Mats Norrman wrote:

>I have read Bruckner had operaplans. Can anyone shed some more
>light on this? I'd be interested to hear.

Yes, believe it or not, he had.  Around 1892-1893, Bruckner was
contemplating writing one on the subject of Richard Voss' "Die Toteninsel",
a story full of religious mystery and romanticism, perhaps not unlike
Wagner's Lohengrin or Parsifal.  The working title of this opera was
"Astra".  Plans never went any further than a few (really VERY FEW)
scetches and were then abandoned for work on his newer symphony (and
overhauling his older ones which alas probably prevented him from finishing
the ninth).These scetches really give no clue to what music he was really
thinking of and I can't see them ever coming into life.

An interesting question of course is: What would this opera have been like?

When you come to think of it, it's really only our 19/20th century
preconception that opera should be about Verdian adultery and cheat or
Puccinian dying of love-thirst that makes the idea of a Bruckner opera an
odd or even absurd one.  As others have shown (like Messiaen as I argued
some time ago or like) it is perfectly possible to write music for the
theatre that is both Theatrically and Musically sound without going into
the down-trodden paths of "what can be done and what certainly not".
Actually, I see the difference between, say, an opera and an oratorio or
a cantata as quite ambiguous.  This difference has in my view only been
created by some of us who had nothing better to do than bore us with their
definitions of genre and style.  Take e.g.  Debussy's Pelleas as opposed
to his Martyre de St. Sebastian.  The more you think of it, the more
impossible it is to tell where the opera starts and the oratorio ends.  As
an other example: who would deny the dramatic impact of, say, Bach's St.
John's Passion? So, this has definitively some "operatic" aspects.

One more word about "the plot" in an opera.  Just have a listen to
Moussorgsky's "Kovantstsjina".  You might just then discover that for
Moussorgsky, it was even possible to tell a story WITHOUT a real plot.  In
this works, one event stumbles over the other, so plenty of action going
on, but the real essence does not llie in "where the story is going", but
in the central theme (in this case:of man's individual and collective
weakness in the face of what some call "fate" but is in fact the going-ons
of the "haves"and the inability/unwillingness of the "have-nots" to do much
about it.)

If you loosen up the defintion of opera a bit, and not make it merely the
"setting to music of a story, with a plot", Bruckner in my opinion might
have had some wonderful opportunities, bigger opportunities in any case
than Brahms.  But then, opera wasn't the only thing Brahms was unsuited
for.  Just think e.g.  of something like Wagner's Parsifal.  Wouldn't that
have been great? On the other hand, who would want to be without the adagio
in the ninth.......

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