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Showing posts with label Anton Bruckner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anton Bruckner. Show all posts

Friday, September 6, 2024

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) Happy 200th Birthday Anton Bruckner

by Georg Predota, Interlude

Anton Bruckner

Anton Bruckner © Ludwig Grillich

His compositions, relying on a highly idiosyncratic and expansive musical style, helped to define contemporary musical radicalism. A solitary man, preferring the rural surroundings of Upper Austria to the urban environments of Linz and Vienna, Anton Bruckner remains an enigma, even as we celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birthday. 

Ancestry and Study

The Bruckner family lived in a small, isolated farming community for over four centuries. His grandfather was a broom-maker, and just like Schubert, Anton was a schoolmaster’s son. His father, also named Anton, did everything in his power to stimulate his son’s musical talents. As the composer later recalled, “my favourite place growing up was in church, next to my father on the organ bench.”

Young Bruckner showed some obvious talent for music, and at the age of 10, it was decided that he should be sent to musical studies with his godfather Johann Baptist Weiss. Bruckner received his first serious lessons in harmony, figured bass, and organ and violin playing. In addition, young Anton was introduced to a wider repertory of church music. After his father’s death in 1837, Bruckner was sent to the monastery of St. Florian as a chorister.

St Florian Monastery

St. Florian Monastery

St. Florian Monastery

Bruckner’s first stay at the Augustinian monastery of St. Florian lasted three years. The monastery was a center for the arts and science, and as part of the centuries-old music tradition, it housed the largest organ in the Danube Monarchy. Bruckner was in awe of the great instrument, later to be called the “Bruckner Organ,” and he greatly excelled in organ improvisation. He also received lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic, and organ and piano instruction.

As Paul Hawkshaw writes, “if his Roman Catholicism had already been firmly established during his boyhood in Ansfelden, it was certainly reinforced at St. Florian. The Baroque halls of the monastery were to be a source of spiritual strength and inspiration for the rest of his life.” Bruckner was a devoutly religious man who kept a log of his daily devotions and prayed before each performance. His faith in the spiritual journey towards the afterlife became a process that decisively shaped his compositional imagination as he channeled profound spiritual messages that elevated the music to the level of an undistracted prayer.

Teacher Training and Return to St. Florian

Anton Bruckner's monument in Vienna

Anton Bruckner’s monument in Vienna

Despite his obvious musical abilities, Bruckner’s mother decided that he should follow in his father’s footsteps and become a schoolmaster. After taking teacher-training courses in Linz, Bruckner was sent to the remote village of Windhaag near Freistadt, where he remained as assistant schoolteacher for 16 months. A further teaching appointment saw him stationed at
Kronstorf an der Enns, but eventually, he returned to St. Florian for ten years to work as a teacher and an organist.

At the beginning of his second stay in St. Florian, Bruckner took on organ duties in the monastery church, and he dedicated himself to compositional studies aimed at improving his skills as a composer. He transcribed and analyzed works by Mozart, Michael and Joseph Haydn, and Beethoven. Bruckner remained a livelong learner, and he started to integrate these influences into his own improvisations and compositions. From about 1849 onward, almost 30 compositions were created at St. Florian. 

Linz

Bruckner's Ave Maria

Bruckner’s Ave Maria

During the early 1850s, Bruckner became increasingly frustrated with St. Florian, and he began to set his sights beyond the monastery walls. He unsuccessfully applied for the position of cathedral organist in Olmütz, but was more successful at Linz. His provisional appointment as cathedral organist was confirmed on 13 November 1855. Bruckner greatly enjoyed his time in Linz, a period that was essentially more stable and freer from controversies.

For six years, Bruckner studied counterpoint via correspondence with the famed Viennese theorist Simon Sechter, producing thousands of pages of exercises. Sechter later confessed that he had never had such an industrious student. Bruckner even took official examinations, and in addition to his legendary reputation as an improviser at the organ, he now produced his first masterpiece, the seven-voice Ave Maria first performed at Linz cathedral on 12 May 1861. 

Idol Wagner

Bruckner's autograph manuscript

Bruckner’s autograph manuscript

In December 1861, Bruckner once again immersed himself in study, taking orchestration lessons with the German cellist and conductor Otto Kitzler. As Timothy L. Jackson writes, “Kitzler must be credited with bringing Bruckner up to date with 19th-century musical practices and introduced him to the music of Wagner.” For Kitzler, Bruckner composed a String Quartet, a “Study” Symphony in F minor, and a Psalm for double chorus and orchestra.

Bruckner first met his idol Wagner at the première of Tristan und Isolde in Munich in May 1865. Bruckner was fascinated by Wagner’s ideas about expanding the orchestra and his harmonic innovations, and he became a “fawning acolyte of Richard Wagner.” This hero worship would haunt Bruckner during his lifetime and posthumously. His total admiration is probably best demonstrated by Bruckner’s dedication of his Third Symphony. It reads, “To the eminent Excellency Richard Wagner the Unattainable, World-Famous, and Exalted Master of Poetry and Music, in Deepest Reverence Dedicated by Anton Bruckner.” 

Vienna

The Bruckner Organ

The Bruckner Organ © stift-st-florian.at

Bruckner’s discovery of Wagner’s music at the age of 38 initiated a transition from meek church musician to bombastic symphonist. But first, Bruckner accepted Sechter’s post as a music theory teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. Bruckner was ill-prepared for the acidic and highly competitive musical environment of imperial Vienna. He presented a wide and easy target for music critics, journalists and composers alike, with most famously perhaps Johannes Brahms referring to him as a “country pumpkin.”

During his time in Vienna, which included an appointment at Vienna University in 1875, the symphony became the focus of his creative activity, starting with the so-called “Nullte,” No. 0. In a remarkable spurt of activity during 1870 and 1871, Brucker completed a series of four symphonies in little over two years. In general, the works were considered too long, and habitually plagued by debilitating periods of low self-esteem, Bruckner became preoccupied with revising earlier scores.

Symphonic Thoughts

Bruckner composed music that was simultaneously naïve and complex. Yet, once he had found his compositional path, the musical world did not know what to do with it. His “Wagner” Symphony No. 3 received a disastrous premiere in December 1877. Bruckner, never a successful orchestral conductor, was forced to take the podium. A scholar writes, “The orchestra was rebellious; the audience streamed out of the hall during the Finale and Hanslick wrote a blistering review.” As Bruckner reported to a friend, “I am once again alone in the face of adversity and misunderstanding.”

Amongst countless revisions of earlier works, the completion of the Fifth Symphony, a work he never heard performed during his lifetime, was followed by another remarkable series of works including the Sixth Symphony, the Seventh, the Eight, and the Te Deum. These works represent the summation of his symphonic journey. He was now blending Beethoven’s sense of preparation and suspense, mystery, and the ethical content of music with Schubert’s extended harmonies and Wagner’s unhurried and gradual unfolding of instrumental music. 

Character and Reception

Bruckner's tomb

Bruckner’s tomb

Admirers describe Bruckner as an unpretentious, modest man and a “daring innovator who shied away from no enterprise.” Detractors, and he certainly had many, recognised his originality yet found nothing of value in the “work of a modest Viennese church musician who lived a solitary dreamlike existence without ambition, and who had been dragged into the limelight by an excessive Wagnerian cult.” To be sure, Bruckner was decidedly out of place in Vienna as he retained his peasant speech and social clumsiness, and he had the disastrous inclination to fall in love with teenage girls.

His distracting compulsions ranged from obsessive preoccupation with financial security to a morbid fascination with corpses. Bruckner was painfully unaware of the intellectual and political currents of his day, and he exhibited a “Neanderthal male chauvinism that even his admirers found remarkable.” He allowed outside influences to shape the content of his music, and untangling the relative merits of Bruckner’s various versions has kept performers and scholars busy until this very day. Bruckner’s symphonic works, much maligned in Vienna in his lifetime, are finally an integral part of the symphonic repertoire.

Bruckner died in Vienna on 11 October 1896 at the age of 72. He is buried in the crypt of the monastery church at Saint Florian, immediately below his favourite organ. 

Monday, March 6, 2023

Top 10 Symphony Composers

 

After the extraordinary musical developments of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven the composition of a symphony became a daunting challenge, for many years the ultimate challenge for any composer. Many rose magnificently to that challenge, not least Brahms, Mahler, Sibelius and Shostakovich

Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms

As Richard Bratby notes in his article What is a Symphony?: 'Few musical terms carry such baggage. And to write a symphony, now as then, means engaging with Western music’s most ambitious ongoing attempt to create meaning out of sound; declaring to the world that you have something important to say – and are about to deploy all your creative powers to say it.' 

We hope that the gathering of the 10 composers below serves as a informative introduction to the vast universe of symphonic writing, outlining the diverse ways that the greatest composers have responded to the task of writing a symphony, from the 18th century to the 20th. There are many outstanding symphonists to explore outside this initial list of 10 (Mendelssohn, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Copland, Carl Nielsen, Florence Price, Per Nørgård, Malcolm Arnold, John Adams – to name just a few), but we hope that this guide will set you off an an inspiring listening journey. 

We have recommended both a complete symphony-cycle and a recording of an individual symphony for each composer.


Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Haydn’s contribution to musical history is immense, he was nicknamed ‘the father of the symphony’ (despite Stamitz’s prior claim) and was progenitor of the string quartet. Like all his well-trained contemporaries, Haydn had a thorough knowledge of polyphony and counterpoint (and, indeed, was not averse to using it) but his music is predominantly homophonic. His 104 symphonies cover a wide range of expression and harmonic ingenuity.

Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra / Adám Fischer (Brilliant Classics)

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Haydn 2032, Volume 4 – Il Distratto

Il Giardino Armonico / Giovanni Antonini (Alpha)

Gramophone Award winner – Orchestral category (2017)

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

There is less than half a century between the death of Handel (1759) and the first performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio (1809). Bach and Handel were still composing when Haydn was a teenager. To compare the individual ‘sound world’ of any of these four composers is to hear amazingly rapid progress in musical thinking. Without doubt, the most important element of this was the development of the sonata and symphonic forms. During this period, a typical example generally followed the same basic pattern: four movements – 1) the longest, sometimes with a slow introduction, 2) slow movement, 3) minuet, 4) fast, short and light in character. Working within this formal structure, each movement in turn had its own internal structure and order of progress. Most of Haydn’s and Mozart’s sonatas, symphonies and chamber music are written in accordance with this pattern and three-quarters of all Beethoven’s music conforms to ‘sonata form’ in one way or another.

Mozart composed 41 symphonies and in the later ones (try the famous opening of No 40 in G minor) enters a realm beyond Haydn’s – searching, moving and far from impersonal.

Recommended recordings

Complete Symphonies (Nos 1-41)

The English Concert / Trevor Pinnock (Archiv)

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Symphonies Nos 29, 31, 32, 35 & 36

Scottish Chamber Orchestra / Sir Charles Mackerras (Linn Records)

Gramophone Awards shortlist (2010)

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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Ludwig van Beethoven coupled his genius for music with profoundly held political beliefs and an almost religious certainty about his purpose. With the possible exception of Wagner, no other composer has, single-handedly, changed the course of music so dramatically and continued to develop and experiment throughout his entire career. His early music, built on the Classical paths trod by Haydn and Mozart, demonstrates his individuality in taking established musical structures and re-shaping them to his own ends. Unusual keys and harmonic relationships are explored, while as early as the Third Symphony (Eroica), the music is vastly more inventive and cogent than anything Mozart achieved even in a late masterpiece like the Jupiter. Six more symphonies followed, all different in character, all attempting new goals of human expression, culminating in the great Choral Symphony (No 9) with its ecstatic final choral movement celebrating man’s existence. No wonder so many composers felt daunted by attempting the symphonic form after Beethoven and that few ever attempted more than the magic Beethovenian number of nine.


Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Arnold Schoenberg Choir / Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Teldec)

Gramophone's Recording of the Year (1992)

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Symphonies Nos 5 & 7

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra / Carlos Kleiber (DG)

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Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

On March 26, 1828, in the Musikverein of Vienna, there was given for the first time a programme entirely devoted to Schubert’s music. It was put on by his friends, of course, but though successful, was never even reviewed. Less than eight months later, Schubert died of typhoid, delirious, babbling of Beethoven. He was 31 and was buried as near to him as was practicable, with the epitaph ‘Here lie rich treasure and still fairer hopes’. Schubert left no estate at all, absolutely nothing – except his manuscripts.

It was only by chance and the diligence of a few musicians that some of it came to light – in 1838 Schumann happened to visit Schubert’s brother and came across the great Symphony in C (the Ninth) and urged its publication; the Unfinished Symphony was not heard until 1865, after the score was found in a chest; it was George Grove (of Grove’s Dictionary fame) and the young Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) who unearthed in a publisher’s house in Vienna Schubert’s Symphonies Nos 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6, 60 songs and the music for Rosamunde. That was in 1867. Over a century later, in 1978, the sketches for a tenth symphony were unearthed in another Viennese archive.


Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Karl Böhm (DG)

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Symphonies Nos 3, 5 & 6

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Sir Thomas Beecham (Warner Classics)


Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)

‘I never had a more serious pupil than you,’ remarked Bruckner’s renowned teacher of counterpoint, Simon Sechter. Certainly, no one could ever accuse Bruckner of being frivolous and quite how this unsophisticated, obsequious boor came to write nine symphonies of such originality and epic splendour is one of music’s contradictions. You don’t turn to Bruckner the man or the musician for the light touch. His worship of Wagner verged on the neurotic for, really, there is something worrying about his debasement before the composer of Tristan. The dedication of his Third Symphony to Wagner reads: ‘To the eminent Excellency Richard Wagner the Unattainable, World-Famous, and Exalted Master of Poetry and Music, in Deepest Reverence Dedicated by Anton Bruckner’; before the two men eventually met, Bruckner would sit and stare at his idol in silent admiration, and after hearing Parsifal for the first time, fell on his knees in front of Wagner crying, ‘Master – I worship you’. His soliciting of honours, his craving for recognition and lack of self-confidence, allied with an unprepossessing appearance and a predilection for unattainable young girls, paints a disagreeable picture. The reverse of the coin is that of the humble peasant ill at ease in society, devoutly religious (most of his works were inscribed ‘Omnia ad majorem Dei gloriam’) and a personality of almost childlike simplicity and ingenuousness. God, Wagner and Music were his three deities.


Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Herbert von Karajan (DG)

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Symphony No 9

Lucerne Festival Orchestra / Claudio Abbado (DG)

Gramophone's Recording of the Year (2015)

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Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Not all composers fell under Wagner’s spell. Brahms was the epitome of traditional musical thought. His four symphonies are far nearer the style of Beethoven than those of Mendelssohn or Schumann, and the first of these was not written until 1875, when Wagner had all but completed The Ring. Indeed Brahms is by far the most classical of the German Romantics. He wrote little programme music and no operas. It’s a curious coincidence that he distinguished himself in the very musical forms that Wagner chose to ignore – the fields of chamber music, concertos, variation writing and symphonies.


Gewandhaus Orchestra / Riccardo Chailly (Decca)

Gramophone's Recording of the Year (2014); Recording of the Month (October 2013)

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Symphony No 3

Budapest Festival Orchestra / Iván Fischer (Channel Classics)

Gramophone Editor's Choice (August 2021)

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Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Mahler is the last great Romantic symphonist, music conceived on the grandest scale and employing elaborate forces. He wanted to express his view of the human condition, to set down his lofty ideals about Life, Death and the Universe. 'My symphonies represent the contents of my entire life.'


CBSO; Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Sir Simon Rattle (Warner Classics)

Gramophone's Recording of the Year (Symphony No 2, 1988); Gramophone's Recording of the Year (Symphony No 10, 2000)

Read the review of Symphony No 10


Symphony No 9

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Herbert von Karajan (DG)

Gramophone's Recording of the Year (1984)

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Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

To most people Sibelius is the composer of Finlandia and the Karelia Suite; to others he is one of the great symphony composers; to the people of Finland he is these things and a national hero. While he was still alive the Finnish government issued stamps with his portrait and would have erected a statue to him as well had not Sibelius himself discouraged the project. Probably no composer in history has meant so much to his native country as did Sibelius. He still does. ‘He is Finland in music; and he is Finnish music,’ observed one critic.


BBC Philharmonic / John Storgårds (Chandos)

Gramophone Awards shortlisted – Orchestral category (2015)


Symphonies Nos 3, 6 & 7

Minnesota Orchestra / Osmo Vänskä (BIS)

Gramophone Awards shortlisted – Orchestral category (2017); Editor's Choice (September 2016)

Read the review


Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

Vaughan Williams emerged as an adventurous, unmistakably English composer with a distinct voice of his own. His discovery in the early 1900s of English folksong, through the recently formed English Folk Music Society, focused his style. VW and Gustav Holst, his lifelong friend whom he’d met at the Royal College, went out seeking the source of their country’s folksongs; many had never been written down before and the cataloguing and research that VW and Holst undertook in this area was of considerable cultural significance. His music now took on a different character. Apart from war service (for which he volunteered, although over 40), Vaughan Williams devoted the rest of his long life to composition, teaching and conducting.

Vaughan Williams worked on into old age with undiminished creative powers – his Eighth Symphony appeared in 1955 (the score includes parts for vibraphone and xylophone) while his Ninth, composed at the age of 85, uses a trio of saxophones.


London Philharmonic Orchestra / Bernard Haitink (Warner Classics)

Gramophone Award winner – Orchestral category (Sinfonia Antartica, 1986); Gramophone Award winner – Orchestral category (A Sea Symphony, 1990)

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A London Symphony (original 1913 version)

London Symphony Orchestra / Richard Hickox (Chandos)

Gramophone's Recording of the Year (2001)

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Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Following his death, the government of the USSR issued the following summary of Shostakovich’s work, drawing attention to a ‘remarkable example of fidelity to the traditions of musical classicism, and above all, to the Russian traditions, finding his inspiration in the reality of Soviet life, reasserting and developing in his creative innovations the art of socialist realism and, in so doing, contributing to universal progressive musical culture’. The Times wrote of him in its obituary that he was beyond doubt ‘the last great symphonist’.


Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra / Vasily Petrenko (Naxos)

Editor's Choice (Symphonies Nos 5 & 9, December 2009); Gramophone Award winner – Orchestral category (Symphony No 10, 2011); Gramophone Awards shortlist – Orchestral category (Symphony No 4, 2014); Recording of the Month (Symphony No 4, November 2013); Editor's Choice (Symphony No 14, June 2014)

Read the review of Symphony No 10


Symphony No 10

Boston Symphony Orchestra / Andris Nelsons (DG)

Gramophone Award winner – Orchestral category (2016); Recording of the Month (August 2015)

Read the review

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Anton Brucker - His Music and His Life



Anton Bruckner, born near Linz on September 4, 1824, is known chiefly as a symphonist. He trained as a school-teacher and organist, and served in the second capacity in Linz until moving in 1868 to Vienna to teach harmony, counterpoint and organ at the Vienna Conservatory. His success as a composer was varied in his lifetime, his acceptance hampered by his own diffidence and his scores posing editorial problems because of his readiness to revise what he had written. He was nine years the senior of Brahms, who outlived him by six months. Bruckner continued Austro-German symphonic traditions on a massive scale, his techniques of composition influenced to some extent by his skill as an organist and consequently in formal improvisation. 


Orchestral Music
 
Bruckner completed nine numbered symphonies (10 if the so-called Symphony ‘No. 0’, ‘Die Nullte’ is included). The best known is probably Symphony No. 7, first performed in Leipzig in 1884; the work includes in its scoring four Wagner tubas, instruments that were a newly developed cross between the French horn and tuba. Symphony No. 4 ‘Romantic’ has an added programme—a diffident afterthought. All the symphonies, however, form an important element in late-19th-century symphonic repertoire

Choral Music

Bruckner wrote a number of works for church use, both large and small scale. Among the former are the Te Deum, completed in 1884, and various settings of the Mass, including the well-known Mass No. 2 in E minor.


The premiere of Bruckner's 9th symphony was 1903 (after his death on October 11, 1896 in Vienna), "dedicated to our Beloved Lord".




“It is to God that I must give account”

Anton Bruckner

Anton Bruckner, 1889

125 years ago, on 11 October 1896, Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) died from acute heart disease brought on by persistent alcoholism. His funeral took place in the Karlskirche in Vienna on 14 October, and his remains were transferred to the crypt in the monastery of St. Florian near Linz, Austria. Even after his death, Bruckner took center stage in the cultural wars of late 19th-century Vienna. “Admirers described him as an unpretentious, modest man and a daring innovator who shied away from no enterprise.” While his detractors did recognize his originality, “they found nothing of value in the work of a modest Viennese church musician who lived a solitary dreamlike existence without ambition and who had been dragged into the limelight by an excessive Wagnerian cult.” Today, Bruckner is primarily remembered for his symphonies and sacred compositions, and as the “master-builder of cathedrals in sound,” we recognize him as a composer having exerted a lasting and crucial influence on the works of Gustav Mahler. Son of a schoolmaster and church organist, Bruckner was born in the village of Ansfelden—near the city of Linz—on 4 September 1824. The eldest of 11 children, he was admitted to the Augustinian monastery of St. Florian as a chorister, where he participated in its rich musical activities.

St. Florian not only imparted a solid musical education, it also firmly established his devotion to Roman Catholicism. Throughout his life, Bruckner was a devoutly religious man who kept a log of his daily devotions, and prayed before each performance. He is even thought to have experienced religious visions. It is said “there is no composer in the 19th century who was rooted so firmly in a lived, heart-deep devoutness, to whom prayer, confession, sacrament, and profession were vital elements.” His faith in the spiritual journey towards the afterlife became a process that decisively shaped his compositional imagination as he channeled profound spiritual messages that elevated music to the level of an undistracted prayer. His initial career path, however, had nothing to do with music, as he became a teaching assistant in Windhaag near Freistadt. An additional teaching appointment saw him at Kronstorf an der Enns, but eventually he returned to St. Florian for 10 years to work as a teacher and an organist.


St. Florian Monastery Bruckner Organ

St. Florian Monastery Bruckner Organ

As a composer, Bruckner was largely self-taught and only started to composing seriously at age 37. He took composition lessons from the German cellist and conductor Otto Kitzler, who introduced him to the music of Richard Wagner. He also became a student of the famous Vienna music theorist Simon Sechter, who instructed him in music theory and counterpoint.

Anton Bruckner

Anton Bruckner

When Sechter died in 1868, Bruckner reluctantly took up the appointment of professor of harmony and counterpoint at the Vienna Conservatory, and subsequently as the Emperor’s court organist. His complete admiration for Richard Wagner elicited deep-seated resentment within Vienna’s musical and critical circles, and for a while, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra refused to perform his works. Habitually plagued by debilitating periods of low self-esteem, Bruckner was ill prepared for the acidic and highly competitive musical environment of imperial Vienna. He presented a wide and easy target for music critics, journalists and composers alike. Bruckner’s highly idiosyncratic and expansive musical style was mercilessly criticized, with a critic claiming, “Bruckner simply composes like a drunkard!”


Anton-Bruckner-Museum

Anton-Bruckner-Museum

Given such harsh professional assessments, it is not surprising that Bruckner was prone to suffer from devastating insecurities that made him endlessly revise and correct his compositions. He allowed outside influences to shape the content of his music and relied for editorial assistance on a number of former students. Their “authorized” involvement with his scores has become one the thorniest issues to haunt the composer’s legacy. Bruckner never felt at home in Vienna. He retained his peasant speech and social clumsiness throughout, and had the disastrous inclination to fall in love with teenage girls. His distracting compulsions ranged from obsessive preoccupation with financial security to a morbid fascination with corpses. Bruckner was painfully unaware of the intellectual and political currents of his day, and he exhibited a “Neanderthal male chauvinism that even his admirers found remarkable.”

Otto Böhler: Anton Bruckner arrives in heaven

Otto Böhler: Anton Bruckner arrives in heaven

Bruckner composed music that was simultaneously naïve and complex. Yet, once he had found his compositional path, the musical world did not know what to do with it. The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler pointedly stated, “Bruckner did not work for the present. In his art he thought only of eternity and he created for eternity. In this way he became the most misunderstood of the great musicians… Bruckner is one of those geniuses who have appeared but seldom in the course of European history, whose destiny it was to render the transcendent real and to attract, even to compel, the element of the divine into our human world.”