Anton Bruckner (jan 1, 1824 – jan 1, 1896)

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Anton Bruckner also helped to revive the symphony. Although he composed no operas, his symphonies were influenced by Wagner in their harmonic language, dense textures, lage orchestra, and imposing length., His orchestrations show his training as a church organist.

Bruckner’s music was often compared to Brahms’, and the two composers regarded each another with suspicion. Bruckner was trained as an oganist and church choirmaster, and quietly plied that trade at St. Florian’s, a monastery near the Austrian city of Linz. Bruckner led an unassuming existence devoted principally to God and music, dual passions that he meged in some of his most magnificent compositions. He devoted most of the first half of his life to learning his craft. In the 1850s, already in his thirties, he studied counterpoint wit a noted Viennese theorist who insisted he study rather than with original compositions. For six years, Bruckner ceased creative work to hone his technique. In 1868, at age forty-four, he moved to Vienna, where he lived for the rest of his life. He taught at the Conservatory and the University of Vienna as well as privately, and played the organ at the Imperial Court Chapel. Bruckner never shed his upper-Austrian roots, etaining its regional dialect and dress. Although he rarely traveled, trips to France and England, in 1869 and 1871, respectively, led some to proclaim that he was the greatest organist and improviser of the day.

Bruckner’s compositional achievement took longer to be recognized than did Brahms’s, due in part to the musical politics in Vienna. The powerful music critic Hanslick opposed what he viewed as a Wagnerian agenda in Bruckner’s symphonies. Of teh premiere of teh Eight:

“I found the newest one, as I have found the othe Bruckner symphonies, interesting in detail, but strange as a whole, indeed repellent. The peculiarity of this work consists, to put it briefly, of importing Wagner’s dramatic style into the symphony… It is not impossible that the future belongs to this nightmarish hangover style—a future we therefore do not envy!”

Of course, these were exactly the qualities that others applauded, such as the young composer Hugo Wolf, most remembered for his brilliant and challenging Lieder. There is something of a paradox in teh fact that the povincial, unfashionable, devoutly Catholic Bruckner, supported by politically reactionary groups, was at the time perceived as a more musically progressive figure than Brahms, who was more cosmopolitan, intellectually cultivated, an anticlerical Protestant, and politically liberal.

Bruckner’s compositional legacy consists primarily of Masses and symphonies, although he also wrote a variety of other works, both sacred and secular, including an ambitious string quintet. His three Masses (Dm, Em, Fm) came relatively early, but the spiritual nature of his early religious compositions left its mark when he turned to symphonies. A flowing cello line in a Bruckner slow movement may seem as if it sets words from teh Benedictus of a Mass, and on several occasions he did import his sacred music directly into his symphonies.

That Bruckner was a master organist also profoundly influenced his orchestral style. His symphonies bear unmistakable traces of organ improvisation: extremely slow, sustained adagios and a heavy reliance on sequences and hythmic ostinatos in the allegros. These traits led to the longest symphonies ever written up to that point. The orchestration of his mature symphonies tends to be slightly larger than Brahms’s, more like a compact version of Wagner’s in the Ring, including “Wagner tubas” and contrabass tuba to furnish the burnished Wagnerian sonority. Bruckner often presents the instrumental sections (strings, winds, brass) as antiphonal choirs. This is also transferred from his organ technique, in which a “registration”

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