Markus Poschner & Bruckner Orchester Linz

Program booklet for the event

„Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine“

Since 2018, the International Bruckner Festival Linz has ended every year on 11 October, the anniversary of the death of its namesake. The memorial concert at the end of the festival always takes place in St Florian's Abbey Basilica, the place where everything ended for Anton Bruckner, where he was buried under his beloved great organ at his own request and where he hoped to find eternal rest.

In honour of his memory, the Symphony No. 8 in C minor was performed in the "1890 version" in 2024. With no other revision did the composer change one of his symphonies more drastically, for while the repeated achievement of a radiant C major in the "1887 version" is not the "object of a tenacious struggle but of a solemnly celebrated certainty", the second version stages the long journey from C minor at the beginning to C major at the end as a "painstakingly won symphonic triumph" and thus seems to us today like a reflection of Bruckner's own creative path. The last movement he completed forms the conclusion, in the coda of which the superimposed main themes of all four movements of the symphony are heard simultaneously.

This closes the circle, and not only in a musical and thematic sense: as at the opening ceremony of the festival, the orchestra bearing Bruckner's name will be playing under the direction of its chief conductor, a work by an Austrian composer will be premiered at the beginning, as at the end of the ceremony, and a symphony will be on the programme that was also performed in the same version and at the same venue at the 2018 Brucknerfest. Thus, the sentence with which T. S. Eliot's poem East Coker concludes proves true once again: "In my end is my beginning."