Anton Bruckner Essentials

Contradictions abound in the music of Anton Bruckner. He could build entire symphonic movements from a few simple melodic ideas and rhythmic gestures, weaving them together to create strikingly complex structures that rise up like vast Gothic cathedrals. Listen, for instance, to how the opening of his Third Symphony grows from a shimmering haze of string ostinatos and a solitary trumpet fanfare into an epic blockbuster. Or to the cosmic battle waged between light and darkness in the immense slow movement of the Eighth Symphony, by turns contemplative, dramatic and overwhelming. Bruckner’s unshakeable Catholic faith, love of religious ritual and heavenly conception of sound are reflected as much in his symphonies as in his majestic settings of sacred texts, the Latin Mass and Requiem among them. He evokes eternity even in his short sacred motets, notably in the block choral chords and expressive dissonances of Christus factus est and the transcendent blend of chords and counterpoint in Os justi. The sacred is never far from his symphonies, while the symphonic owns a place in his sacred works. A feeling of spiritual mystery saturates Bruckner’s music; each new hearing reveals profound things that have passed unheard before. The conductor Paavo Järvi suggests that it is at its strongest in the composer’s Ninth Symphony. “Bruckner Nine is Bruckner’s farewell to life,” he tells Apple Music Classical. “It’s an incredibly powerful and emotional statement of leaving this earth and going to meet the maker, so to speak. Being an incredibly religious person, Bruckner was clear of the direction in which these events will take place. It also happened that this was the end of his life: he did not manage to finish this symphony. Many people have tried to complete the work, but it is, in my opinion, totally complete even without the last movement. In fact, it’s more powerful if it’s left exactly as Bruckner left it. There’s mystery in his music, which in this symphony is unlike anything we’ve heard from him before.” Vladimir Jurowski sees Bruckner as a standard-bearer for the music of the future. “I have to say that, despite his relationship with Wagner and his affection for this late-Romantic idiom, Bruckner is not a Romantic,” the conductor observes. “Bruckner is something else. He’s perhaps the last great visionary of the 19th century. A genius who was moving the music in some new direction but didn’t know quite where to. And so it needed other people, such as Gustav Mahler and also to some extent Dmitri Shostakovich, to continue this Brucknerian invention on a new level of harmonic development and with new means of orchestration. But I think Bruckner is often underestimated as an inventor of the new music.” Echoes of ancient sacred traditions and modernity co-exist in Bruckner’s art. His symphonies also include traces of the folk music and devotional songs that supplied the soundtrack to his early life in a small village near the Austrian city of Linz. Franz Welser-Möst, born and raised in Linz, understands the importance of place to Bruckner. “His Fourth Symphony is the one work, in my view, that really describes his upbringing in the Upper Austrian landscape and says a lot about where he comes from as a composer,” the conductor observes. “What you hear describes Upper Austrian nature more than any of his other symphonies. That said, this is not a ‘pastoral’ symphony—that would be too simplistic given the intricate structure of the work. “In a certain way, Bruckner is one of the major adopters and creators of minimalistic music, where he writes these beautiful motifs, develops them, repeats them, going through different keys and rhythms,” he continues. “And although this might sound like a contradiction, I think of his symphonies as well-structured improvisation—long musical journeys with meditative qualities attached to them.”