Bruckner the Great

...This misunderstanding cannot be accounted for entirely on the basis of the art politics which dominated Vienna in the age of Wagner and Brahms...

...His conduct often seems to accord with some such supposition...

...There are only four titles and none of them is interesting...

...For this was, it is well to bear in mind, in order to get a bird's-eye-view of the whole Bruckner problem: an uncomely peasant-like person, apparently none too well-educated, "half a tramp...

...an artist who was therefore particuarly apart from his time when viewed against the background of cultural history—yes, indeed, perhaps the most untimely personality of the century...

...There is no polish in his manners...

...But he was supported by an idea to which he surrendered completely and which absorbed him entirely and worked through him...

...Yes, his symphonies, especially those glorious ones following the Fifth, are more and more deeply immersed in, made more radiant by, the religious conviction of their creator...

...These were produced in accordance with his intentions, but admittedly we at present can no longer hope to use his Third Mass because of its extreme length, even though from a musical point of view it is the peer of Bach's Mass in B Minor, and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis...

...And Anton Bruckner, whose fame and popularity have increased rapidly in Germany during the two most recent decades, was (all things considered) not appreciated during his lifetime...

...Even so, however, he likewise reaped the harvest which pleases this man: the harmonious concordance of spirit and life...

...Possibly the best proof of his autochthonous power is the depth with which he submitted to authority, to the authority of Wagner, then at the height of his glory, without permitting himself to be influenced in any essential way by Wagner...

...It is almost a general rule that genius should fail of appreciation at the start...

...an artist who clung to both absolute values and absolute forms, while the rest of the world accepted subjectivistic rebellion as originality and power...

...This is largely written in the eight-voice, a-capella style and adds no more than, perhaps, a few horns to the organ accompaniment...

...Broadly speaking, his work may be divided into a first period devoted to church music and a second period of symphonic composition...

...Some slight proof of this statement may be seen in the fact that he never experienced the pleasure of hearing even a premiere of two of his illustrious nine symphonies...

...During virtually twenty years he had been a cathedral organist and as such had made himself one of the most notable instrumentalists of the continent, having, during the course of international competition held in France, left all his rivals far behind him...

...One so firmly rooted in the objective and the universally binding cannot retreat to subjective isolation...

...This content of Bruckner's music also solves the riddle of how so modest a man could create such tremendous works, the effect of which is dependent on no people or no time—and how he whose human nature was utterly non-problematical could introduce into his symphonies the most titanic combats of spirit which have ever been expressed in music...

...He was an unflaggingly devout artist in an era when it was considered good form in cultured circles to be at least a sceptic...

...For although he ultimately adopted some of the musical devices of Wagner, that which he expressed through them was always Bruckner, and nothing but Bruckner...

...his speech is a popular dialect—the broad comfortable diction of upper Austria...

...Finally, if we were in a position to cast a glance at his bookshelf, our general impression of the man would not change greatly...

...Nor can it be explained by referring to the discrepancy between the man's outward appearance and his intrinsic significance, even though one of the most prominent musicians of Bruckner's age was led to describe him as "half a genius and half a tramp...

...This does not imply, however, that he lost devotion to the Church in abandoning the field of church music...

...Indeed in the improvization of fugues in strict accord with the canon he probably has no equal since Bach...

...As I already pointed out in an essay concerning modern church music (The Commonweal, October 9, 1929) it is undoubtedly necessary to hold that neither artistic value nor even so childlike and mystically deep a faith as that of Bruckner's is sufficient to render satisfactory a mass composed for Catholic worship...

...Viewed from the standpoint of pure musical history, Bruckner cannot properly be inserted into the dominant line of development of great musical art...

...Accordingly Bruckner's style remains a kind of unparalleled phenomenon...

...One may conclude, therefore, that it was ultimately a difference of Weltanschauung which saved Bruckner from imitating Wagner...

...Classicism had, at the time of its loftiest development, begun to rationalize forms (as witness the strictly symmetrical structure of its melodies, the tendency to curtail harmonic possibilities, the simplification of linear rhythm through the abandonment of polyphony...

...On the other hand, his interest in the exalted things of the spirit did not induce him to forget life...

...Thus Bruckner becomes finally a demonstration of the cultural fruitfulness of that genuine religious intuition which transcends time...

...and that one is Bruckner...

...This attitude of the spirit naturally also determined the style...

...History knows of no other master excepting Dante whose work was so entirely determined by religious insight...

...This is a kind of fate which he shares with numerous other musicians and poets—the failure of the audience to bring sufficient strength to the assimilation of his art...

...How he manages to anneal these things constitutes the mystery of his personality...

...The text is treated directly as well as with propriety in the liturgical sense, so that the highly respected conductor of a Scola Gregoriana, Abbot Schachleitner, characterizes this work, so impressive from the musical point of view, as an "ideal mass...

...Yes, one could even venture this formula: Bruckner's music is the most Catholic music of recent centuries, the word Catholic being used here in its widest sense and with no confessional import because there is no such thing as confessional music...

...We cannot therefore be surprised that critics who based all their estimates on comparisons with the classical symphony constantly accused Bruckner of formlessness, abrupt phrasing and interminable length...

...But nothing is more characteristic of the utterly individual position and mission of this artist of the nineteenth century than that when he turned to absolute music he began to confess and glorify his faith in God more vigorously than ever...

...Finally, his activity as a church music composer may have been lamed through the absence of any spur to his effort...

...Its motifs remind one of the old Dutch musicians, whom Palestrina followed...

...But for a man who stood so far apart from the trivial art for art's sake principle as did Bruckner, music history was also cultural history...

...But everything we have said is a refutation of these views...

...During his period of activity as a practical organist he wrote three great masses for liturgical purposes...

...That he was all genius should have been evident to even the remotest connoisseurs of music from the circumstance that Bruckner's composition was "modern" already at a time when he could not have come into contact with modern art...

...Bruckner's music could not rest content with these super-refined forms which in their abnormally lucid and self-contented structure were always earthbound, because it itself was concerned with timeless and universal ideas...

...His art simply could not be rhapsodically emotional, as is the case with so much romantic melody...

...Nor is it true to say that Bruckner wrote too learnedly for laymen's ears...

...Meanwhile, he himself was not wholly conscious of the fairy world which he created...

...Embedded between natural and transcendent reality, active both by reason of creative freedom and obedience to laws— whether these were religious dogmas or the artistic mandates of counterpoint—he experienced and expressed the problems of the Catholic man in general...

...This idea was his religion...

...This was the master whose Eighth Symphony has been termed "the crown of music in the nineteenth century...

...Already in his third great mass Bruckner, as we have seen, drifted away from church music and afterwards he returned only in so far as he wrote harmonies for minor liturgical texts, among them the "pearl of great price" which is his Te Deum...

...Apparently invincible proof of this last criticism was the circumstance that length is often construed as being tedious because of a lack of inventive power...

...Concerning it, we might earnestly suppose that it involves a far more drastic criticism of us, the restless folk of today, than of the master living in his spiritual universe...

...He does not belong to the romantics who at that time were almost undisputed masters of the field, and yet he also deviates from the classical norms...

...The facts were that in his later period he needed the more complex apparatus of the large modern orchestra, for which the church was no appropriate place, and that he felt the presence of any text whatsoever as an obstacle to the flight of his imagination...

...This man, outwardly so little noteworthy, was Anton Bruckner, the composer, of whom no less an individual than Richard Wagner could say with complete justice, "I know only one man having the stature of Beethoven...

...But though these objections cannot be defended on either artistic or spiritual grounds, they nevertheless indicate a genuine difficulty which is experienced by many who listen to Bruckner's music...

...All this becomes obvious if one notices how constantly melodies, reminiscent folk dances, so simple and homelike, break through or shine through his symphonies precisely when their mystical ecstacy is most rapt...

...It is likewise impossible to accuse him of having been abtruse for subjective reasons...

...You might well suppose he had been a fairly prosperous farmer or (as his physician once expressed it) "a farm superintendent grown gray in honorable service...

...and his chief pleasure of evenings is to enter some tavern and drink off one glass after another...

...There were many disciples of Bruckner but no Bruckner school, in the stylistic sense...

...He was sufficiently a master to be able to conceal the weightiest themes behind apparently easy diction...

...It has been said that "Bruckner wrestled with God while Wagner wrestled with the world...

...BRUCKNER THE GREAT By KARL SCHAEZLER IMAGINE a man, short and squat of figure, elegantly dressed in a fashion which has never existed, whose face is of irregular contour but lighted by singularly brilliant and candid eyes...

...Bruckner's music is as far above mere feelings and moods as it is above rationalism...

...Bruckner's symphonies are certainly the most pious which have ever been composed," says Fritz Gruninger, who has brought out a very interesting book adducing the best and most convincing evidence to reveal the metaphysical core of the personality and work of Anton Bruckner...

...He is still further remote from art tendencies and isms which have appeared since his time...

...To give adequate expression to these demanded, of necessity, quite unusual outer boundaries...

...We have got far away indeed from our point of departure...

...The matter is different with Bruckner's E Minor...

...Such forgetfulness means the death of art...

...His field was absolute music and it is well to bear in mind that however much of the spiritual content of his work may be super-musical it was never expressed with extra musical means, as is so often the case in programmatic composition...

...If he had not remained so youthfully loyal to his faith, he could hardly have maintained so absolutely his artistic integrity...

...This last fact is precisely the reason why we of today find access to him easier than to many who lived in his own age...

...Human passions are not his material and yet his music grips the heart quite as does the themes which it celebrates...

...We are led to feel that the real reason why the majority of his contemporaries did not understand him was this: he had something to say with which they were not acquainted and his form corresponded so exactly with his matter that it could not be properly measured by the rules of classical form...

...An artist who sees himself obliged to enlarge greatly the traditional form of the symphony in order to voice the fullness of his themes is not a victim of inventive poverty...