January-March 2008	Volume 13, Number 1

"That you should sing My praise and glory"

R. J. Stove .on the life and legacy of a great nineteenth-century Catholic composer, Anton Bruckner.

One of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s best-known essays is “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, which takes its title from a maxim by an obscure ancient Greek poet, Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin used this dichotomy to classify two sorts of writer (without attempting to suggest the superiority of one sort over the other). Foxes are eclectic, “scattered or diffused” in thought, “pursu[ing] many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory”; hedgehogs, on the other hand, have an “unchanging, all-embracing ... unitary inner vision”. Among foxes, Berlin listed Shakespeare, Montaigne, Pushkin, Goethe, and Balzac; among hedgehogs, he listed Dante, Pascal, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Proust. Berlin concentrated on authors, but his classification is equally appropriate to the other arts.

Anton Bruckner might be called the hedgehog’s hedgehog, because he refracted his entire creative life through the sensibility of his changeless Catholic devotion. The phrase ascribed to Pasteur – “I have the faith of a Breton peasant, and I hope, before I die, to have the faith of a Breton peasant’s wife” – could equally well have been said by Bruckner. If he heard church bells while giving a lecture, he would fall to his knees and pray. None of his chief musical contemporaries, except for the Walloon-born but French-domiciled César Franck, possessed anything like Bruckner’s uncomplicated pietas. Against, in particular, most leading Teutonic composers of his time, he cut an incongruous figure indeed: against Wagner the mythic pagan; Brahms the tepid Protestant who often seemed no more than a deist; Johann Strauss the suave, euphoric and matrimonially eventful entertainer. Unlike all three of these men (even Brahms), Bruckner had no gift for self-promotion. He needed to be sought out. So he does even now, well over a century after his death.

There are those who instinctively recoil against Bruckner’s music, finding it dull and enervating. Above all, his nine canonical symphonies – two other symphonies, student pieces both, appeared only posthumously – have been often censured for their length, thickness of texture, and sameness of emotion. But for anyone temperamentally attuned to coming under the spell of Bruckner’s majestic art, such criticisms soon seem mere glib excuses. Those on whom this spell operates find that his most characteristic utterances have not only a powerful appeal, but a lasting one. Ernst Kurth, a German musicologist writing in the 1920s, remarked: “Bruckner will be ready for the world when the world has to flee to him for refuge.”

Moreover, Bruckner’s most severe antagonists tend to be persons who find his religion uncongenial. To such individuals one can only say, as Richard Strauss once teasingly said to someone who admitted a failure to appreciate Der Rosenkavalier: “What a shame for you!”

Working as organist

Although Bruckner spent the last three decades of his life in Vienna, he came originally from Ansfelden in northern Austria (the home where he was born on 4 September 1824 is now a museum in his honour), and never lost his rustic bluntness. His black, baggy peasant attire, worn in all weathers, made him stand out among the elegant Viennese even more than did his thickset build, crew-cut coiffure, and bullet head. Before arriving in Vienna he had worked as organist at St Florian – an Augustinian monastery near Linz – and he continued to play the organ thereafter, occasionally giving recitals in Paris and London as well as nearer home. (When accorded an honorary doctorate, he responded with eloquent naïveté: “I cannot find the words to thank you as I would wish, but if there were an organ here, I could tell you.”)

Punitive instruction

Meanwhile he submitted himself to punitive compositional instruction – mostly by correspondence – from an appallingly prolific Viennese pedagogue named Simon Sechter, who wrote no fewer than five thousand fugues, and who inculcated in his charge a similar diligence, albeit with less spectacularly abundant results. Sechter’s teaching accentuated Bruckner’s natural modesty, which made him continue undergoing lessons and exams long after he might have been expected to start taking some pride in what he had already done. Following his splendid playing in one organ test, a judge commented: “This man should be examining us.”

There was always something for Bruckner to be diffident about, particularly after he had discovered Wagner’s work. Wagner left Bruckner flabbergasted with admiration (not for Bruckner, or for Pius XII, the subsequent belief among certain American ultra-traditionalists that Catholics must shun Wagner like the devil); after finishing his Second and Third Symphonies, he took both scores along to Wagner, hoping to be able to dedicate to his hero whichever piece Wagner preferred. Unfortunately the sheer excitement of meeting Wagner caused Bruckner to drink so much beer that he promptly forgot which symphony the great man liked better. On realising this lapse, he frantically scribbled a note to Wagner, who replied by saying that it was the Third which he especially admired.

Even this favourable verdict could not prevent Bruckner from incessantly revising most of his symphonies, these revisions being a minefield for subsequent editors, who have bitterly quarrelled with one another as to which amendments are justified in musical terms and which were forced on him by outside opinion. In his dozens of wonderful sacred compositions, strangely enough, he avoided such tinkering. He seemed to gain fortitude from the sixteenth-century heritage of choral polyphony, which – thanks in part to Sechter’s example – meant so much to him. Paradoxically, the sacred works derive from recognisably the same pen as the symphonies. All are grave, solemn, short on vivacity (Vienna’s wits called Bruckner “der Adagio-Komponist”, “the Adagio composer”), apt to halt in portentous silences, clearly influenced by Wagner – particularly the Seventh Symphony, written as a Wagner memorial – yet in no sense a direct imitation.

Admirers and detractors

Always Bruckner had admirers, especially after he became professor of organ and music theory at the Vienna Conservatorium. Some of these admirers overtly championed him, including the conductor Hans Richter, whose rehearsals of the Fourth Symphony pleased Bruckner so much that he insisted on giving Richter a silver coin: “Take this, and drink a mug of beer to my health.” (The gesture so touched Richter that instead of spending the coin, he kept it on his watch-chain.) Bruckner’s retirement from the professorship, in 1891, occasioned an official eulogy to his powers as a teacher.

In contrast to César Franck, who managed to train almost the entire officer caste of late nineteenth-century French music, Bruckner did not have a whole group of brilliant protégés. Mahler and Hugo Wolf never formally studied with Bruckner, though they eagerly defended him. Nonetheless his students continued to cherish his memory long afterwards. One of them, the subsequent Viennese journalist Max Graf, reported:

“When Bruckner left the lecturer’s table and sat at the old piano which stood beside it, to play one of his symphonies, one could understand the religious background of his music. In its highest climaxes the themes are transformed into hymns. Sometimes the music sounds ... like the organ – and what are the abrupt pauses of his symphonic music if not the Elevation of the Host in the Mass, when the priest lifts up the chalice, the bell is rung thrice, and the worshipper kneels and bows his head? ... He pondered over chords and chord associations as a mediaeval architect must have contemplated the mysteries of arches, rose windows, and buttresses. They were his path to the Kingdom of God.”

Alas for Bruckner, his detractors included Brahms – who referred with scorn to Bruckner’s “symphonic boa-constrictors” – and Vienna’s leading music critic, Eduard Hanslick, whose invective terrified Bruckner into begging the Emperor Franz Josef: “Oh, Your Majesty, please stop that man Hanslick from writing horrible things about me.”

Excruciating loneliness

Some composers can console themselves for public humiliations by a comfortable domestic life. Not Bruckner, who spent most of his days in excruciating loneliness. Awkward by any standards (let alone Viennese standards) with women, he had a habit of proposing marriage to ladies whom he scarcely knew. The one time where matrimony might have resulted, it came to nothing; the woman’s father, a Lutheran, forbade it on religious grounds. Bruckner’s nerves periodically overcame him, a severe breakdown in 1867 having confined him to hospital for three months; and he never lost an obsession with numbers, which led him not only to write down the prayers he said each day, but to count the turrets on buildings, the leaves on trees, windows, weather-vanes, church crosses, even buttons. Which makes it all the sadder that he should have died, apparently, without a priest present. On the last afternoon of his life, 11 October 1896 (during the morning he had worked on his Ninth Symphony’s finale), he suddenly felt ill, asked his housekeeper for some hot tea, went to bed, and there passed away.

It is to Bruckner’s credit that his output, even at its most agitated, conveys a fundamental serenity of aim which suggests a kind of inspired somnambulism. In accordance with his unworldly detachment, he talked of his Maker with a frankness more mediaeval than modern. Not long before his death he informed an astonished well-wisher: “He [God] will say: ‘Why else have I given you talent, you son of a bitch, than that you should sing My praise and glory? But you have accomplished much too little’.” As for his compositional worries, let us note that he insisted on depositing in Vienna’s Court Library (Hofbibliothek) his original manuscripts – however comprehensively they had been worked over at others’ behest – for future generations to scrutinise. He deserves to have the last word:

“They want me to compose in a different way. I could, but I must not. Out of thousands, God gave talent to me … One day, I shall have to give an account of myself. How would the Father in Heaven judge me if I followed others and not Him?”

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