Listeners unimpressed by the music of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) complain that the composer did not write nine symphonies but one symphony nine times.  More appreciative listeners compare those symphonies to Gothic cathedrals.  Even an admirer of Bruckner’s work, though, must recognize that for some people, after a while one medieval cathedral looks much like another.  Nevertheless, it can be a contemplative experience, taking one’s time pacing through one of those old cathedrals, and so it can be when entering into one of Bruckner’s vast symphonies.

Bruckner’s soaring yet solid compositions owe much to his early years in rural Austria as a virtuoso of the church organ.  As a church organist, he was used to filling lofty interiors with layers of sound.  Another influence on him was the operatic music of Richard Wagner, voluminous and bombastic.  Two men could not have been more different:  Wagner, the egoistic adulterer, Bruckner the shy celibate.  Bruckner was a deeply devout Catholic, an introverted man who never found the right girl, and so he devoted himself to his music and his God.

Perhaps Bruckner’s most popular and accessible symphony is his Fourth, in E-flat major, the first draft of which dates to 1874, the final revisions to 1890.  It was first performed in the United States in 1885, and it has been recorded numerous times.  Bruckner left programmatic notes to describe his Fourth Symphony, and through them Bruckner gave glimpses into another profound influence upon him, the Catholic culture of old Europe.

Bruckner called his Fourth Symphony “The Romantic,” and from his descriptions one could devise a scenario for a film.  According to Bruckner, the symphony begins by depicting dawn rising over the walls and towers of a medieval city and its castle. From a tower a trumpeter signals the start of a new day.  Then knights ride forth from the gates, and in due course there is a hunting scene, followed by a local fair.

In the opening notes of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, music critics hear themes from nature, and then throughout the Andante, one gets the sense of being alone in an autumnal setting.  The Scherzo opens with the brassy call of hunting horns, and one can almost see the horses, stags, and hounds.  In the Finale, passages suggest the merriment at a town festival, with bright strains of Bruder Jakob, the Germanic version of Frère Jacques.

In each movement, one finds Bruckner’s characteristic wave upon wave of sound, many building to majestic crescendo.  It is this monumental quality that leads to comparisons with cathedrals.  While Bruckner may have intended to evoke the chivalry and pageantry of the Holy Roman Empire, more immediate to Bruckner’s eye and ear were the pomp and grandeur of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Whether Bruckner’s Fourth conjures an idealized Austrian landscape from days of yore, it conveys the impression not only of ethereal morning but also of robust activity.  As with all Bruckner’s symphonic work, his Fourth combines elements that are subtle and vigorous.  Just as passages can make one more reflective, others cannot fail to get one’s blood flowing.  It is baffling that Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957), in what one hopes was a bad moment, said that Bruckner’s music shows that “he had never had a woman.”  Whatever such an insight may mean, it does stand as a lesson that even great musicians can make asinine comments.

In contrast, Maestro Manfred Honeck of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra has told me that it certainly helps when interpreting Bruckner’s music to have come from the same roots.  Like Bruckner, Honeck is a devout Catholic layman from Austria.  He grew up with the architecture and the liturgy, the customs and the food that would have been familiar to Bruckner, but what he could not experience from the inside, so to speak, was the martial ethos of imperial Austria.

Still, human nature never changes, and so people even today can understand Bruckner’s music.  Yet, he remains less popular than his younger contemporary, Gustav Mahler, and he has not added a fourth B to the great three of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.  Through performances by conductors such as Honeck and the dedicated work of Bruckner societies here and abroad, Bruckner’s loyal fans find encouragement, and word gets out to the uninitiated about the glories of his music.

People who knew Bruckner described him as a “rustic genius,” something of a musical idiot savant who stuck out in the world of the Strauss family’s Vienna as backward and provincial.  A quiet, heavy-set man given to bow ties and crew cuts, pinches of snuff and mugs of beer, Bruckner had friendly critics of the day marveling that such a bumpkin could produce complex and extensive Adagios, by turns melancholy and mystical.

Alone among Bruckner’s nine symphonies, the Fourth has no Adagio, even though Bruckner was the master of the Adagio.  If one were making a film to illustrate Bruckner’s Fourth, along with scenes of dawn over the old city, of daylight glinting off knights and horses, of sunlight dappling through vaulting branches of trees, of huntsman’s horns and hunting hounds, one would have to show rising above the brooding walls of a medieval city the towers of its cathedral.  The camera would stay outside the cathedral, just as the Fourth steers clear of an Adagio.  Amongst the craggy walls and gnarled trees of the Fourth, the meditative moments occur elsewhere, such as in the autumnal Andante.

A stroll through a medieval cathedral can be contemplative, more so for a believer, for finally one comes before the altar and its crucifix and tabernacle.  The Adagio of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony and that of his Eighth waft one upwards as if on clouds of incense coiling before the heavenly throne.  Whether one shares the faith Bruckner held, those stately and shimmering notes lead one to something transcendent.  “People may not understand one another,” wrote conductor and musicologist Werner Wolff, “but they are drawn together by their common love for Bruckner’s music.”

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.