Read on to discover why Bruckner's works are either loved or hated by listeners... and how the music of this deeply troubled composer helped the author through a mental health crisis
Bruckner... a deeply divisive composer
There’s a conversation I’ve had regularly, with slight variations, throughout my career. It runs something like this:
Other person: ‘You like Bruckner, don’t you?’
Me: ‘Yes.’
Other: ‘I can’t stand him – those interminable/heavy/boring symphonies…’
Me: ‘What about the choral music: the masses and the motets?’
Other: ‘Oh, those are rather beautiful. I like those.’
Me: ‘Then it isn’t Bruckner you don’t like, just one aspect of him.’
Other: ‘Well, I suppose so…’
Strange, isn’t it? I can honestly say that I’ve only ever met one person who said he hated Bruckner’s choral music, and that seemed to me more for reasons of anti-religious prejudice than because he disliked the sound of it. And let’s stress one thing right now: despite Bruckner’s shift in emphasis towards symphonies later in his career, the church music is just as significant an aspect of this intensely devout composer’s output as his purely orchestral works.
Bruckner... an intensely devout character
The E minor Mass, for eight-part chorus and 15-part wind band, is one of the most breathtakingly original religious works written in the 19th century. Like two of his most striking motets, Os Justi and Pange Lingua, it grew partly out of Bruckner’s involvement with the Cecilian Movement, a Roman Catholic society which espoused a ‘back to basics’ attitude to church music: stress on its function within the liturgy and a determination to reconnect with purer stylistic elements found, allegedly, in Baroque and Renaissance music – Palestrina, in particular, was a name that was often cited.
The 19th century saw several attempts to get away from what the poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller called ‘sentimental’ modern thinking and re-engage with something that had been felt to be lost. In the UK, we had the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in art and the Gothic Revival in architecture. What is extraordinary about Bruckner’s Cecilian works, though, is that there’s absolutely nothing ‘neo-’ about them. They don’t sound like the work of a man nostalgically yearning for some notional lost Eden. Beautifully contrived counterpoint, Palestrina-like in its elegance and ecstatic purity, can draw in harmonies from the worlds of Schubert or Wagner without a hint of incongruity or artifice.
Solace in church buildings...
It makes sense when you know about Bruckner’s life. The composer who, from early teens, found sanctuary and solace in some of the most beautiful gothic and Baroque church buildings in Austria seems to have imbibed something of their spirit, even their numerical proportions, in his own thinking and feeling. The Schubert authority Richard Capell wrote that Bruckner arrived at his musical forms ‘by instinct, if not by design’, but the fact is that Bruckner was one of the most design-conscious composers in the whole of the 19th century. It’s one of the reasons why his church works, even when they express the anguish of penitence or tremors of doubt – take, for instance, the wonderful Christus factus est – still feel marvellously ‘contained’. Troubled we may be, but we are in a ‘safe space’, as the chapel of the monastery of St Florian or Vienna’s St Stephen’s Cathedral were for Bruckner.
Bruckner... 'tormented by his obsessions'
That Bruckner needed those safe spaces is clear from the last Mass, in F minor, for chorus and full orchestra. Bruckner began it after one of the worst mental crises of his life – and that’s saying a great deal. His friend from his earlier Linz days, the organist Karl Waldeck, remembered Bruckner having to be restrained from trying to count the leaves on a tree, and later begging him to stay with him late at night, to stop him being ‘tormented by his obsessions’.
Waldeck remembered how the theme for the Mass’s poignant Kyrie (‘Lord have mercy’) came to Bruckner during one of those black nocturnal vigils, but also how composing the Mass helped him find his way back to sanity. The result is a work as great as the E minor Mass, but this time more 19th century in its personal expressive urgency. A performance in 1893 so moved Bruckner’s arch-rival Brahms that he leapt to his feet at the end and applauded enthusiastically, later urging a conductor friend to take it on.
The symphonies... confusing and frustrating, or wondrously healing?
But mention of Brahms, the symphonic ideal for many in the 19th century, brings us back to Bruckner the symphonist. At this point, some readers may remember how Brahms tartly condemned Bruckner’s ‘symphonic boa constrictors’. I’ve mentioned how carefully Bruckner planned and adjusted his structures, so why do so people find them formally confusing or frustrating?
‘People want me to compose differently,’ Bruckner remarked at a time when musical Vienna was busily ignoring or mocking him, ‘but I dare not.’ There was something unique he felt he had to communicate, something not everyone gets, but which for others – myself very much included – inspires not only love, but also wonder and gratitude.
How Bruckner helped me through a mental health crisis
And I do mean gratitude. I remember horribly well the summer of 1976. During my third year at university, I’d experienced my first manic episode. After two weeks in hospital I was sent home for a long rest. The mania was frightening enough, but the depression that followed was torture, haunted by hideous waking dreams. For a while, reading was too difficult, but I could listen to music, so long as it was sufficiently consoling or calming. But then, I listened to Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, and I found myself playing it over and over again.
This may surprise a few readers, as the Eighth contains some of the darkest, most troubled music Bruckner ever composed. The fearfully probing first movement culminates in a vision Bruckner aptly called the ‘Annunciation of Death’, followed by the desolate, slowly ebbing coda that he compared to a clock ticking in the room of a dying man.
The Adagio slow movement contains music of heart-rending longing and loneliness, perhaps the most personal confession of this lifelong bachelor, constantly prone to bizarre infatuations with much younger women and girls – apparently never consummated. The Adagio’s nobly aspiring cello, viola and solo violin theme seemed to speak directly to my loneliness, but in a way that felt strangely affirming. As a Russian musician I met years later put it, ‘There’s something about hearing your most painful emotions transformed into something beautiful…’
Why Bruckner's symphonic structures drive people mad
But there was something else – something rooted in those very formal principles that cause such problems for Bruckner-sceptics. The Eighth Symphony’s first movement is actually one of the most seamless, structurally self-explanatory arguments Bruckner ever created. But as that long Adagio approaches its thrilling, cymbal-crowned climax, Bruckner starts doing something which drives some people mad.
He’ll build up a beautifully engineered long crescendo then, just as we seem to be reaching the moment when the wave ought to break spectacularly, he stops … pauses … then seems to start somewhere else. The themes may be recognisable, but it’s as though we’ve suddenly side-stepped into a parallel universe. In the long approach to the Adagio’s climax this happens three times – which means that, for some, when we do get to that truly visionary moment, it just doesn’t work. Perplexity and irritation have spoilt the Big Reveal.
If that is how you feel, then you really do have my sympathy. There have been times when I’ve been getting to know some of the symphonies when I’ve felt the same. In fact, I’m not even sure that, despite his notorious frequent revisions, Bruckner ever got the Finale of the Fourth Symphony right, let alone any of the movements – barring the Scherzo – in the Third. In the wrong kind of performance, the huge first movement of the Ninth Symphony can leave the listener structurally punch drunk with its sudden cut-offs, reversals, switches in theme, tempo and character.
Cathedrals in sound
Bruckner’s symphonies have been famously described as ‘cathedrals in sound’, but in this case the cathedral seems to have been designed by a kind of deranged MC Escher. It is as though you’re strolling up the spacious nave one moment, candle-lit altar clearly in view, only to find yourself suddenly peering down vertiginously from the top of the rood screen the next. What is Bruckner doing? Does he actually have any idea what he’s doing?
My answer to that, it won’t surprise you to learn, is an emphatic ‘yes’. But it’s something so extraordinary that I’m having difficulty thinking of direct parallels in the works of any other composers. Haydn, and more spectacularly Beethoven, can set up tension in their symphonic works, tease us with false, thwarted resolutions, then thrillingly provide the rabbit-out-of-the-hat release at the very end. Schubert can do something similar, but on a more expansive scale, often with pauses for breath instead of the expected transition into something new – a device which led to George Bernard Shaw dismissing him as ‘brainless’. For those who buy into his thinking, Wagner can create huge expectations which may only be fulfilled after several hours waiting – think of the Liebestod in Tristan und Isolde, all the more overwhelming after three acts of exquisitely agonising foreplay.
A slower metabolic rate...
No question, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner are important influences on Bruckner’s symphonic thinking. But firstly – with the exception of Wagner – he slows them down. The metabolic rate is different, and even when the music seems animated on the surface, the background pulse is slower, like the movement of an ocean liner. There are moments when this background pulse stands revealed, and if we can identify with it, accept it, then what Bruckner does superficially becomes less frustrating because we know not to be fooled into false expectations. As composer Robert Simpson put it, Bruckner doesn’t simply demand patience, he actually expresses it. This is harder to grasp at first because – unless the performance is of the regrettable kind which monumentalises everything – we can also hear his anxiety, his yearning, his sadness and terrifying instability.
Bruckner... 'explains everything'
I can recall taking a Bruckner-sceptic friend to a performance of the Fourth Symphony while at university. I well remember the look of delighted surprise he gave me about five minutes into the first movement – he was actually enjoying it! But what stayed with me most of all was his comment about the slow movement, that strange nocturnal procession through a vast forestscape which at times seems to come to a complete standstill. He pointed to a passage, just after the brassy climax, where sombre string harmonies rise slowly above quietly throbbing timpani. ‘That passage’, he said, eyes burning, ‘explains everything!’
In such moments – and the final crescendo of the Eighth Symphony is perhaps the greatest of all – the threads left hanging in the air earlier on are suddenly drawn together, and the whole journey makes sense. It reminds me of the ending of John Milton’s 1671 drama Samson Agonistes: ‘All is best, though we oft doubt, What th’ unsearchable dispose Of highest wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close. Oft he seems to hide his face, But unexpectedly returns And to his faithful Champion hath in place Bore witness gloriously’.
For Bruckner, that ‘highest wisdom’ was his God, to whom he dedicated his choral-orchestral Te Deum ‘for having brought me through so much suffering in Vienna’. But one doesn’t need to believe in a personal God to share St Augustine’s intuition that ‘There is one within me who is more myself than my self’ – that sense many have that there’s someone within us who knows better than our limited, ‘rational’ egos what we need to think and do.
Bruckner... helping you find your way home
And if that all sounds impossibly high-flown, think of Pooh and Piglet, lost in the fog at the top of the forest in The House at Pooh Corner. ‘Do you know the way home?’, asks Piglet anxiously. ‘“No,” said Pooh. “But there are 12 pots of honey in my cupboard, and they have been calling me for hours. I couldn’t hear them properly before, because Rabbit would talk, but if nobody says anything except those 12 pots, I, Piglet, I shall know where they are calling from. Come on.”’
Don’t let the fog and the unfamiliarity of everything scare you, Bruckner seems to say; be patient – wait for Rabbit to stop talking, and you too might hear that call and find your way home. That’s what he said to me, in 1976, and has continued to say, at varying intervals, ever since. If he hasn’t said that to you yet, then perhaps you’ve never needed it, in which case I genuinely envy you. But don’t dismiss him utterly – there may come a day when you need him too.
