It is Wednesday evening, shortly before the start of the concert. The programme is that of a single, substantial work, Bruckner’s unfinished Ninth Symphony, with his Te Deum as a fourth movement. Just after seven o’clock, the conductor is sitting in the green room. He prefers to prepare for a performance in peace. Right from the beginning, the first movement demands much of everyone's concentration and focus. It is an enormous task to make the ‘Feierlich’ and ‘Misterioso’ sound weighty but not dragging, profound but not tormented, devout but not pathetic, and certainly not sentimental. He feels the tension slowly growing inside himself.

An elderly gentleman arrives at the venue in a hurry, just minutes before the start of the concert. He has high expectations of this performance of The Ninth. Examples from the past with great names such as Eugen Jochum or Sergiu Celibidache, which were authoritative, fervent, and utterly solemn, are his ideal performances. Bruckner's music is like a prayer or a kind of sacrament for this man. The concert hall is his church and the conductor his priest. As he sits down he notices a well-known reviewer from the city newspaper positioned a few rows behind him.

One of the violinists on stage had worked on the symphony that morning. He thought it was a boring and mediocre rehearsal, with little more than a few adjustments to the balance. There was hardly a moment when they had been ‘making music’. After the rehearsal he had to teach all afternoon at the music school, and then there was the rush home, a bite to eat, a quick change into concert clothes and on his bike through busy traffic to the concert. On top of that he is also in a bad mood from a quarrel at home that morning, and pupils getting under his skin during the afternoon. And now there is this long symphony of which he is already no great fan – with all that glutinous stuff and those excessive outbursts of sound.

At exactly a quarter past eight, everyone is in place. The orchestra has tuned, the musician contemplates the long musical journey ahead, and the reviewer has his pen at the ready.