The pizzicato figures are symmetrical in the sense that the outer movements share one figure while the middle movements share another. Finale: Adagio – Allegro moderato (B ♭ major)Īll but the third movement begin with pizzicato strings, hence the above-mentioned nickname.Introduction: Adagio – Allegro ( B ♭ major).There are four movements the climax comes unusually late, in the chorale at the end of the last movement, posing a huge interpretive challenge: The symphony is not outwardly a work of storm and stress, but it is a piece of 'working out', one of Bruckner's most contrapuntally intricate works.

The tuba was added in 1878 (the same year Bruckner added one to his Fourth Symphony). One pair each flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, with four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and one bass tuba along with timpani and strings. He in fact never heard this symphony performed by an orchestra. Bruckner, who died two years later, was sick and unable to attend. The first orchestral performance – in the inauthentic 'Schalk version', with a changed orchestration in Wagnerian fashion and omitting 122 bars of the finale – was conducted by Franz Schalk in Graz on 8 April 1894. The Fifth was first performed in public on two pianos by Joseph Schalk and Franz Zottmann on 20 April 1887 in the Bösendorfersaal in Vienna. Dedicated to Karl von Stremayr, education minister in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the symphony has at times been nicknamed the 'Tragic', the 'Church of Faith' or the 'Pizzicato' Bruckner himself referred to it as the 'Fantastic' without applying this or any other name formally. It came at a time of trouble and disillusion for the composer: a lawsuit, from which he was exonerated, and a reduction in salary. 5 in B-flat major WAB 105, was written in 1875–1876, with minor changes over the next two years.

B flat 5