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Anton Bruckner 1824–1896

In recording with regret the death, on the 11th ult., at Vienna, of Dr. Anton Bruckner, we are aware that to many amateurs in this country the remarkable Austrian composer, if not heard of for the first time, will be little more than a name. And yet it is a name around which some fierce, if bloodless, battles have been fought on the Continent. Anton Bruckner has been glorified by some as the ‘Wagner of the Symphony’ – a fact which may serve to indicate his artistic bias. He has been suffered by his most zealous partisans to be placed, indeed, upon the same pedestal with Johannes Brahms, but on condition that he should be allowed to tower head and shoulders above him. Sufficient elements here for determined and bitter contention. On the other hand, he has been looked upon by the great majority of his critics as a mere learned musical pedagogue, devoid of the divine gift of imagination, whose compositions are so many intricate contrapuntal exercises on a vast scale; a very Dry-as-dust of musical literature. And all the while the subject of such diametrically opposed opinions has been living the quiet and uneventful life of an organist and teacher in the Austrian capital, a modest and unassuming man, adding symphony to symphony to the number of eight, together with other works of equal pretentions, while years elapsed before one of these was vouchsafed a public hearing. Time is not yet for the forming of a just estimate of their relative importance. When it comes, a place will doubtless be assigned to him somewhere between the two extremes alluded to, though it will certainly be an enduring one. As regards the symphonies, one of which, the third, is dedicated to Wagner, they may be likened, on a first hearing, to a desert sprinkled here and there with oases, luxuriant, almost voluptuous, in their vegetation, and hailed with delight by the weary traveller thus predisposed to fullest appreciation. These oases may very probably increase in number upon closer acquaintance, and how many symphonies have been written since Beethoven and Schumann which have proved deserts pure and simple?

The fact, at all events, remains that Bruckner’s symphonies have been more and more frequently performed in Austria and Germany of late years, thanks to Dr. Hans Richter, Herr Mottl, and other prominent conductors, and that the number of their admirers has been steadily increasing. Bruckner’s genius aims at the colossal. In his symphonies the form has been expanded to its utmost limits; they are orchestral trilogies or tetralogies. His ‘Germanenzug’ is intended to be performed, as it was at the recent Male Choir Festival in Stuttgart, by thousands of voices. His Te Deum is not a hymn of praise offered up by a congregation; it is the homage rendered by the Church Universal to the Godhead. A Handelian or Mozartian Te Deum sung by a church choir might well represent the expression, for the time being, of all Christendom. Bruckner’s, performed even by a cathedral choir, would be an anomaly: it cannot dispense with the force of numbers. Small wonder then if in constructing edifices of such vast design the architect appears to be deficient at times in a sense of due proportion, and to be apparently aiming at the unattainable. Wagner himself has been frequently taxed, even in these days, with a similar defect in his artistic vision. Intensely active and emotional as Bruckner’s inner life must thus have been, his outward career, as we have indicated, was of the simplest, though not free from material privations and mental sufferings in its earlier stages.

Born September 3, 1824, at Ansfelden, in Upper Austria, the son of a schoolmaster in humble circumstances, he followed for a time the father’s profession, while, under the tuition of the local organist, he rendered himself a proficient in that instrument. Having in the latter capacity attracted some attention beyond the limits of his native place, he was called, at the age of twenty-one, to the organistship of the Cathedral at Linz. With characteristic self-inspection and zeal, while accepting the relatively important appointment, he at once supplemented his, for the greater part, self-acquired musical education by undergoing a complete course of tuition under Simon Sechter, the famous Viennese contrapuntist, who, on his part, is said to have designated young Bruckner as his eventual successor. As a matter of fact, the latter, upon the death of Sechter, in 1868, succeeded to the post of organist of the Imperial Chapel and also to the professorship of organ and counterpoint at the Vienna Conservatorium, to which appointments was added, in 1875, the chair of history and theory of Music at the University. Although in a precarious state of health during the last year or two, he filled these positions to the last, and an intensive course of lectures, to be delivered by him during the winter, had quite recently been announced at the Viennese University. Bruckner’s compositions are as yet but little known in England. He visited London in 1871, when he gave a series of recitals, and his Seventh Symphony was produced at a Richter Concert at St. James’s Hall in 1887.

His principal compositions include, with those already referred to, two Grand Masses in D and F minor respectively, a Quintet in F major, and many others for church and chamber. Three movements of a Ninth Symphony are said to have been completed at the time of his death. He died in the Palace of Belvedere, where he had latterly resided at the instance of his Emperor, by whom he was held in great esteem and affection. Bruckner’s intimate friendship with Richard Wagner, and the high opinion entertained by the Bayreuth master of his friend as a composer, are historical facts which should assist, now he has passed away, in obtaining for his works a more general and impartial hearing.

Musical Times, November 1896