Truth Tellers: Anton Bruckner and His Incomparable Sacred Music

Humble, whimsical, deeply spiritual composer Anton Bruckner may have been a late bloomer, but his ethereal works transformed the world of sacred music.

A monument in Vienna to Anton Bruckner displays a statue of the man responsible for transformative sacred music. Public Domain

It is curious that beautiful works of art are often created by people who are not so beautiful themselves. Austrian composer Anton Bruckner’s homeliness and awkward ways seemed humorous to even his most devoted friends.

Beginnings

Until age 46, Bruckner (1824–1896) lived in the Alpine foothills of Upper Austria where the land seemed vast and the sky infinite. Bruckner was raised in the Church, in the faith of his forefathers, and theirs was a faith unshakable, unchanged from medieval times. Magnificent nature and the Church constituted the bedrock of his personality to his last breath.

He knew poverty and humiliation at the age of 12 after his father’s death, as his mother was left without an income and turned to farm work to feed and shelter her family. Four years later young Bruckner became an assistant school teacher in the small village of Windhaag. His duties, as well as teaching, included playing the organ at church services, ringing the church bells each morning at 4:00, and shoveling manure in the fields. His salary was so meager that he had to play the violin late into the night for parties and village celebrations. Complaints and insults were daily fare from his boorish supervisor. This cruel material life lay in great contrast to his inner spiritual life, one of wonder, beauty, and kindness.

The birthplace of Anton Bruckner still stands, in Ansfelden, Austria. Dergreg:/CC BY-SA 3.0

After holding a series of small church and school positions, he was appointed organist at the great Linz cathedral; later he taught composition at the Vienna Conservatory. But the honor and fame he deserved came only in his last years.

Bruckner’s Character 

Simple, humble and pious, Bruckner never gave up his provincial habits of speech and dress. In many ways, he remained childlike, filled with an unbounded, sometimes uncontrolled, enthusiasm. He liked to dance, to eat, and to laugh with friends, but Bruckner was a genius, and genius led him, slowly, to undreamed of destinations.

Genius holds its subjects captive, in a prison of thoughts higher than the thoughts of ordinary men. Genius invariably fosters eccentricity. Society observed Bruckner forever falling in love, and proposing marriage to girls too young and too silly for him; he was oblivious to world events; he obsessively counted leaves on a tree or statues in a park; he stopped dead in his tracks and began to pray in the street or in a classroom whenever he heard a church bell. Richard Wagner told him he clapped too loud at concerts.

Bruckner lived in the St. Florian Monastery while a choirboy and, at times, when he was an adult. C.Stadler/CC BY-SA 4.0

Bruckner’s inner world, the world unobserved, was a different matter. It was magnificent with an immense, volatile, dramatic landscape. He knew the furthest reaches of rapture and the furthest reaches of despair. Perhaps he knew the price that great creators pay for their gifts and their visions.

If anyone embodied the words of the Beatitudes, it was Anton Bruckner. He was poor in spirit, meek and pure of heart, the qualities that opened to him the Bible’s “Kingdom of heaven.” He was a citizen of that kingdom and rarely visited “the Kingdom of this world.”

The Russians have a word for such a man: “Yurodihvy,” roughly translated, “holy fool.” He is the ragged simpleton and seer in Pushkin’s “Boris Godonov,” and the beautiful, otherworldly Prince Mishkin in Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot.” In his few photographs, Bruckner seems to be preoccupied, looking at a distant something we cannot see—a higher reality known to us only through his music. He wrote from a profound inner need to give birth to his thoughts. It was a commission from God; he never wrote for money.

Bruckner’s Symphonies

Mozart composed his first symphony when he was 8 years old. Bruckner wrote his first when he was 42. At first, the public found his music incomprehensible and simply too long. The longest symphony of his contemporary, Johannes Brahms was about 50 minutes, compared to Bruckner’s 80. Well-meaning friends sometimes persuaded him to alter a score in order to interest one conductor or another, and he sometimes acquiesced, but reluctantly. If he changed them, he preserved the original versions in his archives. He wrote:

“They want me to write differently. Certainly, I could, but I must not. God has chosen me from thousands and given me, of all people, this talent. It is to Him that I must give account. How then would I stand there before Almighty God, if I followed others and not Him?”

There is little discernible development or change of style over the course of his nine symphonies. A set form, long in gestation, had already been established in his mind. These compositions are monumental in scope, yet supple in structure. They are like great trees of a forest rather than the stone columns of a Gothic cathedral designed to represent them. They reflect the magnificent Alpine landscape into which he was born, the turbulent play of emotions that moved like clouds through his mind, and of course, his ever-present God presiding over all.

Bruckner in a photograph circa 1892. His unshakeable faith contributed to the harmonies and dissonances in his music. Public Domain

The broad melodic lines seem to move ineluctably toward an unknown, unknowable destination, promising something just out of reach, something never quite realized. Harmonic progressions rashly move listeners to dizzying heights; trumpet fanfares herald a king that seldom appears. “The journey, not the destination matters,” Montaigne tells us, and the journey is a wondrous one.

Incomparable Sacred Music

But the promises are realized in Bruckner’s three great masses. The settings reveal an entirely new relationship between man and his maker: gentle and intimate. Prayers for forgiveness are not said out of fear and trembling, but from regret and trust that forgiveness will come.

The Credos (“I believe”) have a suppleness and unity unmatched by other composers. Articles of faith are not theological statements but issue from deep within the human heart. Each has its own striking reality and flows organically into the next. The “Glorias,” translated as “Glory to God,” are perhaps the most stunning revelation of Bruckner’s vision. There are moments of wild joy, full of breathless ecstasy, matched only by the “Gloria” of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis in D Major.

Even today, the organ at St. Florian Monastery is called the Bruckner Organ in memory of composer Anton Bruckner. C.Stadler/CC BY-SA 4.0

“God’s Incomprehensible majesty,” a phrase from the “Te Deum,” fills every note that Bruckner set to paper. The “Te Deum” was his most treasured creation. The power of his faith and its astonishing musical incarnation is a solid rock to stand on. “Look at this!” he tells listeners. He asks, “How can you not believe?” Listeners may sense that the room around them is not as real as what they are hearing.

The scriptures say that angels, spiritual beings, messengers of God, sang “Glory to God.” Bruckner, the mortal being, also the messenger of God, sang this as well.

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