Anton Bruckner

Austrian musician and composer

• Born: September 4, 1824
• Birthplace: Ansfelden, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)
• Died: October 11, 1896
• Place of death: Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)

After rising from modest rural origins, Bruckner first established himself as one of the leading organists of his time, then persevered in his creative work to produce a great series of choral and symphonic works. Musically eloquent and possessing a unique sense of spiritual aspiration, the finest of Bruckner’s large-scale compositions belong to the essential repertoire of nineteenth century music.

Early Life

Anton Bruckner (BROOK-nehr) was the son of Anton and Theresa Bruckner. For generations, his family had engaged in modest occupations such as broom-making and innkeeping, but both Bruckner’s father and his grandfather had become schoolteachers, a position of modest status but substantial responsibilities. One of the tasks of a schoolteacher in those days was to oversee the basic musical education of his students. Thus, it was Bruckner’s father who first instructed him in singing and in the playing of various instruments. Though young Anton seems to have played a child’s violin as early as age four, he showed no special talent until the age of ten, when his godfather and cousin, Johann Weiss, took him into his own home in the nearby town of Hörsching to instruct him in the playing of the organ. One likely cause for Anton’s move may have been the crowded Bruckner household; he was the first of eleven children, though only five survived to maturity.

Under his cousin’s guidance, Anton studied the rudiments of music theory and continued his organ studies. In 1836, he composed his first organ work, a prelude that suggests that Bruckner knew some of the music of Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the foremost Austrian composers of the late eighteenth century. Later, Bruckner was to be influenced by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and the Counter-Reformation master Giovanni Palestrina, but his months of study in his cousin’s home were cut short when Anton was needed at home to deputize for his ailing father in the schoolroom. In 1837, the elder Bruckner died, leaving Anton nominally the head of the family.

With surprising resourcefulness, Anton’s mother immediately arranged for him to become a student and choirboy at the Augustinian monastery of St. Florian, which boasted a splendid Baroque church containing one of the finest organs of the time. The young student flourished in the environment of the monastery and was able to continue his musical studies with the church organist. His progress as an instrumentalist was rapid, and although little is known of his intellectual growth it is likely that Bruckner was a diligent student, for in October, 1840, he left St. Florian to enter the preparatory course for public school teachers in Linz and was graduated from it the following year without having to repeat the course, as was usually necessary. In Linz, Bruckner was exposed to an increasing range of musical influences. It was there that he heard for the first time a symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, but he did not record the impression it made upon him.

Upon completing the preparatory course for teachers, Bruckner was assigned as an assistant teacher to the small town of Windhaag, where he endured appalling conditions of employment. Living in the teacher’s house, he had to eat his meals with the servant girl. In addition to classroom duties, he was required to ring the church bells at 4:00 a.m., help the village priest dress for services, and work in the fields during the harvest. After fifteen months in Windhaag, an understanding school inspector transferred Bruckner to nearby Kronstorf.

At that time, Bruckner’s only stated ambition was to become a schoolteacher, despite evidence that he was capable of either a religious or a musical vocation. Bruckner’s need for financial security and his sense of responsibility toward his needy family were undoubtedly factors in his reluctance to declare an interest in a career as a performing musician; even his appointment as assistant organist at St. Florian in 1849 did not quell his insecurity about abandoning a steady, if ill-paying, job as public school teacher. After assuming the permanent post of organist at St. Florian in 1851, Bruckner was still reluctant to entrust his future to music, and he continued to enroll in preparatory courses in order to be qualified for high school teaching. He even applied, unsuccessfully, for a routine clerical position in 1853.

Despite Bruckner’s insecurity about finances, his growth as a musician was steady. In 1856, while living in Linz, where he had recently been appointed cathedral organist, Bruckner began studying with the noted Viennese musician Simon Sechter. This elderly organist and conservatory professor was the author of a treatise on musical composition that codified rigorous rules of harmony and counterpoint based upon the musical practices of past centuries.

In accepting private students, Sechter requested that they set aside creative work in composition during their period of study with him, and Bruckner largely complied with this condition for the six years of Sechter’s rigid but benevolent instruction. Bruckner’s sacrifice was perhaps less significant than it was for other musicians, because he continued improvising at the organ, in itself a creative experience akin to composition. Music historians have regretted that Bruckner seems always to have been indifferent to writing down even the outlines of his acclaimed organ improvisations, and Bruckner himself once remarked upon this fact by saying “One does not write as one plays.”

Life’s Work

After completing his study with Sechter—which was carried on by mail and in occasional vists to Vienna—Bruckner’s creative output increased remarkably, but at the age of thirty-nine he continued to seek instruction from established musicians. His next teacher was an opera conductor, Otto Kitzler, who introduced Bruckner to the work of Richard Wagner, the German composer of monumental “music-dramas” such as Tristan und Isolde (1859) and Der Ring des Nibelungen (1874). The influence of Wagner’s music and personality upon Bruckner is as unquestionable as it is difficult to assess. Wagner’s music released powerful forces in Bruckner’s creative personality, but it is clear that the younger composer did not comprehend the literary and ideological content of Wagner’s work, even after making Wagner’s acquaintance in 1865. Wagner was a sophisticated, cosmopolitan personality, while Bruckner was a man with country schooling and manners; it is a testimony to the unique genius of each that they were able to appreciate each other. Bruckner’s formal, even obsequious manner may well have been a source of concealed amusement to the self-possessed Wagner.

Bruckner’s career as a composer had blossomed during the early 1860’s with the composition of a Mass in D Minor and two symphonies. The second of these symphonies, long forgotten by Bruckner, was later acknowledged by him as “only an attempt,” and numbered as “Symphony 0.” The composition of Bruckner’s great chain of nine symphonies began in 1865 with the Symphony No. 1 in C Minor. Two more masses followed in the years 1866-1868 before the completion of the Symphony No. 2 in C Minor in 1872. This work begins the first of two great creative waves in Bruckner’s mature career, encompassing work on the second, third, fourth, and fifth symphonies between 1871 and 1876.

By all standards, this first period of mastery occurred very late in Bruckner’s life. At the time of the completion of Symphony No. 4 in E-flat Major, he had just passed his fiftieth birthday, and although he was enjoying professional success as an organist, choral composer, and, to a lesser extent, choral director, his life was a lonely one. In 1867, he had suffered a nervous breakdown and spent three months recovering at a hydropathic establishment in Bad Kreuzen, where he was assailed by thoughts of suicide and a mania for numbers. It is reported that he would count the stars or the leaves on a tree and was possessed by the idea that he had to bail out the Danube River.

Though simple overwork contributed to Bruckner’s depression, his inherently solitary and often-melancholy disposition magnified his sense of his life’s disappointments. On the personal side, his utter inability to find a partner in marriage weighed unusually heavily upon him. Bruckner was a very religious man, even by the standards of his time, and he would not countenance a sexual relationship outside marriage. Because his romantic interests were rather ineffectually aimed at young women aged sixteen to nineteen, Bruckner’s search for a mate seemed almost designed to fail.

Later, Bruckner was unable to take professional disappointments in stride. While the opposition to his music by powerful critics such as Eduard Hanslick was often malicious, the occasional incomprehension of his scores by conductors and orchestral players was essentially a transitory problem, and much of his music was well received. The episode of mental collapse he experienced in 1867-1868 was fortunately not to be repeated, but Bruckner continued to be plagued by doubts about his work, which he sought to resolve by repeated and often ill-advised revision of his scores. The creative period of the early 1870’s was followed by a period of revision in 1876 through 1879. He regained his confidence and composed a series of masterpieces in the years 1879 through 1887, including his Te Deum (1883-1884) and the magisterial Symphony No. 8 (1884-1886), but another period of revisions ensued in 1887, lasting until 1891.

The most frequently reproduced photographs of Bruckner show him in later life as a dignified and remote man, posing rather formally in his studio—often seated next to the great Bösendorfer grand piano that was left to him by a friend of earlier years. With close-cropped hair and baggy trousers (said to aid an organist’s foot-pedaling), Bruckner had nothing of the appearance of a typical artist of his era. He seemed to his friends almost completely unaware of the effect of his awkward appearance and manners, and he was once admonished to take care in dressing so as not to disadvantage himself in his professional life.

Bruckner’s formative years occurred during the reign of the Austrian emperor Franz Josef, a period of unrelieved political conservatism and social rigidity; reflecting this background, Bruckner approached most relationships in an archaic and servile manner that irritated many of his acquaintances. Nevertheless, as a professor of music theory at the University of Vienna and as a private teacher, he gained the love and respect of his students not only by his competence but also by his humanity, which must have been all but invisible to the public.

The growing recognition given to Bruckner’s music during the 1880’s was a partial consolation for the relative neglect he had suffered, which can be measured by reference to the fact that his main rival in the field of symphonic composition, Johannes Brahms, received enormous sums for the publication of his four symphonies, while few of Bruckner’s works were published in his lifetime, and then only with subsidies from friends and admirers.

The burden of Bruckner’s many professional responsibilities seems to have had little effect on his ability to complete massive compositions. By 1890, however, in declining health, he gave up the last of his teaching positions to devote his full efforts to the completion of his Ninth Symphony. This work was intended to bear the dedication, Dem lieben Gott… , “To the dear Lord, if he will accept it,” revealing a faith that is perhaps as naïve as it is profound. The first three movements of the Ninth Symphony were composed during the period 1891 through 1894, and the fourth was begun in late 1894. By that time, Bruckner had accepted the emperor’s offer of accommodation in an annex of the Belvedere Palace, where he labored on the finale of the symphony until days before his death on October 11, 1896. Although speculative completions of the finale have been recorded, the symphony has been performed for generations as a complex but unified work of three movements, concluding with an adagio that embodies, in its final passages, a profound and valedictory innocence.

Significance

Anton Bruckner’s great works were composed after a long musical apprenticeship, and they display a technical and expressive consistency that makes possible a degree of generalization about them. A Bruckner symphony tends to be expansive, developing on a scale where the formal logic of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century music is of limited use as an organizing principle. The grandeur of Bruckner’s musical thought was often expressed in compositions of demanding length that some listeners perceive as formless. In reality, Bruckner’s music is highly organized, but it is unusually complex and polymorphous, and seldom adheres to familiar forms. Many of Bruckner’s obvious structural ideas, such as periodicity within movements, dramatic contrast of blocks of thematic material, and complete rests within movements (which Bruckner compared, perhaps only half seriously, to pausing to take a deep breath before saying something important), were novel in their time and were often remarked upon disparagingly.

Bruckner’s harmony became increasingly daring in his mature compositions, but in this he was not out of step with contemporary trends. His harmonic practice has been often attributed to the influence of Wagner’s music, but it might also be regarded as Bruckner’s inevitable victory over the rigidity of Sechter’s rules. Similarly, Bruckner was able to turn a conventional mastery of contrapuntal technique into a creative resource, achieving remarkable powers of thematic metamorphosis and large-scale integration. In all areas of endeavor, Bruckner blended orthodoxy with inspired inventiveness. Many of his contemporaries, acknowledging his idiosyncrasies but not his inspiration, thought him to be a naïve musician, but the more discerning of his colleagues, such as Gustav Mahler, knew the stature of the man from their earliest experience of his music. The public was soon to follow in its appreciation of Bruckner’s singular genius. He is recognized as the composer of a magisterial body of music that stands somewhat outside its time, looking as much to the past as to the future, but that forms part of the great continuity of European music.

Bibliography

Barford, Philip. Bruckner Symphonies. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1978. One of the BBC Music Guides, this slim volume discusses the symphonies in terms understandable to the layperson and with a minimum of musical examples. A brief concluding section, “Understanding Bruckner: A Personal View,” is excellent.

Doernberg, Erwin. The Life and Symphonies of Anton Bruckner. London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1960. This solid study, divided into independent sections dealing first with Bruckner’s life and then with his symphonies, frees Bruckner from many of the character stereotypes that for so long created an almost unbridgeable gap between perceptions of the man and his music. Excerpts from Bruckner’s letters are provided in sufficient quantity for the reader to imagine something of his personal trials and his musical triumphs.

Howie, Crawford. Anton Bruckner: A Documentary Biography. 2 vols. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. More recent and comprehensive biography. Volume one, From Ansfelden to Vienna, examines Bruckner’s early life until 1877, and volume two, Trial, Tribulation, and Triumph in Vienna, details his life in Vienna from 1878 until his death.

Johnson, Stephen. Bruckner Remembered. London: Faber & Faber, 1998. Part of Composers Remembered, a series of personal recollections about prominent composers. The Bruckner book includes reminiscences by students and colleagues who recall how he composed and recorded, and accounts of his organ improvisations.

Schönzeler, Hans-Hubert. Bruckner. London: Calder and Boyars, 1970. The author is a musicologist as well as a conductor who has been an advocate of Bruckner’s music, and his account of the composer is notably sympathetic to Bruckner’s cause. The book stands apart from others in its quantity of useful illustrations. There is no bibliography, but a chronological list of works is provided.

Simpson, Robert. The Essence of Bruckner. 2d ed. London: Gollancz, 1977. This book is the product of twenty-five years of reflection upon Bruckner’s symphonies by a noted British composer. Each work is examined in detail, satisfying the most exacting analytical standard. A concluding chapter, “Reflections,” is essential for the nonspecialist reader.

Watson, Derek. Bruckner. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1975. The growth of interest in Bruckner’s music in the English-speaking world brought about the publication of this new account of the composer in the Master Musicians series. Readable. The many appendixes are very useful.

Wolff, Werner. Anton Bruckner: Rustic Genius. New York: Cooper Square, 1973. The author, whose father was the founder of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, met Bruckner during the early 1890’s, when the composer was invited to dinner. As conductor, author, and lecturer, Wolff later championed Bruckner’s cause. The bibliography dates from the original edition (1942) and consists almost exclusively of German-language entries.