It was an accident. I didn't mean to, really I didn't. As the evidence of my transgression was made manifest, my parents were puzzled and concerned, yet gentle. They were on my side and I knew they were, but I was stubborn. I was determined to face the consequences on my own, all their solicitious advice notwithstanding.
Send it back, they said.
No, I said.
My dad looked at me steadily. Well, it's your money, he murmured. My mother gave him that look, the one that meant "So…is that ALL you're going to do about this??" He gave her that look, the one that meant "Yes, that's all I'm going to do, and don't you dare escalate."
They had their say, and I had mine.
Every month our mailbox would sprout a catalog from the Columbia Record Club. Bewitching and tempting, it was downright pornographic with its wanton promises of vinyl goodies galore. I usually lusted for everything in the Classical section. But my allowance limited me to one record per month, if that. Pure agony, those choices. Usually I settled on something I was absolutely certain would rock my boat big time—Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Debussy, Shostakovich, all those big splashy orchestral jobs. That is, provided I was solvent. Just as often I sighed in resignation as I checked the box saying "no selection this month" then dropped the postage-paid card in the mail.
I forgot to fill out my card one month. In the Columbia Record Club, "no answer" meant "send me this month's featured Classical album." So they sent me this month's featured Classical album. Given that I was flat broke, the arrival of that white media-mail cardboard box with the Columbia logo on the front was disconcerting. As I said, it was an accident. I opened it anyway. Columbia Stereo MS 6897, George Szell conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 3 in D Minor. The album cover is striking. A jet-black background surrounds a Gothic arch cutout that frames Ernst Ferdinand Oehme's Cathedral in Winter, one of the talismanic images of German Romanticism. The print is stark white, the Columbia logo and catalog number muted gold. I thought it was gorgeous. I still do.
Without a doubt my parents had my best interests at heart; they didn't know anything about Bruckner, but they knew that I wasn't the slightest bit interested in religious stuff, and that jacket implied one seriously churchy record. That's why they advised sending it back for a refund; they figured I'd hate it. But they underestimated the sheer magnetic power that a record—any record—had on their teenage son. At some subterranean atavistic level of consciousness I was starving for music. That's why I headed straight for the lush Romantic showstoppers; like a ravenous bear just emerging from hibernation, I needed the calories.
A grudging low-interest parental advance on my earnings as a grocery-store bag boy took care of my temporary cash-flow problem. MS 6897 was mine. I retreated with my prize down to the panelled basement room that served both as bedroom and cloistered retreat. With some trepidation I gently split open the cellophane wrapper and eased out the gray-label Columbia "360 Stereo" disc from within. I opened the smoked-glass plastic cover of my RCA Victor record player. I gave MS 6897 a gentle swipe or two with the record-cleaning brush. The moment of truth had arrived.
You understand that I had never heard of Anton Bruckner. I had never heard a note of his music. I didn't have the faintest idea what to expect. As the opening pulsating string figures emerged from my el-cheapo red-fabric-grill speakers—D minor chords lightly spiced by inner-voice ninths (i.e., e-naturals)—and the solo trumpet outlined a nobly simple falling figure D-A-A-D, I was mesmerized. A long crescendo carried me to the shattering peak when the inner-voice ninth emerged triumphant in the first violins, the whole eventually settling down to the first appearance of major mode and a well-earned moment of tranquillity. I remembering lying flat on my back in front of the stereo, my eyes shut, as I drank in the symphony from beginning to end, stopping only long to flip the record over between the 2nd and 3rd movements. When the symphony ended, I played the Scherzo again. Then again. Howling erupted from above to turn down the goddamn stereo goddamnit. More Scherzo. More first movement. More howling to come get your goddamn dinner or I'm going to stuff it down the goddamn garbage disposal and you can goddamn well go hungry and GODDAMNIT TURN OFF THAT GODDAMN RECORD FOR NOW GODDAMNIT.
I learned a bit about Bruckner. Jack Diether's essay-length liner note clued me in to the gentle Austrian from an impoverished hamlet near Linz who eventually travelled to Vienna, endured the mockery of the Big Apfel's sneering sophisticates, and was eventually recognized as the giant that he was. We no longer had an encyclopedia—it had gone missing at some point during our unsettled existence—so for the time being that was the sum total of my Bruckner education. Come to think of it, I didn't move on with him for many years to come. But no matter. The seeds had been sown.
I can even pinpoint my next Bruckner experience: It was the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sergiu Comissiona. They were playing the 8th. I'll be honest and admit that I was bored during the first two movements. But the Adagio rekindled the old flame, and from then on Bruckner and I have never been far apart. Given the hefty time investment mandated by an entire Bruckner symphony, more often than not my Bruckner sessions are piecemeal, a movement here and a movement there. Until recently entire symphonies yet remained terra incognita. This past season a pre-concert lecture on the Fifth for the SF Symphony filled one particularly gaping hole as I put myself through a month-long crash course in that most majestic (and lengthy) of symphonies. Assignments for program notes on symphonies 2 and 6 have encouraged me to get my Brucknerian house in order, and a most pleasant housekeeping it has been.
My MS 6897 disappeared at some point, probably during the late 1980s when I began foolishly divesting myself of LPs in favor of CDs. But today I went on an Amoeba Records run and there it was—a pristine, nearly-new copy. I haven't listened to it yet. But of course I will. And I think I'll listen prone on the living room floor, in honor of my teenaged self who gambled his allowance on serendipity and won.
