There are few grander buildings in Austria than the vast Baroque complex of the Sankt Florian monastery. One can only imagine the impression it had on the 12-year-old Anton Bruckner when he was brought there by his desperate mother on 7th June 1837, the day of his father’s death, to enrol as a chorister. Today it’s probably the first stop on any Bruckner pilgrimage. It remained a refuge for the composer throughout his life and he chose it as his final resting place: he is buried in the crypt in the Stiftskirche, under the organ that now bears his name. “Perhaps you have got to see the church at St Florian,” Herbert von Karajan once said, “to understand why the music is as it is, with so many pauses and such great spaciousness.”
Bruckner had been born just down the road in the small Upper Austrian town of Ansfelden. A quick train ride from Linz, Ansfelden celebrates its famous son with a Bruckner Museum and a town crest featuring organ pipes. In 1824 it was a rural village of a couple of thousand inhabitants, deep inside a law-abiding and god-fearing pre-revolutionary Austria. “Tonerl”, as he was called, was the eldest son of the local schoolmaster and organist, and for a long time assumed he would simply follow in his father’s footsteps.
He was over 30 before he felt able finally to consider music as a long-term career, and had a lifelong compulsion to seek official qualifications and approvals to bolster achievements that should have been proof enough of his abilities – including holding posts as organist in St Florian and later at the cathedral in Linz. For five years in his 30s, he slaved away at a correspondence course in strict harmony and counterpoint with Simon Sechter, Professor at the University in Vienna and composer of over 5,000 fugues.
Sechter imposed a strict ban on free composition, and on completing his studies with him Bruckner emerged blinking into the sunlight, feeling, he admitted, “like a watchdog that has broken his chain”. He continued his studies with a local cellist in Linz, Otto Kitzler, who taught him form and orchestration. Most importantly, though, he introduced him to newer music – including Wagner. Bruckner was now as a mature artist and when, after a performance of the Mass in D minor, an article in a Linz newspaper suggested that his future lay in the symphony, his course seemed set: “I felt that this was a pointer in the right direction,” he’s reported as saying.
By this time, too, Bruckner’s name was not unknown in Vienna. He had sought to consolidate his training with Sechter with a diploma from the University of Vienna, which involved an organ examination in front of a distinguished panel of musicians in the beautiful Baroque Piaristenkirche in Vienna’s Josefstadt district (a plaque on the building commemorates the event). After hearing Bruckner improvise, one of the adjudicators, Johann Herbeck, famously announced that Bruckner should have been the one examining them.
And with Herbeck – a teacher at the University in Vienna and conductor of the concerts of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde – Bruckner found an important ally, and one who laid the foundations for him eventually succeeding Sechter in his post at the Vienna Conservatory in 1868. Bruckner made the move reluctantly, and his reticence might well have seemed justified: this child of Vormärz rural Upper Austria never really learnt to fit in in the capital. Accounts vary, but while he was by and large respected by his students, he was also mocked for his childlike lack of sophistication, his strong accent, and for manners and dress sense that were hopelessly out of line with fashions in the capital.
Bruckner was undoubtedly something of an oddball. A lifelong bachelor, he regularly fell for, proposed to – and swiftly forgot – young women and girls who entered his orbit. He was obsessed with numbers and harboured an unhealthy interest in dead bodies. Perhaps uniquely among composers of the age, he had apparently zero interest in literature: the only books not on music or religion left in his library after death were about the Mexican War (he was obsessed with the tragic figure of Emperor Maximilian) and an expedition to the North Pole.
His upbringing had instilled in him an unshakeable Catholic faith, a deep allegiance to the Emperor and a general tendency to subservience in the face authority. But he was no social stick-in-the-mud: there are many accounts of him being good company, an enthusiastic eater and drinker. He was, until his 50s, no mean dancer.
In terms of personality and outlook Bruckner could hardly have been more different to his extravagant idol, Wagner. But his allegiance to the Bayreuth Meister saw him automatically thrown into the heated aesthetic debates of the time – between followers of Brahms and followers of Wagner – and by default gaining Vienna’s most powerful critic, Eduard Hanslick, as a sworn enemy. Bruckner proved an all-too-easy target, his personal foibles projected on music deemed at best jumbled and unfathomable, at worst bordering on the unhinged. Few could quibble, though, with his mastery on the organ, and he was famed above all for his magnificent improvisations.
But the process of writing symphonies was difficult for him, the act of committing music to paper for posterity a very different matter to extemporising in the moment. And the sometimes crippling effects of Bruckner’s self-doubt – leading to several nervous breakdowns and making him susceptible to suggested “improvements” to his works – should not be underestimated. It’s testament to a deeper faith in his vocation, bolstered by his even deeper religious belief, that he could be as industrious as he was.
He completed what became his official First Symphony in 1866 (and “No. 0” in 1869), but he essentially produced his next four (revisions notwithstanding) between 1871 and 1876, the year that saw premiere of Wagner’s Ring in Bayreuth (Bruckner was there, naturally) and the completion of Brahms’ long-awaited Symphony no. 1. But few in Vienna, it seemed, were waiting for Bruckner’s symphonies, and the infamous first Viennese performance of the Third Symphony the following year was probably the biggest fiasco of Bruckner’s career. As Hanslick gleefully reported, only a handful of Bruckner’s admirers (including the young Mahler) stayed to applaud the work; the majority of the audience either left or jeered.
The following years saw more disappointments, punctuated by only occasional triumphs: the premiere in Vienna of the revised version of Symphony no. 4 in 1881; and especially the Leipzig premiere of the Seventh three years later. But work on the symphonies was held back by the fact that time-consuming teaching remained Bruckner’s main source of income. While Brahms furnished his publishers with a steady stream of saleable works in commercial genres, Bruckner didn’t, receiving a fee from a publisher only once, for his Te Deum.
The final decade of his life was overshadowed by what was arguably the biggest and most consequential disappointment of all, when Hermann Levi – the first conductor of Parsifal – rejected the first version of the Eighth Symphony. This unleashed a crisis in confidence and a bout of revisions that probably robbed us of the final movement of the Ninth, dedicated “to dear God” and planned as a symphonic culmination to match Beethoven’s.
But by the time of his death in 1896, Bruckner had at least achieved some official recognition. The Emperor, dedicatee of the Eighth, bestowed on him the Order of Franz Joseph (accompanied by a small grant) in 1886. He later gave Bruckner use of the so-called Kustodenstöckel, a gate keeper’s lodge attached to Vienna’s grand Upper Belvedere Palace – now home to one of the city’s great art collections – when he had become too frail to climb the stairs to his apartment in the in Heßgasse, across the other side of central Vienna.
A major exhibition currently running in the magnificent State Hall of the Austrian National Library dubs Bruckner “The Pious Revolutionary”, and there is no doubt – despite his shifting reputation throughout the turmoil of the 20th century – that he was a revolutionary composer. He devoted the last 30 years of his life to a prestigious but contested genre, the symphony, whose future after Beethoven had been in doubt. And to carry out this aim he set himself a uniquely daunting aesthetic challenge: to reconcile the power and daring of Wagner’s music with his decades-long training in traditional harmony and counterpoint to create a musical language all his own.
While Brahms’ four symphonies would achieve greater acclaim in the composers’ lifetimes, Bruckner’s arguably proved the most influential, consciously re-establishing an even stronger link to Beethoven in their misty and mysterious openings (think Beethoven’s Ninth), their powerful slow movements (the Eroica) and the grand culminations of their finales (the Ninth, again).
Mahler might have been a very different sort of composer, whose life and loves seeped into his music in a way that was entirely unthinkable with Bruckner, but it’s difficult to imagine his works being the same without Bruckner – not to mention symphonic works by Franz Schmidt (compared in early reviews to Bruckner) and Stenhammar, and even Sibelius. That now, 200 years after his birth, his works retain the power to move (and baffle) music-lovers as much as ever, is testament to his single-minded vision and achievement – not bad for Tonerl from Ansfelden.
See upcoming performances of music by Anton Bruckner.
