastery in Sankt Florian to become a choirboy. In addition to choir practice, his education included violin and organ lessons. Bruckner is in awe of the monastery's great organ, which was built during the late baroque era and rebuilt in 1837, and he sometimes plays it during church services. Later, the organ is to be called the "Bruckner Organ".
*
1841 – Despite his musical abilities, Bruckner's mother sends her son to a teaching seminar in Linz. After completing the seminar with an excellent grade, Bruckner is sent as a teacher's assistant to a school in Windhaag. The living standards and pay are horrible, the duties are non-musical, and Bruckner is constantly humiliated by his superior, teacher Franz Fuchs. Despite the difficult situation, he never complains or rebels; a belief of inferiority is to remain one of Bruckner's main personal characteristics during his whole life.
*
1843 - A local bishop notices Bruckner's bad situation in Windhaag and awards him a teacher's assistant position near Sankt Florian. He is sent to Kronstorf for two years of training, and here he has more part in musical activities and significantly improves his compositional ability, writing numerous songs and short choral pieces.
*
1845 – Bruckner returns to Saint Florian where, for the next ten years, he works as a teacher and organist, learning the standard repertoire for organ, composing numerous choral works, and gradually improving his teaching credentials to allow him to teach at higher levels.
*
1855 - Bruckner, aspiring to become a student of the famous Vienna music theorist Simon Sechter, shows the master his Missa solemnis, written a year earlier, and is accepted. The education, which includes skills in music theory and counterpoint among others, will have a profound influence on Bruckner. Later, when Bruckner begins teaching music himself, he will base his curriculum on Sechter's book Die Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition. He is also appointed organist at Linz Cathedral.
*
1861 – Bruckner, now 37, studies further with Otto Kitzler, nine years younger than he, who introduces him to the music of Richard Wagner, which Bruckner studies extensively from 1863 onwards. Bruckner considers the earliest orchestral works (the "study" Symphony in F minor, the three orchestral pieces, the March in D minor and the Overture in G minor, which he composes in 1862-1863), mere school exercises, done under the supervision of Otto Kitzler. He continues his studies to the age of 40. In May 1861 he makes his concert debut, as both composer and conductor of his Ave Maria, set in seven parts. From 1861 to 1868, he alternates his time between Vienna and Sankt Florian, wishing to know how to make his music modern, but he also wanting to spend time in a more religious setting. He becomes aquainted with Franz Lizst, by this time also a staunch Catholic. Bruckner’s reputation as an organist begins to grow during this time.
*
1863 - Bruckner hears Wagner’s Tannhauser for the first time.
*
1864 – Bruckner, aged 40, ends his studies under Sechter and Kitzler, and writes his first mature work, the Mass in D Minor.
*
1865 – Bruckner meets Richard Wagner after the world premiere of Tristan und Isolde, and overcome by the new opera, falls at Wagner’s feet with admiration.
*
1866 – Bruckner’s mother dies and he requests a picture of her corpse be made. This begins his morbid fascination with dead bodies, which continues throughout his life. Later in the year, he suffers a nervous breakdown, spending three months in a sanatorium. He continues to have periodic depressions throughout the rest of his life.
*
1868 – Sechter dies and Bruckner reluctantly accepts his post at the Vienna Conservatory. His first two symphonies are performed (conducted by him) and receive hostile receptions as “wild” and “nonsensical”. The second symphony is scrapped by Bruckner and decades after his death is rediscovered and jokingly renamed “Die Nullte” (Symphony # 0)
*
1869 – Bruckner continues his teaching at the conservatory and also makes a successful tour of France as an organist.
*
1871 – Bruckner, now gaining renown as an organist, makes another triumphant tour, this time of England, performing at the new Royal Albert Hall. He receives several marriage proposals from women because of his playing. His symphonies frequently have their genesis in his organ improvisations.
*
1873 – A third symphony (later renamed as Symphony #2) is premiered with Bruckner conducting the Vienna Philharmonic to positive reviews but contempt from the orchestra. Franz Lizst rejects the dedication. Bruckner travels to Munich and asks Wagner to accept a dedication of his not yet completed Fourth symphony in D-minor, (later renamed as Symphony # 3 “Wagner”). After a beer-drinking binge, Wagner accepts, and the two become firm friends.
*
1874 – Bruckner completes a first version of an E-major Symphony, (later to be revised and renamed as the Symphony # 4 “Romantic”)
*
1875 – Now aged 51, he accepts a post at the Vienna University in 1875, where he tries to make music theory a part of the curriculum. Vienna, at this time, is musically dominated by the feud between advocates of the music of the musically revolutionary, but politically nationalist and anti-semitic Wagner and the more musically-conservative but pro-Jewish Johannes Brahms. By aligning himself with Wagner, Bruckner makes an unintentional enemy out of the powerful, pro-Brahms critic, Eduard Hanslick, also a dean at the University.
*
1876 – While teaching at the University, Bruckner becomes obsessed with several teenage female students, one of whom takes him to court for sexual harassment. The charge is eventually dismissed, but Bruckner suffers humiliation and a stain on his reputation. Accusations of Bruckner being a drunkard are also hurled at him. During this troubled time, he takes refuge in his composing and completes a new B-flat major symphony begun the year before. It is eventually known as the Symphony # 5.
*
1877 – The D-minor symphony dedicated to Wagner four years earlier is finally completed and premiered in Vienna. The conductor was to have been Johann Van Herbeck, but he dies a month beforehand, so Bruckner himself steps in to conduct. The concert is a complete disaster: although a decent choral conductor, Bruckner is a barely competent orchestral director, and the Viennese audience, not sympathetic to his work to begin with, gradually leaves the hall as the music plays. Even the orchestra flees at the end, leaving Bruckner alone with a few supporters, including the seventeen-year-old Gustav Mahler, a pupil of Bruckner’s. Stunned by this debacle, Bruckner stops composing for a year, but eventually makes several revisions of his work, leaving out significant amounts of music, including most quotations from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and Die Walkure. The original 1873 score is not published until 1977.
*
1878 - Bruckner begins an extensive revision of several of his earlier symphonies, with the aid of several young followers, including the Schalk brothers, Joseph and Franz, aged 20 and 14, Ferdinand Lowe, 13 years old. Gustav Mahler, 18 years old, begins work on a two-piano transcription of Bruckner’s disastrous “Wagner” symphony.
*
1879 - His spirits rejuvenated by his young followers, Bruckner begins work on a new symphony in A Major, (which will eventually become known as the 6th symphony). He also composes some more religious music for chorus, as well as his most well known chamber work, the String Quintet.
*
1880 - Bruckner completes an extensive revision of the “Romantic” symphony, including a completely new scherzo and a completely rewritten finale.
*
1881 - The revised E-flat major “Romantic” symphony (later known as the 4th) is world-premiered at Vienna in February, the first time Bruckner does not conduct his own work. In rehearsal for the performance, Bruckner is so impressed by the conductor, Hans Richter, that he naively tips him a coin. The amused/moved Richter keeps the coin for the rest of his life. Even Eduard Hanslick, who hates Bruckner and had savaged the “Wagner” symphony, grudgingly admits that the performance of the new “Romantic” symphony was a success. Later that year, the 17-year-old Franz Schalk persuades the conductor Felix Mottl to perform the still unpublished work in Karlsruhe, and also helps organize the first public performances of the string quintet, playing viola. Bruckner also completes the A-Major symphony (later know as the 6th) and begins work on the Te Deum and a new symphony in E-major (later known as the 7th symphony).
*
1882 – Bruckner does revisions of his three Masses for Chorus and Orchestra, and continues work on the E-major symphony.
*
1883 – Wagner dies, and Bruckner finishes the E-major symphony (7th) and dedicates it to Ludwig II. The second movement, Adagio, is a tribute to Wagner. Gustav Mahler, aged 23, completes his two-piano arrangement of the “Wagner” symphony.
*
1884 – The E-major (later the 7th) is world-premiered in Liepzig under Arthur Nikisch’s direction and is a resounding success. It is the first of Bruckner’s symphonies to feature extra percussion instruments, the cymble and the triangle, plus four Wagner tubas. It is also conducted with great success by Bruckner’s friend Harold Levi. Bruckner begins work on a new C-minor symphony, the last one he will complete.
*
1885 - Bruckner completes the “Te Deum”, which is generally considered his greatest work for chorus. He calls it “the pride of my life”. It will receive thirty performances during Bruckner’s lifetime. He revises the E-major symphony (later 7th) with much help by Nikisch, Ferdinand Loewe, and Franz Schalk. It is then published.
*
1886 - Bruckner receives the Order of St. Joseph, the nation’s highest honor. Two movements of the D-major symphony (later Symphony # 5) are performed publicly to an indifferent reception. Hanslick lambastes the music publicly.
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1887 – Bruckner finishes a first version of the C-minor symphony (later known as the 8th). He sends it to friend and conductor Harold Levi who rejects it as un-performable. Stunned, Bruckner contemplates an extensive revision. A two-piano arrangement of the B-flat Major Symphony (later 5th) is performed by Joseph Schalk and another pianist.
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1888 – More revisions
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1889 – Bruckner produces a third and final version of the “Wagner” symphony. Begins sketches for a new D-minor symphony (eventually known as the 9th) that he will not complete.
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1890 – Produces a second, extensively revised version of the C-minor symphony with help from Joseph Schalk. Retires from his post at the Conservatory.
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1891 – Completes a revised version of the Symphony # 1, which he calls “The Saucy Maid”.
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1892 – Bruckner, aged 68 and suffering more frequent health problems, retires from his teaching post at the University of Vienna. The C-minor symphony (later 8th) is dedicated to Emporer Franz Joseph, who helps fund it’s publishing. After several cancellations by conductor Felix Weingertner, Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic give the world-premiere performance to a mixed reception. Eduard Hanslick leaves after the adagio and later slams the work as too long, peculiar, and drawn out. The work is performed two more times during Bruckner’s lifetime, then falls into obscurity.
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1893 – Writes the choral work Helgoland and considers writing an opera based on the novel “Astra” by Gertrud Bolle-Hellmund. Also creates a third and final version of the Symphony # 1.
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1894 – The first orchestral performance of the D-major Symphony (later Symphony # 5) is conducted by Franz Schalk in Graz, eighteen years after it was written, and with extensive cuts and revisions by Schalk. Bruckner is too ill to attend the event, and never hears the work performed. Bruckner, in declining health, returns to the University for a last lecture.
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1895 – Emperor Franz Joseph’s daughter Valerie, grants the ailing Bruckner use the ground floor flat at the Oberes Belvedere in July. Bruckner spends his last sixteen months there and his health improves enough to complete the first three movements of the Ninth Symphony. The other Symphonies are all published together (except the second, later known as Die Nullte, which is scrapped) and numbered as follows:
Symphony # 1 in C-Minor
Symphony # 2 in C-Minor
Symphony # 3 in D-minor
Symphony # 4 in E-flat Major (“Romantic”)
Symphony # 5 in B-flat Major
Symphony # 6 in A-Major
Symphony # 7 in E-Major
Symphony # 8 in C-Minor
Bruckner works occasionally on the 9th when his health allows.
*
1896 – Hers a performance of the 4th, but is too ill to enjoy it. Hears a performance of Te Deum, the last time he will hear a work of his performed. With three movements of the Ninth Symphony complete, he begins to tackle the finale.
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Black Irish
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Re: Bruckner chronology
In the wake of the slaughter of the First World War, which he briefly but nearly fatally experienced first-hand, Hemingway developed a terse, compact and direct writing style. He hoped to eliminate what was ornamental and inessential, and thus false, from his language. The effort had a both moral and political dimension to it, bound up as it undoubtedly was with revulsion against the old order responsible for the savage conflict and with the wave of revolutions that overturned empires and in Russia, in October 1917, the capitalist system itself.
There are enormously attractive and enduring features of Hemingway’s body of work (he wrote some of the most beautiful prose in the English language), as well as less attractive and less enduring features. It is not accidental that the first two hours of the Burns-Novick series are its most compelling and intriguing. A persuasive case can be made that the writer did his most authentic and purposeful work in the first decade of his career, in his Michigan and European short stories and his first two novels.
As the series itself suggests, Hemingway was damaged by his arrival as a “celebrity” in the 1930s, by the solidifying and fixing at the same time of the two-fisted, brawny “Hemingway personality,” a man rushing—for unclear reasons—from one near-death encounter to the next. The writer, a deeply sensitive and shy man, initially built that public personality in part, it would seem, out of the need to protect himself from the world and how it was suffering and how it hurt him. Unfortunately, if one takes on such a posture long enough, one tends to become it. When Hemingway later turned to “political” matters in the late 1930s, his “tough-guy” personality became anchored, at least temporarily, in quasi-Stalinist realpolitik, a location “from whose bourn no traveller” easily or fully returns.
If Hemingway ultimately falls below Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald in one’s estimation, it has something to do with a less critical attitude toward American society, although he was undoubtedly critical of it, and a less critical attitude toward his own situation and trajectory, although he could be honest about that at times too.
His famed style played a role as well. Form is not a passive container for content. To a certain extent, Hemingway trapped himself in a corner with his short, declarative sentences and his nearly relentless stoicism (whereas the real man wallowed in grudges, complaints and even self-pity). When it came time to expand, to open up his approach and let in more of the world, including its great, historic tragedies, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, for instance, the results were not entirely happy. And that was his last major social-aesthetic experiment.
Hemingway asserted in his memoir, A Moveable Feast (published posthumously in 1964), that writing “the truest sentence that you know” and going “from there” solved any paralyzing dilemmas he faced in the early days of his writing career. Of course, a particular sentence is only true to the extent that it belongs to or reflects the truth of a larger, preconceived artistic and social idea. Whether a given author is fully conscious of it or not, he or she is subordinating the selection of words and sentences to that idea—although those words and sentences may, in turn, act upon the overriding conception and alter it. In his later, postwar books, Hemingway continued at times to turn out individually true sentences, but they added up to false or often trivial works because the underlying notions no longer corresponded meaningfully to the character of the epoch.
The moral-artistic crusade that Hemingway launched in the early 1920s, rooted in a belief that personal courage and strength lay at the heart of accomplishing anything in the world, ultimately ran up against the objectively thorny political problems of the 1930s and 1940s, and inevitably proved inadequate. Nonetheless, at his bravest and most realistic, Hemingway cut through mystification and euphemism in a pioneering fashion and contributed toward humanity seeing itself as it really was.
The Burns-Novick series is divided into three episodes, “A Writer (1899–1929),” “The Avatar (1929–1944)” and “The Blank Page (1944–1961).” The miniseries, narrated by actor Peter Coyote, systematically works through the course of Hemingway’s life and career, making use of photographs and film clips, interspersed with comments from numerous academics, biographers and writers, including short story writer and novelist Tobias Wolff, Irish novelist and memoirist Edna O’Brien and Peruvian novelist and politician Mario Vargas Llosa. Unfortunately, comments by the late Sen. John McCain also make their inappropriate way into the series.
The observations of the more than 15 interviewees in Hemingway range from the acute to the banal, but one has to commend Burns and Novick in general for their refusal to kowtow to the prevailing obsession with gender and race, and malicious, subjective gossip. Whether one subscribes to all their judgments or not, the co-directors, first and foremost, seriously treat Hemingway’s contributions as an artist, as someone who importantly responded to life and society, and do not become overly ensnared by his personal dramas and failings—although those are not ignored. One hopes, indeed, that Hemingway will encourage viewers to turn to the author’s works.
The creators conscientiously attempt to examine Hemingway’s art and personality in their contradictoriness. In regard to the traumas of the 1930s and 1940s, one might say that the Burns-Novick series encounters some of the same difficulties as Hemingway did. No doubt the writer-directors have their own limitations and blind spots, but much of the PBS film’s predicament in trying to depict the period has broader, more generalized sources: the complexity of the events and the degree to which they are still poorly understood 70, 80 and 90 years later.
One especially salient fact certainly does come across in Hemingway, that the writer was intensely attuned to social and political life and “the moral atmosphere of the time, as it is felt at the roots of human relations, with a sensitivity almost unrivalled,” in critic Edmund Wilson’s eloquent phrase. This is the case apart from the question as to whether he responded valuably or in a principled manner to every pressure of that atmosphere.
Indeed, that Hemingway failed to grasp the essence of a number of strategic experiences, and made serious blunders, tended to heighten and not lessen the degree to which he ultimately felt or even absorbed physically, as it were, a portion of the immense violence and suffering bound up with the events of the mid-20th century. It seems reasonable to suggest, on the basis of the six-hour film alone, that the accumulating blows and defeats, only very partially comprehended, contributed to his early, tragic death, by suicide, in July 1961.
The first episode grapples with Hemingway’s childhood, adolescence, his experiences in World War I and the first phase of his writing career in the 1920s, predominantly in Europe.
Hemingway was born in the upright Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. His mother was a cultured woman and aspiring vocalist, to whom her eldest son was strongly drawn and by whom he also felt oppressed, as the PBS series indicates. Their relationship was a contentious one, and no doubt had longer-term psychic consequences. His father, a doctor, suffered from depression and would eventually kill himself in 1928.
At 18, during the First World War, Hemingway signed on to be a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy. Soon after he arrived, he was seriously wounded by an Austrian mortar shell, hit by 220 shards of shrapnel. Hemingway lay in a Milan hospital bed, uncertain whether he would lose one or both legs. Having spent six months in hospital and “deeply affected by the war,” as one of the interviewees observes, he returned to the US in 1919.
Three years later, now married and having arranged a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway and his new wife, Hadley Richardson, moved to Paris, the intellectual and artistic capital of the decade. He quickly fell in with artistic circles there, encountering Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. As part of his work for the Star, Hemingway traveled widely in Europe, covering wars and international conferences, interviewing Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris in 1923. It contains what was a controversial piece at the time, “Up in Michigan.” The eight-page story, set in northern Michigan, where the Hemingway family had a cottage and spent every summer, describes a sexual encounter between a coarse blacksmith and a girl who works as a waitress.
Hemingway, his wife Hadley (center) and friends in Spain in 1925
Edna O’Brien makes the point that the story refutes Hemingway’s “detractors” who claim that he “didn’t understand women and women’s emotions.” In general, Daniels’ reading of passages from Hemingway’s works,” especially in the first episode (including also “Indian Camp” and “Big Two-Hearted River”), is intensely moving and evocative.
Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, concerns a group of expatriate Americans and Britons, residing in Paris, who travel to Pamplona, Spain, for the running of the bulls and the bullfighting. The various men and women belong to what had become known as the Lost Generation, those scarred and disoriented by the world war. As the title suggests, however, all is not lost, humanity is resilient, although the characters are battered and disillusioned.
The beautifully composed novel, as a commentator points out in the Burns-Novick series, concludes on a disturbing, questioning note:
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Episode 1 of Hemingway also deals with the end of the writer’s first marriage, his second one to Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy American woman from Arkansas, his initial commercial and critical successes and the writing of remarkable stories such as “Hills Like White Elephants.” In that brief work, mostly dialogue, an American man pressures his female companion while they wait at a small Spanish train station to have an “operation,” presumably an abortion. At one point, she simply says to him, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
Hemingway’s second novel, A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929, saw him return to the subject of World War I. Set in northern Italy, the story centers on an American ambulance driver, who falls in love with a British nurse. Eventually, after many disasters related to the war, including his serious wounding, the lovers escape to Switzerland. Tragically, the woman dies in childbirth, along with her baby. Without ever offering a didactic statement, the novel presents the cruelty and madness of the world war, whose horrors fall almost entirely on the heads of ordinary soldiers, civilians, refugees. Those in charge are stupid and brutal. The book was a great critical and popular success.
In a number of ways, the second and third episodes, covering Hemingway’s writing and activity during the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War and World War II, along with his physical and mental decline in the 1950s, are more problematic and more painful to watch, and even at times tedious, for some of the reasons mentioned above.
Various commentators in Hemingway point to the increasing weight of the writer’s fame in the 1930s, to the emergence of the “legendary Hemingway,” which threatened to consume him.
Now based in Key West, Florida, flush with money, Hemingway is watching the bullfights again or off to Africa to hunt game. He writes about such things in unsatisfying works like Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Green Hills of Africa (1935). Meanwhile, the Great Depression grinds down the population and Stalinist critics such as Granville Hicks deplore his apparent lack of commitment.
In fact, the burst of slightly hysterical outdoor activity may well have been Hemingway’s initial, overwhelmed response to the economic hardships and the political tragedies in Europe. Edmund Wilson observed that while in the previous decade, the writer had tried to express his disquiet, and had been “undruggable,” now what had set in was “a deliberate self-drugging.”
By 1937, however, “the blast of the social issue” rushed into the vacuum. Hemingway produced a not very good “proletarian novel,” To Have and Have Not, about an individualistic fisherman-smuggler who ends up dying in a heroic manner. (The novel did form the basis of two very good films, Howard Hawks’ 1944 film with the same title and Michael Curtiz’ The Breaking Point in 1950).
Hemingway in Spain, 1937
Moreover, in the face of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Hemingway declared, “I have to go to Spain.” He went there as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). In Madrid, he met fellow correspondent Martha Gellhorn, with whom he carried on an affair and to whom he was later married, for a third time.
The Burns-Novick series points to the role of Stalin and the GPU in Spain, rounding up and murdering anarchists, socialists and “Trotskyites,” although it fails to place the vicious repression in the context of the Stalinists’ counter-revolutionary functioning during the civil war as a whole, as a force for bourgeois law and order suppressing every attempt by the Spanish workers to carry out a revolution.
The series notes Hemingway’s “opportunist” decision to conceal the Stalinists’ execution of leftist José Robles, a friend and translator for American novelist John Dos Passos, who was working at the time with Hemingway on the film The Spanish Earth (directed by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens). Hemingway claimed that such killings were “necessary in time of war,” and Dos Passos rightly denounced him, although it became the departure point for the latter’s own shift to the extreme right. Hemingway screened the Ivens film for Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House, as part of a vain effort to drum up official American support for the Spanish Republican cause.
As we noted ten years ago, at the time of the 50th anniversary of Hemingway’s death, the writer’s politics, generally speaking, “were of a certain American left variety, an amorphous mix of socialism, liberalism and individualism. … During the Spanish Civil War he submitted to the politics and discipline of the Spanish Communist Party and Soviet Stalinists, not the only American ‘free spirit’ to do so, although he writes mistrustfully about them.”
For Whom the Bell Tolls is Hemingway’s novel of the Spanish Civil War, and it is “mistrustful” of the Loyalist-Stalinist leadership. It relates the events over several days in the life of a young American volunteer, Robert Jordan, serving in the International Brigades and attached to a guerrilla band, as he prepares to blow up a bridge. The explosion is vital to an offensive planned by the Loyalist army, with its Soviet and French advisers. The offensive is doomed, however, and Jordan tries unsuccessfully to have it called off.
The book begins and ends with the young American on the floor of a pine forest, an image, we commented in our 2011 article, that “brings back some of Hemingway’s earliest concerns and emotions,” associated with summers spent in northern Michigan, “but now the images are charged with world-historical and tragic dimension. The ‘boy from the American Middle West’ was now in the midst of vast events, with equally vast consequences. As Jordan prepares for death in an apparently hopeless cause, he can feel ‘his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.’”
Wilson wrote, with some exaggeration, that in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway had “largely sloughed off his Stalinism” and that “the artist is with us again, and it is like having an old friend back.” Wilson observed that “The whole picture of the Russians and their followers in Spain … looks absolutely authentic,” and indeed Hemingway was denounced by the Stalinist press in the US.
The new series makes much of Martha Gellhorn’s goading Hemingway into covering the Second World War as though it were some sort of virtue on her part. One has the sense that Hemingway rightly viewed the new mass carnage with a considerable degree of horror. Gellhorn appears to have been more gung-ho. When Hemingway did eventually make his way to Europe, he ended up observing and perhaps even participating in the bloody Battle of Hürtgen Forest in late 1944, the longest single battle the US army has ever fought. The sights he saw, the series suggest, “would haunt him” for the rest of his days. As Hemingway once remarked, “never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead.”
By the end of the world war, Hemingway was involved with journalist Mary Welsh, who would become his fourth and final wife. By all accounts, she endured a great deal over the next 15 years, as the writer experienced a sharp deterioration in his physical and moral condition. However triumphant official America and the Stalinist left may have been about the outcome of the war, Hemingway emerged from it an even more shattered human being. The onset of the Cold War troubled and demoralized him further. How else can one make sense of his comment, not cited by Burns and Novick, in a letter to fellow writer William Faulkner in 1947, following the victory of the US and its allies in “the good war,” the supposed war for democracy against fascism, that “Things [have] never been worse than now.”
Martha Gellhorn and Hemingway in 1941
The success of The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which helped win Hemingway the Nobel Prize, and the Prize itself, tended to mask the overall decline and loss of purposefulness. The book, about an aging fisherman and his heroic but ultimately defeated effort to bring in a great fish, as we argued in 2011, “is well carried out, but its slightly condescending and sentimental tone is grating. And it almost celebrates resignation and defeatism.”
Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden and True at First Light, all published posthumously, are negligible works or worse. His memoir, A Moveable Feast, based on newly recovered notebooks and writings from his early days in Paris, was his last valuable and insightful work.
Hemingway, as the series documents, suffered serious injuries in two successive plane crashes in Africa in 1954. Erroneously, obituaries appeared in the international press. Hemingway had the unusual privilege of being able to read various premature attempts to sum up his life and work.
Afflicted with alcoholism and a host of physical wounds and ailments, unable to write satisfactorily, Hemingway inadvertently endured another blow when the Cuban revolution, which he generally supported, and US imperialism’s hostile response, combined to prevent him from returning to his beloved home outside Havana. He and Mary now resided in an isolated house in Ketchum, Idaho.
The series makes reference to Hemingway’s “paranoia” in regard to the FBI following and observing him. There may have been individual episodes of paranoia, but, in fact, documents subsequently made public revealed that J. Edgar Hoover and his ferociously anti-communist agency had been keeping an eye on the novelist since the 1940s.
In the early hours of July 2, 1961, the deeply, hopelessly depressed Hemingway shot himself at his Ketchum residence.
Hemingway’s life-story is an important one, for the light it sheds on art and politics in the last century.
The Burns-Novick series and the various interviewees refer, legitimately enough, on numerous occasions to Hemingway’s obsession with violence and death, and the brutality of life. But the responsibility for this “obsession” did not lie with Hemingway but with modern capitalist society. Born into an America created by the mass violence of the Civil War (in which both of Hemingway’s grandfathers fought) and the ensuing industrial-labor conflicts and imperialist interventions, Hemingway did not have to look far to find “darkness” and “butchery.” “How we are,” he pointedly observed in a letter in 1950, “is how the world has been.”
Hemingway in later life
Again, Hemingway, in our view, does not get everything right and does not probe deeply and critically enough into some of the American establishment’s own mythology, but it has its priorities essentially correct.
And that has been enough to bring down on the series and on PBS the wrath of the race-and-gender set. How dare anyone pay attention to anyone but these people? An open letter from “Beyond Inclusion” March 29 to PBS President Paula Kerger “from viewers like us” questioned “the network’s over-reliance on one white male filmmaker,” i.e., Burns. Beyond Inclusion describes itself as “a BIPOC [black, Indigenous and people of color]-led collective of non-fiction makers, executives, and field builders.”
The letter complained about Burns’s “211 hours of programming on PBS spanning 40 years,” reflected “in 38 cumulative films, mini series and television series titles.”
Rather than congratulating Burns on his sustained, diligent efforts over four decades, the open letter primarily suggests envy and petty back-biting. It would never occur to the authors, for example, to make a case for the infusion of tens of billions of dollars into PBS and the setting up of public film and arts programs on a mass scale that would enable young people of every background, including the most oppressed, to participate in cultural life. Rather, this unsavory pressure campaign by Beyond Inclusion is about divvying up more advantageously for its members and supporters the existing, meager resources.
The claim that the letter writers represent “viewers like us,” in other words, that only “BIPOC” filmmakers can speak to the concerns of black and other audiences, while entirely predictable, is false and disgusting. In fact, frankly, in so far as the letter expresses affluent petty bourgeois selfishness and self-regard, it does not speak to any wide layer of the population.
The questions examined or touched upon in Hemingway —including the rise of modern American society, the relationship between artists and social struggles, the nature of fascism and Stalinism, the character of the two imperialist world wars—are or ought to be of the greatest concern to every section of the working class and to the serious-minded intelligentsia, if such a thing can be said to exist at present. They are of far greater concern, in any case, than any issue raised so far, or likely to be, by those fixated on their ethnic or gender identities.
There are enormously attractive and enduring features of Hemingway’s body of work (he wrote some of the most beautiful prose in the English language), as well as less attractive and less enduring features. It is not accidental that the first two hours of the Burns-Novick series are its most compelling and intriguing. A persuasive case can be made that the writer did his most authentic and purposeful work in the first decade of his career, in his Michigan and European short stories and his first two novels.
As the series itself suggests, Hemingway was damaged by his arrival as a “celebrity” in the 1930s, by the solidifying and fixing at the same time of the two-fisted, brawny “Hemingway personality,” a man rushing—for unclear reasons—from one near-death encounter to the next. The writer, a deeply sensitive and shy man, initially built that public personality in part, it would seem, out of the need to protect himself from the world and how it was suffering and how it hurt him. Unfortunately, if one takes on such a posture long enough, one tends to become it. When Hemingway later turned to “political” matters in the late 1930s, his “tough-guy” personality became anchored, at least temporarily, in quasi-Stalinist realpolitik, a location “from whose bourn no traveller” easily or fully returns.
If Hemingway ultimately falls below Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald in one’s estimation, it has something to do with a less critical attitude toward American society, although he was undoubtedly critical of it, and a less critical attitude toward his own situation and trajectory, although he could be honest about that at times too.
His famed style played a role as well. Form is not a passive container for content. To a certain extent, Hemingway trapped himself in a corner with his short, declarative sentences and his nearly relentless stoicism (whereas the real man wallowed in grudges, complaints and even self-pity). When it came time to expand, to open up his approach and let in more of the world, including its great, historic tragedies, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, for instance, the results were not entirely happy. And that was his last major social-aesthetic experiment.
Hemingway asserted in his memoir, A Moveable Feast (published posthumously in 1964), that writing “the truest sentence that you know” and going “from there” solved any paralyzing dilemmas he faced in the early days of his writing career. Of course, a particular sentence is only true to the extent that it belongs to or reflects the truth of a larger, preconceived artistic and social idea. Whether a given author is fully conscious of it or not, he or she is subordinating the selection of words and sentences to that idea—although those words and sentences may, in turn, act upon the overriding conception and alter it. In his later, postwar books, Hemingway continued at times to turn out individually true sentences, but they added up to false or often trivial works because the underlying notions no longer corresponded meaningfully to the character of the epoch.
The moral-artistic crusade that Hemingway launched in the early 1920s, rooted in a belief that personal courage and strength lay at the heart of accomplishing anything in the world, ultimately ran up against the objectively thorny political problems of the 1930s and 1940s, and inevitably proved inadequate. Nonetheless, at his bravest and most realistic, Hemingway cut through mystification and euphemism in a pioneering fashion and contributed toward humanity seeing itself as it really was.
The Burns-Novick series is divided into three episodes, “A Writer (1899–1929),” “The Avatar (1929–1944)” and “The Blank Page (1944–1961).” The miniseries, narrated by actor Peter Coyote, systematically works through the course of Hemingway’s life and career, making use of photographs and film clips, interspersed with comments from numerous academics, biographers and writers, including short story writer and novelist Tobias Wolff, Irish novelist and memoirist Edna O’Brien and Peruvian novelist and politician Mario Vargas Llosa. Unfortunately, comments by the late Sen. John McCain also make their inappropriate way into the series.
The observations of the more than 15 interviewees in Hemingway range from the acute to the banal, but one has to commend Burns and Novick in general for their refusal to kowtow to the prevailing obsession with gender and race, and malicious, subjective gossip. Whether one subscribes to all their judgments or not, the co-directors, first and foremost, seriously treat Hemingway’s contributions as an artist, as someone who importantly responded to life and society, and do not become overly ensnared by his personal dramas and failings—although those are not ignored. One hopes, indeed, that Hemingway will encourage viewers to turn to the author’s works.
The creators conscientiously attempt to examine Hemingway’s art and personality in their contradictoriness. In regard to the traumas of the 1930s and 1940s, one might say that the Burns-Novick series encounters some of the same difficulties as Hemingway did. No doubt the writer-directors have their own limitations and blind spots, but much of the PBS film’s predicament in trying to depict the period has broader, more generalized sources: the complexity of the events and the degree to which they are still poorly understood 70, 80 and 90 years later.
One especially salient fact certainly does come across in Hemingway, that the writer was intensely attuned to social and political life and “the moral atmosphere of the time, as it is felt at the roots of human relations, with a sensitivity almost unrivalled,” in critic Edmund Wilson’s eloquent phrase. This is the case apart from the question as to whether he responded valuably or in a principled manner to every pressure of that atmosphere.
Indeed, that Hemingway failed to grasp the essence of a number of strategic experiences, and made serious blunders, tended to heighten and not lessen the degree to which he ultimately felt or even absorbed physically, as it were, a portion of the immense violence and suffering bound up with the events of the mid-20th century. It seems reasonable to suggest, on the basis of the six-hour film alone, that the accumulating blows and defeats, only very partially comprehended, contributed to his early, tragic death, by suicide, in July 1961.
The first episode grapples with Hemingway’s childhood, adolescence, his experiences in World War I and the first phase of his writing career in the 1920s, predominantly in Europe.
Hemingway was born in the upright Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. His mother was a cultured woman and aspiring vocalist, to whom her eldest son was strongly drawn and by whom he also felt oppressed, as the PBS series indicates. Their relationship was a contentious one, and no doubt had longer-term psychic consequences. His father, a doctor, suffered from depression and would eventually kill himself in 1928.
At 18, during the First World War, Hemingway signed on to be a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy. Soon after he arrived, he was seriously wounded by an Austrian mortar shell, hit by 220 shards of shrapnel. Hemingway lay in a Milan hospital bed, uncertain whether he would lose one or both legs. Having spent six months in hospital and “deeply affected by the war,” as one of the interviewees observes, he returned to the US in 1919.
Three years later, now married and having arranged a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway and his new wife, Hadley Richardson, moved to Paris, the intellectual and artistic capital of the decade. He quickly fell in with artistic circles there, encountering Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. As part of his work for the Star, Hemingway traveled widely in Europe, covering wars and international conferences, interviewing Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris in 1923. It contains what was a controversial piece at the time, “Up in Michigan.” The eight-page story, set in northern Michigan, where the Hemingway family had a cottage and spent every summer, describes a sexual encounter between a coarse blacksmith and a girl who works as a waitress.
Hemingway, his wife Hadley (center) and friends in Spain in 1925
Edna O’Brien makes the point that the story refutes Hemingway’s “detractors” who claim that he “didn’t understand women and women’s emotions.” In general, Daniels’ reading of passages from Hemingway’s works,” especially in the first episode (including also “Indian Camp” and “Big Two-Hearted River”), is intensely moving and evocative.
Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, concerns a group of expatriate Americans and Britons, residing in Paris, who travel to Pamplona, Spain, for the running of the bulls and the bullfighting. The various men and women belong to what had become known as the Lost Generation, those scarred and disoriented by the world war. As the title suggests, however, all is not lost, humanity is resilient, although the characters are battered and disillusioned.
The beautifully composed novel, as a commentator points out in the Burns-Novick series, concludes on a disturbing, questioning note:
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Episode 1 of Hemingway also deals with the end of the writer’s first marriage, his second one to Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy American woman from Arkansas, his initial commercial and critical successes and the writing of remarkable stories such as “Hills Like White Elephants.” In that brief work, mostly dialogue, an American man pressures his female companion while they wait at a small Spanish train station to have an “operation,” presumably an abortion. At one point, she simply says to him, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
Hemingway’s second novel, A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929, saw him return to the subject of World War I. Set in northern Italy, the story centers on an American ambulance driver, who falls in love with a British nurse. Eventually, after many disasters related to the war, including his serious wounding, the lovers escape to Switzerland. Tragically, the woman dies in childbirth, along with her baby. Without ever offering a didactic statement, the novel presents the cruelty and madness of the world war, whose horrors fall almost entirely on the heads of ordinary soldiers, civilians, refugees. Those in charge are stupid and brutal. The book was a great critical and popular success.
In a number of ways, the second and third episodes, covering Hemingway’s writing and activity during the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War and World War II, along with his physical and mental decline in the 1950s, are more problematic and more painful to watch, and even at times tedious, for some of the reasons mentioned above.
Various commentators in Hemingway point to the increasing weight of the writer’s fame in the 1930s, to the emergence of the “legendary Hemingway,” which threatened to consume him.
Now based in Key West, Florida, flush with money, Hemingway is watching the bullfights again or off to Africa to hunt game. He writes about such things in unsatisfying works like Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Green Hills of Africa (1935). Meanwhile, the Great Depression grinds down the population and Stalinist critics such as Granville Hicks deplore his apparent lack of commitment.
In fact, the burst of slightly hysterical outdoor activity may well have been Hemingway’s initial, overwhelmed response to the economic hardships and the political tragedies in Europe. Edmund Wilson observed that while in the previous decade, the writer had tried to express his disquiet, and had been “undruggable,” now what had set in was “a deliberate self-drugging.”
By 1937, however, “the blast of the social issue” rushed into the vacuum. Hemingway produced a not very good “proletarian novel,” To Have and Have Not, about an individualistic fisherman-smuggler who ends up dying in a heroic manner. (The novel did form the basis of two very good films, Howard Hawks’ 1944 film with the same title and Michael Curtiz’ The Breaking Point in 1950).
Hemingway in Spain, 1937
Moreover, in the face of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Hemingway declared, “I have to go to Spain.” He went there as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). In Madrid, he met fellow correspondent Martha Gellhorn, with whom he carried on an affair and to whom he was later married, for a third time.
The Burns-Novick series points to the role of Stalin and the GPU in Spain, rounding up and murdering anarchists, socialists and “Trotskyites,” although it fails to place the vicious repression in the context of the Stalinists’ counter-revolutionary functioning during the civil war as a whole, as a force for bourgeois law and order suppressing every attempt by the Spanish workers to carry out a revolution.
The series notes Hemingway’s “opportunist” decision to conceal the Stalinists’ execution of leftist José Robles, a friend and translator for American novelist John Dos Passos, who was working at the time with Hemingway on the film The Spanish Earth (directed by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens). Hemingway claimed that such killings were “necessary in time of war,” and Dos Passos rightly denounced him, although it became the departure point for the latter’s own shift to the extreme right. Hemingway screened the Ivens film for Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House, as part of a vain effort to drum up official American support for the Spanish Republican cause.
As we noted ten years ago, at the time of the 50th anniversary of Hemingway’s death, the writer’s politics, generally speaking, “were of a certain American left variety, an amorphous mix of socialism, liberalism and individualism. … During the Spanish Civil War he submitted to the politics and discipline of the Spanish Communist Party and Soviet Stalinists, not the only American ‘free spirit’ to do so, although he writes mistrustfully about them.”
For Whom the Bell Tolls is Hemingway’s novel of the Spanish Civil War, and it is “mistrustful” of the Loyalist-Stalinist leadership. It relates the events over several days in the life of a young American volunteer, Robert Jordan, serving in the International Brigades and attached to a guerrilla band, as he prepares to blow up a bridge. The explosion is vital to an offensive planned by the Loyalist army, with its Soviet and French advisers. The offensive is doomed, however, and Jordan tries unsuccessfully to have it called off.
The book begins and ends with the young American on the floor of a pine forest, an image, we commented in our 2011 article, that “brings back some of Hemingway’s earliest concerns and emotions,” associated with summers spent in northern Michigan, “but now the images are charged with world-historical and tragic dimension. The ‘boy from the American Middle West’ was now in the midst of vast events, with equally vast consequences. As Jordan prepares for death in an apparently hopeless cause, he can feel ‘his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.’”
Wilson wrote, with some exaggeration, that in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway had “largely sloughed off his Stalinism” and that “the artist is with us again, and it is like having an old friend back.” Wilson observed that “The whole picture of the Russians and their followers in Spain … looks absolutely authentic,” and indeed Hemingway was denounced by the Stalinist press in the US.
The new series makes much of Martha Gellhorn’s goading Hemingway into covering the Second World War as though it were some sort of virtue on her part. One has the sense that Hemingway rightly viewed the new mass carnage with a considerable degree of horror. Gellhorn appears to have been more gung-ho. When Hemingway did eventually make his way to Europe, he ended up observing and perhaps even participating in the bloody Battle of Hürtgen Forest in late 1944, the longest single battle the US army has ever fought. The sights he saw, the series suggest, “would haunt him” for the rest of his days. As Hemingway once remarked, “never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead.”
By the end of the world war, Hemingway was involved with journalist Mary Welsh, who would become his fourth and final wife. By all accounts, she endured a great deal over the next 15 years, as the writer experienced a sharp deterioration in his physical and moral condition. However triumphant official America and the Stalinist left may have been about the outcome of the war, Hemingway emerged from it an even more shattered human being. The onset of the Cold War troubled and demoralized him further. How else can one make sense of his comment, not cited by Burns and Novick, in a letter to fellow writer William Faulkner in 1947, following the victory of the US and its allies in “the good war,” the supposed war for democracy against fascism, that “Things [have] never been worse than now.”
Martha Gellhorn and Hemingway in 1941
The success of The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which helped win Hemingway the Nobel Prize, and the Prize itself, tended to mask the overall decline and loss of purposefulness. The book, about an aging fisherman and his heroic but ultimately defeated effort to bring in a great fish, as we argued in 2011, “is well carried out, but its slightly condescending and sentimental tone is grating. And it almost celebrates resignation and defeatism.”
Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden and True at First Light, all published posthumously, are negligible works or worse. His memoir, A Moveable Feast, based on newly recovered notebooks and writings from his early days in Paris, was his last valuable and insightful work.
Hemingway, as the series documents, suffered serious injuries in two successive plane crashes in Africa in 1954. Erroneously, obituaries appeared in the international press. Hemingway had the unusual privilege of being able to read various premature attempts to sum up his life and work.
Afflicted with alcoholism and a host of physical wounds and ailments, unable to write satisfactorily, Hemingway inadvertently endured another blow when the Cuban revolution, which he generally supported, and US imperialism’s hostile response, combined to prevent him from returning to his beloved home outside Havana. He and Mary now resided in an isolated house in Ketchum, Idaho.
The series makes reference to Hemingway’s “paranoia” in regard to the FBI following and observing him. There may have been individual episodes of paranoia, but, in fact, documents subsequently made public revealed that J. Edgar Hoover and his ferociously anti-communist agency had been keeping an eye on the novelist since the 1940s.
In the early hours of July 2, 1961, the deeply, hopelessly depressed Hemingway shot himself at his Ketchum residence.
Hemingway’s life-story is an important one, for the light it sheds on art and politics in the last century.
The Burns-Novick series and the various interviewees refer, legitimately enough, on numerous occasions to Hemingway’s obsession with violence and death, and the brutality of life. But the responsibility for this “obsession” did not lie with Hemingway but with modern capitalist society. Born into an America created by the mass violence of the Civil War (in which both of Hemingway’s grandfathers fought) and the ensuing industrial-labor conflicts and imperialist interventions, Hemingway did not have to look far to find “darkness” and “butchery.” “How we are,” he pointedly observed in a letter in 1950, “is how the world has been.”
Hemingway in later life
Again, Hemingway, in our view, does not get everything right and does not probe deeply and critically enough into some of the American establishment’s own mythology, but it has its priorities essentially correct.
And that has been enough to bring down on the series and on PBS the wrath of the race-and-gender set. How dare anyone pay attention to anyone but these people? An open letter from “Beyond Inclusion” March 29 to PBS President Paula Kerger “from viewers like us” questioned “the network’s over-reliance on one white male filmmaker,” i.e., Burns. Beyond Inclusion describes itself as “a BIPOC [black, Indigenous and people of color]-led collective of non-fiction makers, executives, and field builders.”
The letter complained about Burns’s “211 hours of programming on PBS spanning 40 years,” reflected “in 38 cumulative films, mini series and television series titles.”
Rather than congratulating Burns on his sustained, diligent efforts over four decades, the open letter primarily suggests envy and petty back-biting. It would never occur to the authors, for example, to make a case for the infusion of tens of billions of dollars into PBS and the setting up of public film and arts programs on a mass scale that would enable young people of every background, including the most oppressed, to participate in cultural life. Rather, this unsavory pressure campaign by Beyond Inclusion is about divvying up more advantageously for its members and supporters the existing, meager resources.
The claim that the letter writers represent “viewers like us,” in other words, that only “BIPOC” filmmakers can speak to the concerns of black and other audiences, while entirely predictable, is false and disgusting. In fact, frankly, in so far as the letter expresses affluent petty bourgeois selfishness and self-regard, it does not speak to any wide layer of the population.
The questions examined or touched upon in Hemingway —including the rise of modern American society, the relationship between artists and social struggles, the nature of fascism and Stalinism, the character of the two imperialist world wars—are or ought to be of the greatest concern to every section of the working class and to the serious-minded intelligentsia, if such a thing can be said to exist at present. They are of far greater concern, in any case, than any issue raised so far, or likely to be, by those fixated on their ethnic or gender identities.
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