Happy 200th Birthday to “God’s Minstrel,” Anton Bruckner

Ferry Bératon, Portrait of Anton Bruckner, 1889 (source)

Readers, take note! In the voiceover, I not only read the article but incorporate all the musical examples. It may be a more enjoyable way to access this content. —PAK

I am publishing “off-rhythm” on a Wednesday because I wish to pay tribute, on his 200th birthday, to one of the finest Catholic composers of all time, Anton Bruckner (born September 4, 1824; died October 11, 1896). Bruckner has been a musical companion of mine for decades. In fact, I wrote my doctoral dissertation nearly constantly immersed in, one might even say saturated by, his symphonic output. I wonder if it shows…

Much has been written about the Austrian romantic’s unshakable faith and profound love of God, to which many letters, episodes, and anecdotes bear witness.

Whenever Bruckner improvised on the organ, he spent some time in prayer beforehand, and by all accounts this was no mere word-saying but a complete immersion in a meditative process which took him beyond the confines of the physical world. Bruckner’s pupils speak of times when in the middle of a lesson they suddenly became aware that his mind and spirit were no longer with them: the church bells had rung, and Bruckner was praying.¹

A grateful nation has honored Bruckner as der Musikant Gottes, the musician of God.² This nickname is entirely fitting. A Musikant, be it noted, is not a professional urban musician but a rustic performer who plays for church processions, country dances, and other events of the common people. This nuance is important for catching the phrase’s playful combination of pride, reverence, and down-to-earth familiarity.

How can one talk about Bruckner’s music without speaking continually of the divine, of glory and terror, bliss and despair, longing and surcease of longing, consolation dawning on the dark night, half-recalled dreams of heaven, the heart losing and finding, straying and returning—of invisible (and inaudible) realities, and of visible realities seen with the eyes of faith?

Bruckner’s vivid musical imagination is indebted to his lifelong internalizing of the Catholic liturgy as a church organist—the gently-flowing rhythms and melodies of the Mass from Introibo ad altare Dei to Deo gratias, the speech, song, and silence, the majestic Ordinary, the awesome Sequences. “Bruckner is perhaps the only great composer of his century whose entire musical output is determined by his religious faith.”³ This can be seen most evidently in his Latin motets, which are among the most remarkable choral works ever written: vast worlds of sound, tomes of meaning, contained in the Fabergé eggs of a few minutes of a cappella singing.

Here is “Locus Iste”:

And a particular favorite (for obvious reasons), the motet “Os Justi”:

The Quest for the Holy Grail

The significance of his Fourth Symphony’s title, “Romantic,” has nothing to do with the hypertrophic introspection and self-lacerations of the “romanticism” then in full bloom. Bruckner had in mind the medieval romance, with its courteous knights and dames, great hunts and banquets, castles and cathedrals—perhaps, too, the quest for the Holy Grail.⁴ Commentators rightly downplay the notion of programs for the symphonies, since Bruckner hardly ever attempts tone-painting and pursues a loftier goal than storytelling.⁵ But I think we would be mistaken to presume that the one program Bruckner assigned and never retracted was given at whim and without personal significance. The literary genre of romance, with all the imagery and feelings associated with it, was undoubtedly highly congenial to him.

Here’s an excerpt from the 4th Symphony:

(For a video of the whole symphony in a great performance, go here.)

At the end of his life, while hard at work on the Ninth Symphony, Bruckner considered composing an opera—the title Astra, the plot, in his own words, “à la Lohengrin, romantic, full of the mystery of religion, and completely free from all that is impure.”⁶ Given the “impurity” of human language about the mystery of religion, it seems hardly accidental that he never wrote the opera. The words would have gotten in the way. A narrative and theatrical enterprise would have gone against the distinctive grain of his musical spirituality, which reaches into a domain inaccessible to words and their distracting particularity.

One might dare to say Bruckner succeeded where Wagner had failed. Wagner could not get past the dimension of words, narrative, drama; his “theology” was naively cataphatic. For this reason he could speak convincingly only of man-made gods, not of the true God beyond and within. It is chiefly for this reason that a believer cannot but find Parsifal wanting, however splendidly it may depict certain aspects of the truth.

The Eighth Symphony is in fact Bruckner’s Parsifal — a Catholic Parsifal, where the libretto has fallen by the wayside because no word, no utterance that limits itself in subject and predicate, can express the truth Bruckner has darkly seen with eyes of faith, has felt in his lonely and hopeful heart. Behold how Bruckner transforms the raw materials of romantic introspectiveness and introversion, the looking within and turning to one’s self (an echo of the Cartesian “turn inward”?), into ex-spectatio, extroversio, a turning outwards to the divine. “I have not yet begun to speak, and behold, Yahweh, you know my speech altogether. You hem me in behind and before, you have placed your hand upon me” (Ps. 138:4–5). Grace anticipates, follows after, endures throughout any human effort; God’s actuality precedes, sustains, concludes all potentiality.

Two excerpts from the 8th — the first with Zubin Mehta conducting the Berlin Philharmonic:

Then, the coda of the last movement, with Gunter Wand at the helm of the NDR Sinfonieorchester:

(For a video of the whole symphony, under Paavo Järvi’s baton, go here.)

A Moving Image of Eternity

Bruckner’s symphonies, each in its way a moving image of eternity, illustrate this truth. He manages to put into music the doctrine of grace: “You hem me in behind and before.” The end of a Bruckner symphony is the extroversion of the beginning’s introversion; creation, non-being emerging from its sleep, has been led by the surprising pathways of Providence to its final re-creation after the Last Judgment, when God will be all in all: “In my beginning is my end.”⁷

Indeed, Bruckner’s works constitute an entire theology in musical terms: creation, fall, redemption, and glory. At their deepest level, the symphonies are constructed along the lines of a contemplative-active polarity that brings to light the unspoken theological premises of the art of music itself.⁸

• The adagio is an image of contemplation, of something that must be and that we gaze upon lovingly (as St. Thomas says, “in the contemplative life is beauty pure and essential found”⁹).

• The scherzo is an image of action, of something we must do and are zealous to bring about (e.g., the “hunting scherzo” of the Fourth), or at any rate, something being done, to which we must react in a suitable way—at times, a fearful presence that has to be confronted, a chalice of suffering that has to be drunk (the scherzo of the Ninth).

• As is fitting, the opening and closing movements are a combination of both active and contemplative strains, a closer imitation of earthly life which is never simply one or the other. The middle movements thus enable one to feel a purity of purpose, of motive and motion, that is only accessible through concentration and abstraction.

Taken as a whole, each symphony is “one gigantic arch which starts on earth in the midst of suffering humanity, sweeps up towards the heavens to the very Throne of Grace, and returns to earth with a message of peace.”¹⁰

Music such as Bruckner’s is a wordless via positiva that picks up where the via negativa leaves off; but because music is temporal and thus hemmed in by silence before and after, there is in it simultaneously the rapture of expressing what words cannot express, and the sadness of the time by which music is encompassed and which triumphs over it.

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die.
. . . . . .
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.¹¹

But there is something more. A plummet from divine ecstasy imitates the Incarnation. The Son did not grasp at His equality with the Father but took the form of a slave—temporal form and its limits, the limits of speech and emotion and Hebrew song—and took upon Himself the death of the cross, and for this humiliation won the glorious Name that is above all other names, winning for us a hidden name that is above our worldly name. By the impetuous and gentle force of grace, the saint, though driven from Eden and fallen from ecstasy, imbues the most trivial things of earthly life with intimations of immortality, making them messengers of heaven.

In the same way the soul that has made the pilgrimage of a Bruckner symphony returns from it changed, his hearing for the divine heightened. That is why each subsequent listening is, or can be, more of a discovery, a fresher exposure, than the preceding. At a first listening to Bruckner one is least hearing it for the first time; at the tenth listening, one is finally hearing it for the first time.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.¹²

A growing familiarity with melodies, harmonies, inner voices, makes it possible to glimpse ever more clearly a world whose imperishable grandeur, shining through transfigured wounds, is the model and salvation of this fragile world. The blood of the Lamb is not spilled to no purpose but is caught in a chalice of blessing and poured out upon the soul to purify her of profane noise, of the hearing which is not listening.¹³ The first hearing of Bruckner is not fully a listening because too much is being “said” and we are too little prepared to take it in. As we receive it more deeply, we listen more lovingly, and hear the composer speaking the cosmic language of the Creator.

Here’s the glorious Adagio of the Second Symphony:

Outstripping Nietzsche

The terrifying vision of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, sometimes called “The Apocalyptic,” is at the same time a privileged vision of the beginning and the end, the dawning of the world and its final resting in God.¹⁴ In this symphony, as also in the Ninth that followed but could not be completed, Beethoven’s Promethean straining, his humanly storming of heaven, doomed beforehand by the clipped wings of Adam, is absorbed and overcome in the childlike faith that takes heaven by love.¹⁵ Far from excluding tragedy, this love is interwoven with it.

There are moments in the Eighth Symphony when the yearning and the pain are nearly too much to bear, the sense of tragedy stronger than anything Nietzsche could evoke. Nietzsche dwelt upon the birth of tragedy, but he did not understand its death—he did not understand the Death, most painful, most desolate, most incomprehensible, that breaks the dominion of fate and evil, shattering the cycles of birth and decay, flattening the hopeless Buddhist circle into a straight line from fiat lux to lumen gloriae.

What is missing from Nietzsche is above all hope, the vital force that carries us already into the blessed now of God while we are yet plunged in the ever-dissipating now of time. He who lacks hope is prisoner of an impersonal fate that deprives him of a destiny beyond the dissipated now, the moment that slips through one’s fingers like sand from an endless shore. Evil robs the now of its share of eternity, it makes of time not a moving image of eternity but a motionless and meaningless grid.

Hope, in contrast, is “a little slip of a girl” (Péguy), with a little girl’s energy and laughter and joy. It is the virtue of hope which enables us and impels us to look forward to heaven and the transformation of this body of death into a glorified body, the icon of a blessed soul.¹⁶ Hope makes it possible for us to say, with full conviction, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi.

“To the good Lord, if He will accept it”

Bruckner’s Te Deum of 1881 was offered up by its author to the “dear Lord,” and appeared in print with the subtitle: O.A.M.D.G., omnes ad majorem Dei gloriam.¹⁷ While working on his last symphony, he confided to his biographer August Göllerich:

You see, I have already dedicated two symphonies [the Seventh and the Eighth] to earthly majesties, poor King Ludwig as royal patron of the arts, and our illustrious, dear Emperor [Franz Josef I] as the highest earthly majesty, and now I am dedicating my last work to the majesty of all majesties, our dear Lord God and hoping that he will grant me enough time to complete it.

In the event, he shortened the dedication: “To the good Lord, if He will accept it.” Yet he seems to have had little doubt that He would: Bruckner said of this work, his own favorite: “When God calls me to Him and asks me, ‘Where is the talent which I have given you?’ Then I shall hold out the rolled up manuscript of my Te Deum and I know He will be a compassionate judge.”¹⁸

Writes Josef Pieper:

The poet Gottfried Benn, in a significant speech on growing old, has made a penetrating remark on works of art and their meaning. It contains a statement, and a question which he does not answer. This unanswered question is the chief point. Benn says: “One thing is clear: when something is finished, it must be perfect—but what then?” This is not the tone of someone who thinks a work of art meaningful in itself. To be sure, the question “What then?” is flung into a world that promptly falls mute. “Then” we ought to be able to celebrate, festively commemorate affirmation of the meaning of the world—in the happiness of contemplating something that is not the work of art, but that is brought into view by that work. Perhaps also—in a rare, special case—it should be possible “then” to offer up the completed work as a consecrated gift and sacrifice in the precise meaning of the word. Phidias, when he completed the Athene Promachos, knew the answer to the question “What then?” Bach knew it too, and Bruckner.¹⁹

Speaking of this Te Deum, Schönzeler writes: “Its contrasts . . . make an indescribable impression on the listener, filling him with awe and reverence and awakening in him a realisation of human insignificance.”²⁰ The final phrase is worth pondering: man is not—certainly not in Bruckner—the mensura omnium. As the Book of Wisdom declares, it is God who creates all things “in number, weight, and measure” (11:20). Bruckner surrounds and interrupts his richly tonal music with silences because he speaks of God, whose uncreated music, the inner Trinitarian communicatio, is unheard by human ears, yet originates all that is heard. As St. Thomas Aquinas writes:

God is honored by silence—not that we can say or seek nothing about Him, but rather that whatsoever we say or seek of Him, we should understand how far short our comprehension falls. Thus it is said in Ecclesiasticus (43:32): “Glorify the Lord as much as you can; for He will yet far exceed, and His magnificence is wonderful: blessing the Lord, exalt Him as much as you can, for He is above all praise.”²¹

All of Bruckner’s music has silence as its essential condition, its seedbed: “in the opening bars of most of his works, it is ‘not a symphony which starts, but the very beginning of music itself.’”²² And within the works, he “encompasses the entire cosmos, from minus infinity to plus infinity.”

Gustav Mahler, Tormented Admirer

In view of the profound hope inscribed in Bruckner’s music, it cannot be coincidental that Gustav Mahler—an ardent admirer of his works who exclaimed that Bruckner’s Te Deum, instead of being “for choir, soloists and orchestra, organ ad lib.,” was “for the tongues of angels, for seekers after God, for tortured hearts and flame-chastened souls”—chose to entitle his Second Symphony The Resurrection, nor that in it he seems to paraphrase a passage from Bruckner’s Seventh and use it for much the same expressive purpose.²³

It would be an unforgivable oversimplification to contrast these composers in a black-and-white manner. No one has expressed better than Bruno Walter how they differ from each other and yet how deeply they are at one in their pursuit of the unum necessarium:

At bottom Bruckner’s spirit was repose, Mahler’s unrest. With Bruckner the most impassioned movement has a foundation of certainty; not even Mahler’s inmost depths remain undisturbed. . . . Mahler’s noble peace and solemnity, his lofty transfiguration are the fruits of conquest; with Bruckner they are innate gifts. Bruckner’s musical message stems from the sphere of the saints; in Mahler speaks the impassioned prophet. He is ever renewing the battle, ending in mild resignation, while Bruckner’s tone-world radiates unshakable, consoling affirmation. . . . He did not have to struggle toward God; he believed. Mahler sought God. He searched in himself, in Nature, in the messages of poets and thinkers. He strove for steadfastness while he swung between assurance and doubt. . . . Change characterized Mahler’s life; constancy Bruckner’s. In a certain sense this is also true of their work. Bruckner sang of his God and for his God, Who ever and unalterably occupied his soul. Mahler struggled toward Him. Not constancy, but change ruled his inner life, hence also his music….

Above all, however, Mahler and Bruckner are (though in different ways) religious beings. An essential part of their musical inspiration wells from this devotional depth. It is a main source of their thematic wealth, swaying an all-important field of expression in their works; it produces the high-water mark of their musical surf. . . . Mahler was, like Bruckner, the bearer of a transcendental mission, a spiritual sage and guide, master of an inspired tonal language enriched and enhanced by himself. The tongues of both had, like that of Isaiah, been touched and consecrated by the fiery coal of the altar of the Lord and the threefold “Sanctus” of the seraphim was the inmost meaning of their message.²⁴

Placing the accent on difference, Schönzeler argues that “Bruckner’s symphonies all have an underlying calm, and progress with inexorable steadiness of pulse from initial problem to ultimate solution,” while “Mahler’s symphonies are quite devoid of this calmness and inner balance, and in the end the problem presented at the outset remains unsolved and insoluble.”²⁵ So sweeping a judgment begs to be qualified, and is to some extent belied by Schönzeler’s description of the Scherzo of Bruckner’s Ninth:

The main section of the Scherzo, if it can still be called a dance, is more in the nature of a giants’ dance for it has some almost terrifying moments. Nor is this impression relieved by the Trio, the swiftest movement which Bruckner ever composed, for instead of bringing the customary relaxation of tension it provides a sort of supernatural vision of shadowy shapes flitting by.²⁶

“Some almost terrifying moments” surely understates the fact, if the music is played as it ought to be:

(For a complete video of the 9th Symphony, go here.)

The manner in which Bruckner distorts the tonal scale while the drum batters away induces a frightening instability and disorientation not much different from what Mahler will give us in larger and dizzier doses. And the likeness extends to more than the tragic. The Adagios of Mahler’s Fourth and Fifth give us a serenity and bliss as sweet as the sweetest in Bruckner; the finale of the Second asserts a faith as pure, if not as orthodox; the Ninth reconciles death and life after a mighty conflict from which life and the affirmation of life emerge supreme: mors et vita duello / conflixere mirando / dux vitae mortuus / regnat vivus. It would be truer to say that both Bruckner and Mahler pose humanly insoluble problems to which they do not find or expect to find human solutions; the answers, unexpected, undeserved, sometimes barely heard, are given from above, at once utterly satisfying and unfathomable.

The Bruckner symphonies imitate in music the hypostatic union in which all that is man’s is taken up, healed, and divinized by the Father’s beloved Son. Life triumphs over death, love over solitude, meaning over chaos, heaven over hell—but only because life goes into death and transforms it, love goes into solitude and fills it, meaning descends into chaos and illuminates it, heaven reaches into earthly hell, deeper still into Sheol, and rescues the soul athirst for the living God. Mahler’s symphonies, especially the Second, Fifth, and Ninth, express something of the same kenosis, the same triumph.

Bruckner was a musical theologian in the way that Thérèse was a biographical theologian—she who wrote no treatises but spoke in her everyday language of what she experienced in her life, he who wrote no books but spoke in wordless symphonies of what he believed. “The mystic connection between the inner life of a composer and his music makes it possible to discover his soul in his work.”²⁷ Thérèse taught us to do everything with love and for love, showing us in her own life how it could be done; Bruckner conveys in feeling what it means to turn to God in faith, worship Him in fear, embrace Him in love. A Bruckner symphony beckons the listener to self-effacement before the mystery of God; in “wordless jubilation,” it hymns the pleasing sacrifice and surrender to the divine Lover.

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1. Hans-Hubert Schönzeler, Bruckner (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970), 137.

2. A good summary may be found in Patrick Kavanaugh, Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 130–38. Derek Watson’s excellent biography, Bruckner (New York: Schirmer, 1997), also accurately reports Bruckner’s religious motivations.

3. Kavanaugh, Spiritual Lives, 134.

4. Schönzeler, Bruckner, 78.

5. Thus Bruckner could have made his own the description Beethoven gave of his Pastoral Symphony: “more expression of feeling than painting.” See Barry Cooper, Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 175–76.

6. Schönzeler, Bruckner, 99.

7. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, ‘East Coker’, in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, n.d.), 123.

8. On the sacrality inherent in the very nature of music, see the fine essay of Robert R. Reilly, “Is Music Sacred?” in Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music (Washington, DC: Morley Books, 2002), 18–27.

9. Summa theologiae II-II, Q. 180, art. 2, ad 3.

10. Schönzeler, Bruckner, 169.

11. Eliot, Four Quartets, ‘Burnt Norton’, in Complete Poems and Plays, 121; 122.

12. Eliot, Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’, in Complete Poems and Plays, 144.

13. Cf. Josef Pieper, “Music and Silence,” in Only the Lover Sings, 55–56.

14. Bruckner said of this symphony: “My Eighth is a mystery.”

15. However heterodox his theological opinions may have been, Beethoven’s Prometheanism found an opposing force in his earnest faith in the Eternal Father and his habit of turning to God in prayer, especially in times of suffering—though no one attempts to portray him as the devout, law-abiding Catholic that Bruckner was. On Beethoven’s piety and theological views, see The Beethoven Compendium, ed. Barry Cooper (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 145–48; Kavanaugh, Spiritual Lives, 54–62; Maynard Solomon, “Beethoven: The Quest for Faith,” in Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 216–29.

16. Rom. 7:24; 1 Cor. 15:42–58.

17. See Holger Schneider, “Bruckner’s Major Sacred Music in the Vicissitudes of a Quarter Century,” notes to Hänssler CD 98.119 (the Te Deum conducted by Helmuth Rilling), p. 13.

18. Kavanaugh, Spiritual Lives, 136.

19. Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 96–97.

20. Schönzeler, Bruckner, 80.

21. St. Thomas, In Boethii De Trinitate, q. 2, a. 1, ad 6.

22. Schönzeler, Bruckner, 147, quoting Halm.

23. At about twelve minutes into the first movement (mm. 233–248), Bruckner calls forth crushing dissonances from the full orchestra. Near the end of the first movement of Mahler’s Second (section 20, Molto pesante), the mighty jarring chords that prepare for the return of the opening theme show a pronounced similarity to the Bruckner passage. Could this be allusion or recollection? Bruckner sustains these chords with some instruments while others are tracing scales (the immutable ground sustaining the struggle in the realm of change), to mark the half-way point of the pilgrimage of the soul evoked in the first movement—the point at which the soul is most burdened by its trials. Mahler handles it differently, repeating the chords again and again, as if to emphasize the sheer weight of pain, the nailing of hands and feet to a cross. In a penetrating speech from 1940, Bruno Walter, a personal friend of Mahler’s, described the latter’s Second as “the symphony which, more vividly than all his other works, reveals his affinity with Bruckner,” asserting that “we find in one of his main works, the Second, indications of a deeper, essential kinship” (published in Chord and Discord 2.2 [1940] and available at many places on the web, e.g., www.uv.es/~calaforr/walter.html).

24. In the 1940 address already cited.

25. Schönzeler, Bruckner, 148.

26. Ibid., 161.

27. Bruno Walter, in the address earlier cited.