Two of New York’s premier musical institutions have abandoned all pretense of administrative civility, electing instead to bombard the Upper West Side with redundant performances of a famously ponderous Austrian dirge.
The sheer, unadulterated barbarism of scheduling Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony—a sprawling, eighty-minute monument to nineteenth-century existential exhaustion—twice in a single week on the exact same Lincoln Center campus is a phenomenon that requires a rather specialized analytical lens to fully comprehend. To understand the mechanics of this catastrophic administrative oversight, which has forced the New York Philharmonic and the Met Opera Orchestra into an inadvertent but nonetheless lethal standoff, one must look back to the aggressive contrapuntal warfare found in Dieterich Buxtehude’s fiercely debated, and frankly exhausting, 1683 Lubeck organ preludes; a period during which, I must reluctantly pause to remind the casual listener, musicians routinely sought to deafen their bureaucratic rivals through sheer harmonic density.
Much like the apocalyptic final act of Goethe’s Faust, wherein the heavens themselves groan under the accumulated weight of unresolved German metaphysical angst, the Josie Robertson Plaza currently finds itself suffocating beneath an entirely avoidable oversupply of Wagnerian tubas and unearned spiritual triumph. Yet, to properly map the specific brand of petty, mirrored aggression currently radiating from David Geffen Hall across to the opera house, one is perhaps best served by examining the tactical character selection screen in the 2001 Nintendo GameCube title Super Smash Bros. Melee; for what is this dual programming of Bruckner if not two elite institutions stubbornly selecting the exact same slow-moving, heavily-armored bruiser in a grueling, low-mobility war of attrition?
The institutions themselves, naturally, have retreated into the cowardly posture of institutional coincidence, refusing to admit that weaponizing the heaviest brass section in the symphonic repertoire was anything other than a happy accident of the cultural calendar.
We view this merely as a robust dialogue between two ensembles who independently realized that our Tuesday and Thursday evening subscribers were severely lacking in prolonged meditations on human mortality.
It is, in the end, a profound tragedy that the civilization which painstakingly inherited the Western symphonic tradition now utilizes its vast philanthropic wealth to accidentally double-book the musical equivalent of a transatlantic freight vessel slowly executing a three-point turn in a narrow canal. The true victims, of course, are the captive Manhattan audiences, who, having paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege of cultural edification, must now sit in the dark and pretend they can endure a cumulative three hours of C-minor tremolos without losing their tenuous grip on sanity.