Product Code Database
Joseph Anton Bruckner (; ; 4 September 182411 October 1896) was an Austrian composer and organist best known for his symphonies and Christian music, which includes Masses, Te Deum and motets. The symphonies are considered emblematic of the final stage of Austrian German Romanticism because of their rich harmonic language, strongly polyphony character, and considerable length. Paul-Gilbert Langevin, Anton Bruckner – apogée de la symphonie, l'Age d'Homme, Lausanne, 1977 Bruckner's compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving harmony.
Unlike other musical radicals such as Richard Wagner and Hugo Wolf, Bruckner showed respect, even humility, before other famous musicians, Wagner in particular. This apparent dichotomy between Bruckner the man and Bruckner the composer hampers efforts to describe his life in a way that gives a straightforward context for his music. The German conductor Hans von Bülow described him as "half genius, half simpleton".In German "halb Genie, halb Trottel". This description is often, but mistakenly, attributed to Gustav Mahler. Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen: "»Halb Genie, halb Trottel«. Hans von Bülows Urteil über Anton Bruckner". In: IBG-Mitteilungsblatt 55 (2000), pp. 21–24. Bruckner was critical of his own work and often reworked his compositions. There are several versions of many of his works.
His works, the symphonies in particular, had detractors, most notably the influential Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick and other supporters of the German composer Johannes Brahms, who pointed to their large size and use of repetition,"The laconic idiom of restraint, the art of mere suggestion, involving economy of means and form, is not theirs." Bruno Walter observed, comparing Bruckner and Gustav Mahler (see ). as well as to Bruckner's propensity for revising many of his works, often with the assistance of colleagues, and his apparent indecision about which versions he preferred. On the other hand, Bruckner was greatly admired by subsequent composers, including his friend Gustav Mahler.
Music was part of the school curriculum, and Bruckner's father was his first music teacher. Bruckner learned to play the organ as a child. He was very dedicated to the instrument just as he was later in life in composing, often practising for 12 hours a day. He entered school when he was six, proved to be a hard-working student, and was promoted to upper class early. While studying, Bruckner also helped his father in teaching the other children. After Bruckner received his confirmation in 1833, Bruckner's father sent him to another school in Hörsching. The schoolmaster, Johann Baptist Weiß, was a music enthusiast and respected organist. Here, Bruckner completed his school education and refined his skills as an organist. Around 1835 Bruckner wrote his first composition, a Pange lingua – one of the compositions which he revised at the end of his life. When his father became ill, Anton returned to Ansfelden to help him in his work.
After completing the seminar with an excellent grade, Bruckner was sent as an assistant teacher to a school in Windhaag. The living standards and pay were appalling and Bruckner was constantly humiliated by his superior, teacher Franz Fuchs. Despite the difficult situation, Bruckner never complained or rebelled; a belief in his own inferiority was to remain one of Bruckner's main personal traits during his whole life. He stayed at Windhaag from age 17 to 19, teaching general subjects.
Prelate noticed Bruckner's bad situation in Windhaag and awarded him an assistant teacher position in the vicinity of the monastic town of Sankt Florian, sending him to Kronstorf an der Enns for two years. Here he would be able to have more of a part in musical activity. The time in Kronstorf was a much happier one for Bruckner. Between 1843 and 1845, Bruckner was the pupil of Leopold von Zenetti in Enns.Paul-Gilbert Langevin, Anton Bruckner – apogée de la symphonie, pp. 17, 306 Compared to the few works he wrote in Windhaag, the Kronstorf compositions from 1843 to 1845 show a significantly improved artistic ability, and finally the beginnings of what could be called "the Bruckner style". Among the Kronstorf works is the vocal piece Asperges me (WAB 4), which the young assistant teacher, out of line given his position, signed with "Anton Bruckner m.p.ria. Componist". This has been interpreted as a lone early sign of Bruckner's artistic ambitions. Otherwise, little is known of Bruckner's life plans and intentions.
Largely self-taught as a composer, Bruckner only started composing seriously at age 37 in 1861. Bruckner studied further with Otto Kitzler, who was nine years younger than him and who introduced him to the music of Richard Wagner, which Bruckner studied extensively from 1863 onwards. Bruckner considered the earliest orchestral works (the "study" Symphony in F minor, the three orchestral pieces, the March in D minor and the Overture in G minor, which he composed in 1862–1863), mere school exercises, done under the supervision of Otto Kitzler. He continued his studies to the age of 40. Broad fame and acceptance did not come until he was over 60 (after the premiere of his Seventh Symphony in 1884). In 1861, he had already made the acquaintance of Franz Liszt, whom Bruckner idolised. Like Bruckner, Liszt was of the Catholic faith and a harmonic innovator, and, alongside Wagner, he initiated the New German School. In May 1861 he made his concert debut, as both composer and conductor of his Ave Maria, set in seven parts. Soon after Bruckner had ended his studies under Sechter and Kitzler, he wrote his Mass in D Minor. From 1861 to 1868, he alternated his time between Vienna and Sankt Florian. He wished to ensure he knew how to make his music modern, but he also wanted to spend time in a more religious setting.
He later accepted a post at the University of Vienna in 1875,: "In July 1875 Bruckner ... proposed yet a third time to the university of Vienna that a lectureship in harmony and counterpoint be created, and at long last, despite Hanslick's opposition, his application was successful. Bruckner was appointed to the post, and on 25 November 1875 he gave his opening oration." where he tried to make music theory a part of the curriculum. Overall, he was unhappy in Vienna, which was musically dominated by the critic Eduard Hanslick. At the time, there was a feud between advocates of the music of Wagner and Johannes Brahms; by aligning himself with Wagner, Bruckner made an unintentional enemy out of Hanslick. He was not without supporters, though. Deutsche Zeitung music critic Theodor Helm, and famous conductors such as Arthur Nikisch and Franz Schalk constantly tried to bring his music to the public, and for this purpose proposed "improvements" for making Bruckner's music more acceptable to the public. Bruckner bequeathed his original scores to the Austrian National Library in Vienna.
In addition to his symphonies, Bruckner wrote Masses, motets and other sacred choir works, and a few chamber works, including a string quintet. Unlike his romantic symphonies, some of Bruckner's choral works are often conservative and counterpoint in style; however, the Te Deum, Helgoland, Psalm 150 and at least one Mass demonstrate innovative and radical uses of chromaticism.
Biographers generally characterise Bruckner as a "simple" provincial man,Peter Gammond, Bluff Your Way in Music. London: Ravette Books (1985):: 33. "it is generally said that Bruckner was a very simple man ... If, after listening to one of his symphonies, you still feel that he was simple, then you are not the kind of person who should be reading this book." and many of them have complained that there is huge discrepancy between Bruckner's life and his work. For example, Karl Grebe said: "his life doesn't tell anything about his work, and his work doesn't tell anything about his life, that's the uncomfortable fact any biography must start from." Anecdotes abound as to Bruckner's dogged pursuit of his chosen craft and his humble acceptance of the fame that eventually came his way. Once, after a rehearsal of his Fourth Symphony in 1881, the well-meaning Bruckner tipped the Austrian-Hungarian conductor Hans Richter: "When the symphony was over", Richter related, "Bruckner came to me, his face beaming with enthusiasm and joy. I felt him press a coin into my hand. 'Take this' he said, 'and drink a glass of beer to my health.'" Richter accepted the coin, a Maria Theresa thaler, and wore it on his watch-chain ever after. Reprint of vol. 2, no. 1, Chord and Discord – A Journal of Modern Musical Progress, January 1940, Bruckner Society of America
Bruckner was a renowned organist in his day, impressing audiences in France in 1869, and the United Kingdom in 1871, giving six recitals on a new Henry Willis organ at the Royal Albert Hall in London and five more at the Crystal Palace. Though he wrote no major works for the organ,: "Unlike Franck or Reger, however, he Bruckner has not left a single composition of any value for his instrument." his improvisation sessions sometimes yielded ideas for the symphonies. He taught organ performance at the Conservatory; amongst his students were Hans Rott and Franz Schmidt. Gustav Mahler, who called Bruckner his "forerunner", attended the conservatory at this time.Walter n.d.
In July 1886, the Emperor decorated him with the Order of Franz Joseph. He most likely retired from his position at the University of Vienna in 1892, at the age of 68. He wrote a great deal of music that he used to help teach his students.
Bruckner died in Vienna in 1896 at the age of 72. He is buried in the crypt of the monastery church at Sankt Florian, immediately below his favorite organ.: "Bruckner's ... body was taken to St. Florian. ... There, in a splendid sarcophagus, lie the earthly remains of Anton Bruckner, but from above the crypt, from the great 'Bruckner Organ', his living spirit still bursts forth." He had always had a fascination with death and dead bodies, and left explicit instructions regarding the embalming of his corpse.
The Anton Bruckner Private University for Music, Drama, and Dance, an institution of higher education in Linz, close to his native Ansfelden, was named after him in 1932 (as the "Bruckner Conservatory Linz" until 2004). The Bruckner Orchestra Linz was also named in his honor.
The revision issue has generated controversy. A common explanation for the multiple versions is that Bruckner was willing to revise his work on the basis of harsh, uninformed criticism from his colleagues. "The result of such advice was to awaken immediately all the insecurity in the non-musical part of Bruckner's personality", the musicologist Deryck Cooke writes. "Lacking all self-assurance in such matters, he felt obliged to bow to the opinions of his friends, 'the experts,' to permit ... revisions and even to help make them in some cases." This explanation was widely accepted when it was championed by the Bruckner scholar Robert Haas, who was the chief editor of the first critical editions of Bruckner's works published by the International Bruckner Society; it continues to be found in the majority of program notes and biographical sketches concerning Bruckner. Haas's work was endorsed by the Nazis and so fell out of favour after the war as the Allies enforced denazification. Haas's rival Leopold Nowak was appointed to produce a whole new critical edition of Bruckner's works. He and others such as and the American conductor Leon Botstein argued that Haas's explanation is at best idle speculation, at worst a shady justification of Haas's own editorial decisions. Also, it has been pointed out that Bruckner often started work on a symphony just days after finishing the one before. As Cooke writes, "In spite of continued opposition and criticism, and many well-meaning exhortations to caution from his friends, he looked neither to right nor left, but simply got down to work on the next symphony."
Bruckner composed eleven symphonies, the first, the Study Symphony in F minor in 1863, the last, the unfinished Symphony No. 9 in D minor in 1887–96. With the exception of Symphony No. 4 ( Romantic), none of Bruckner's symphonies originally had a subtitle and in the case of those that now do, the nicknames or subtitles did not originate with the composer.
Nicholas Temperley writes in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) that Bruckner
Deryck Cooke adds, also in the New Grove,
In a concert review Bernard Holland described parts of the first movements of Bruckner's sixth and seventh symphonies as follows: "There is the same slow, broad introduction, the drawn-out climaxes that grow, pull back and then grow some more – a sort of musical coitus interruptus."
In the 2001 second edition of the New Grove, called the Bruckner symphonies "monumental in scope and design, combining lyricism with an inherently polyphonic design... Bruckner favored an approach to large-scale form that relied more on large-scale thematic and harmonic juxtaposition. Over the course of his output, one senses an ever-increasing interest in cyclic integration that culminates in his masterpiece, the Symphony No. 8 in C minor, a work whose final page integrates the main themes of all four movements simultaneously." Print: vol. 24, p. 839
In 1990 the American artist Jack Ox gave a paper called "The Systematic Translation of Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony into a series of Thirteen Paintings" at the Bruckner Symposium in Linz Austria; here she structurally analysed all of the Eighth Symphony's themes. She then proceeded to show how she mapped this musical data into a series of twelve large, painted visualisations. The conference report was published in 1993.Jack Ox, Anton Bruckner Institute Linz (1993), 83:101.
The first versions of Bruckner's symphonies often presented an instrumental, contrapuntal and rhythmic complexity (Bruckner rhythm, use of Tuplet), the originality of which has not been understood and which were considered unperformable by the musicians. In order to make them "performable", the symphonies, except Symphonies No. 5, No. 6 and No. 7, have been revised several times. Consequently, there are several versions and editions, mainly of Symphonies 3, 4 and 8, which have been deeply emended by Bruckner's friends and associates, and it is not always possible to tell whether the emendations had Bruckner's direct authorisation.
Looking for authentic versions of the symphonies, Robert Haas produced during the 1930s a first critical edition of Bruckner's works based on the original scores. After World War II other scholars (Leopold Nowak, William Carragan, Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs et al.) carried on with this work.
The three early Masses ( Windhaager Messe, Kronstorfer Messe and Messe für den Gründonnerstag), composed between 1842 and 1844, were short Austrian Landmessen for use in local churches and did not always set all the numbers of the ordinary. His Requiem in D minor of 1849 is . It shows the clear influence of Mozart's Requiem (also in D minor) and similar works of Michael Haydn. The seldom performed Missa solemnis, composed in 1854 for Friedrich Mayer's installation, was the last major work Bruckner composed before he started to study with Simon Sechter, with the possible exception of Psalm 146, a large work, for SATB soloists, double choir and orchestra.
The three Masses which Bruckner wrote in the 1860s and revised later on in his life are more often performed. The Masses numbered 1 in D minor and 3 in F minor are for solo singers, mixed choir, organ ad libitum and orchestra, while No. 2 in E minor is for mixed choir and a small group of wind instruments, and was written in an attempt to meet the Cecilians halfway. The Cecilians wanted to rid church music of instruments entirely. No. 3 was clearly meant for concert, rather than liturgical performance, and it is the only one of his Masses in which he set the first line of the Gloria, "Gloria in excelsis Deo", and of the Credo, "Credo in unum Deum", to music. In concert performances of the other Masses, these lines are intoned by a tenor soloist in the way a priest would, with a line of plainsong.
Bruckner also composed 20 Lieder, of which only a few have been published. The Lieder that Bruckner composed in 1861–1862 during his tuition by Otto Kitzler have not been WAB classified. In 2013 the Austrian National Library was able to acquire a facsimile of the Kitzler-Studienbuch, the autograph manuscript hitherto unavailable to the public. The facsimile is edited by and in Band XXV of Bruckner's Gesamtausgabe.
Bruckner composed also five name-day cantatas, as well as two patriotic cantatas, Germanenzug and Helgoland, on texts by August Silberstein. Germanenzug (WAB 70), composed in 1863–1864, was Bruckner's first published work. Helgoland (WAB 71), for SATB men's choir and large orchestra, was composed in 1893 and was Bruckner's last completed composition and the only secular vocal work that he thought worthy enough to bequeath to the Austrian National Library.
A String Quartet in C minor and the additional Rondo in C minor, also composed in 1862, were discovered decades after Bruckner's death. The later String Quintet in F Major of 1879, contemporaneous with the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, has been frequently performed. The Intermezzo in D minor, which was intended to replace its scherzo, is not frequently performed.
A Symphonisches Präludium (Symphonic Prelude) in C minor was discovered by Mahler scholar Paul Banks in the Austrian National Library in 1974 in a piano duet transcription. Banks ascribed it to Gustav Mahler, and had it orchestrated by Albrecht Gürsching. In 1985 Wolfgang Hiltl, who had retrieved the original score by Rudolf Krzyzanowski, had it published by Doblinger (issued in 2002). According to the scholar Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, the stylistic examination of this "prelude" shows that it is all Bruckner's. Possibly Bruckner had given a draft-score to his pupil Krzyzanowski, which already contained the string parts and some important lines for woodwind and brass, as an exercise in instrumentation.
Bruckner's Two Aequali of 1847 for three trombones are solemn, brief works. The Military march of 1865 is an occasional work as a gesture of appreciation for the Militär-Kapelle der Jäger-Truppe of Linz. Abendklänge of 1866 is a short character piece for violin and piano.
Bruckner also wrote a Lancer-Quadrille () and a few other small works for piano. Most of this music was written for teaching purposes. Sixteen other pieces for piano, which Bruckner composed in 1862 during his tuition by Kitzler, have not been WAB classified. A facsimile of these pieces is found in the Kitzler-Studienbuch.
Bruckner was a renowned organist at the St Florian's Priory, where he improvised frequently. Those improvisations were usually not transcribed, so that only a few of his works for organ has survived. The five Preludes in E-flat major (1836–1837), classified WAB 127 and WAB 128, as well as a few other WAB-unclassified works, which have been found in Bruckner's Präludienbuch, are probably not by Bruckner.
Bruckner never wrote an opera, and as much as he was a fan of Wagner's music dramas, he was uninterested in drama.: "Studying Tristan Bruckner used a piano score without text – a sign of how unconcerned he was with opera as drama." In 1893 he thought about writing an opera called Astra based on a novel by Gertrud Bollé-Hellmund. Although he attended performances of Wagner's operas, he was much more interested in the music than the plot. After seeing Wagner's Götterdämmerung, he asked: "Tell me, why did they burn the woman at the end?" Nor did Bruckner ever write an oratorio.
Decades after his death, the leadership of the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany strongly approved of Bruckner's music because they saw it as expressing the zeitgeist of the German volk, and Adolf Hitler even consecrated a bust of Bruckner in a widely photographed ceremony in 1937 at the Walhalla in Regensburg. Bruckner's music was among the most popular in Nazi Germany.
Near the end of World War II, Hitler became enamoured with Bruckner's music, and planned to convert St. Florian Monastery in Linz—where Bruckner had played the organ, and where he was buried—into a repository of Bruckner's manuscripts. Hitler evicted the monks from the monastery and personally paid for the restoration of the organ and the institution of a Bruckner study centre there. He also paid for the Haas collection of Bruckner's works to be published, and himself purchased material for the proposed library. Additionally, Hitler caused the founding of the Bruckner Symphony Orchestra, which began presenting concerts in late 1943. His plan for one of the bell towers in Linz to play a theme from Bruckner's Fourth Symphony never came to pass.Evans, Richard J. (2008) The Third Reich at War. New York: Penguin Books. p. 579. The Adagio from Bruckner's Seventh Symphony was broadcast by German radio (Deutscher Reichsrundfunk) when it announced the news of Hitler's death on 1 May 1945.
Today the Brucknerhaus in Linz, which opened in 1974, is named after him.
The approval by Hitler and the Nazis of his music did not hurt Bruckner's standing in the postwar media, and several films and television productions in Europe and the United States have used excerpts from his music ever since the 1950s, as they already did in the 1930s. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra have never banned Bruckner's music as they have Wagner's, even recording his Eighth Symphony with the Indian conductor Zubin Mehta.
Bruckner's symphonic works, much maligned in Vienna in his lifetime, now have an important place in the tradition and musical repertoire of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
Luchino Visconti used Bruckner's music for his film Senso (1954), its plot concerned with the war Italy waged against Austria in 1866. The score by Carl Davis for the restoration of the 1925 film Ben-Hur takes "inspiration from Bruckner to achieve reverence in biblical scenes."
|
|
