Monday, December 2, 2019

BRUCKNER BICENTENNIAL BLOG / PART 4 OF 4
Sacred Music of Anton Bruckner, Part 4: 
A Blog of Personal  Reflections


 Psalms, Abendzauber, Um Mitternacht, Trosterin Musik, & Te Deum

by Donald Beagle

Bruckner composed choral settings for Psalms 22, 112, 114, 146, and 150. The Psalm 150 is by far the most famous, and has entered the standard international repertoire. But none of the settings, in my opinion, quite rise to the superlative level of the finest motets or the three numbered masses. Bruckner’s finest psalm setting, to my personal taste, is not his famous Psalm 150, although that is a striking and effective work. I feel his best music in the genre of psalms emerges in the first, third, and fourth movements of Psalm 146. My personal view is that Psalm 150 has become the best-known and most frequently performed partly because (along with its crowd-pleasing orchestral and vocal flourishes) it is the one psalm that projects aspects of a Wagnerian aesthetic. Others may disagree, but for sake of discussion, I want to first speculate why the psalms as a genre presented Bruckner with an especially difficult challenge.

In his seminal 1981 article for The Musical Quarterly, A. C. Howie pinpointed the central problem of sacred music in the Romantic era: “In setting words of the liturgy to music, Bruckner was confronted with the problem of correlating textual importance - an undue regard for which would naturally hinder the process of melodic and dynamic development - with the laws of absolute music, to which any musical event succumbs. In Classical sacred music….the text was usually subordinated to the demands of absolute music, and the relationship between words and music was effected by constant thematic forms, such as sonata form, which were based on the principles of symmetry and repetition. Consequently, different parts of the Mass text were set to the same musical material, and in many cases this resulted in declamatory unevenness. Bruckner was one of the few composers of sacred music to successfully solve the problem of verbal-musical synthesis; he accomplished this in his mature works largely through his replacement of Classical symmetry and periodicity by a highly individual technique of melodic development.”

Howie’s observation about abstract formalism in the Classical tradition helps explain how an unknown composer like Franz Sussmayr could bring an unfinished masterpiece like Mozart’s Requiem to an effective completion. Certainly, the sections of Mozart’s Requiem that most successfully achieve verbal-musical synthesis are those composed by Mozart himself. But the highly-formalized conventions governing melodic development, counterpoint, and harmony in the Classical period enabled Mozart’s pupil Sussmayr to extrapolate a completion that proved musically satisfying, without compromising the work’s overall status as a masterpiece.

 In the article noted above, Howie goes on to describe Bruckner’s uniquely innovative approach to verbal-musical synthesis as a “climactic process:”

In a typical Brucknerian climactic process, the melodic ascent is felt as an increase in tension, and the descent as the necessary relaxation. Other factors such as harmony and rhythm are also similarly divided in this constant alternation between tension and emotional release. Nevertheless, while melodic ascent is always associated with a general upward musical surge, and the highest note is to be regarded, in most cases, as the important climactic note on which the discharge of harmonic and melodic tensions is fully concentrated, the ensuing melodic descent does not always signify the complete annulment of tension. It usually effects only a partial release, and a complete release is achieved only at the end of a movement. The melodic course throughout a whole movement is thus in the nature of a series of mountain peaks and valleys, each descent usually representing only a ‘pause for breath’ before a new ascent. The melodic development of an entire movement often contains enclaves of a more relaxed character which lie outside the dynamic disposition of the movement in one respect but are really necessary parts of it as sections of emotional relaxation.”

Bruckner brought this “highly individual” climactic technique to a great level of accomplishment in the three numbered masses, as he proved supremely skillful at integrating the music’s climactic process with narrative equivalents in the liturgy. The Latin liturgy of the mass offers clear textual points of tension-building-and-release, with the most obvious examples being the Crucifixion and Resurrection scenes in the Credo.

But the psalms offer a different sort of textual tapestry, typically more exclamatory than dramatic. In psalm settings, Bruckner was working with texts less well-suited to his innovative technique. A second challenge derives from how he developed his personal style: by immersion in masterworks by Hayden, Beethoven, and Schubert, along with intensive study of their scores-- playing out parts from those scores on keyboard (both organ and piano). For motets and masses, Bruckner had indisputably great models to draw from: Palestrina (for motets), masses by Hayden, Mozart, and Schubert, and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. Bruckner learned much from these models, enabling him to move the motet and the symphonic mass forward to superb late-romantic-era culminations.

But far fewer musical settings of psalms had achieved similar prominence.. Bruckner had a less effective foundation to learn from and build on. I think support for this view can also be found in the psalm settings by Felix Mendelssohn, which also (to my mind) fall short of Mendelssohn’s finest compositions. I’m not alone; Mendelssohn scholar Philip Radcliffe is quoted in a review on MusicWeb commenting that he was not impressed by Mendelssohn’s psalm settings overall,  though he did consider 114 to be the finest of the set.

Mendelssohn’s early-romantic compositional style was very different from Bruckner’s; he composed with an energetic yet  polished lyrical fluency one might think better-suited to psalms than Bruckner’s late-romantic radicalism.  But no direct comparison seems possible, because the two composers chose different psalms for their settings. They apparently overlapped only with 114. But Psalm 114 seems to have been Bruckner’s least ambitious foray in his series; he scores it as one movement for a modest ensemble. Mendelssohn’s music for the same text plays for twice the runtime across multiple movements, employing a much larger ensemble. 

Beyond Bruckner’s very restrained effort at 114, where do his other psalms fall on the scale of sacred music? I once long ago heard a live performance of Psalm 22, and found it enjoyable (though also very restrained, I found it melodically superior to 114). I’m surprised to report that I find no choral performances of this work on YouTube. There is an attempted electronic “realization” by Alexander Reute, but it falls flat, due to its substitution of synthesized “voices” for human singers, while vocalizing no words. Tempo changes in this electronic version seem arbitrary and clumsy, lacking organic impact.

The YouTube performance of Psalm 112, by contrast, displays Bruckner’s very early choral style to good (if somewhat uneven) effect. Overall it succeeds as for me as a reasonably effective evocation of its text, and it’s well-judged 9 minute runtime shows yet again that Bruckner was not the compulsive monumentalist many have assumed:

Psalm 112


Bruckner’s last two psalm settings, 146 and 150, are very different in concept and execution, with both achieving a higher level of quality than 112, while also being different from each other. Psalm 146 has the lengthier text, which Bruckner weaves into a work of six movements. Movement I is the heart of this work, and to my ear, stands on its own as an impressive choral achievement. Movements II and V are merely very brief recitatives for soloists serving as transitions between neighboring movements--I am frankly surprised Bruckner labelled them as "movements." By contrast, Movements III and IV have independent substance and their own respective strengths, but I’ll be discussing them separately and pasting their links in reverse order for reasons to be explained later. But first, here is that splendid Movement I:

Psalm 146 – I. “Alleluja! Lobet den Hern. Langsam.”


If I were to program Psalm 146 in my own “imaginary concert hall,” I would feel justified in performing Movement I as a standalone work. A reasonable alternative, I think, would be to offer it as a two-part program featuring Movement I followed by Movement IV. This 4th movement has its own aesthetic strength, but with a more vigorous tempo and more varied interludes of solo and choral parts, including extended and well-executed duets. Unfortunately for my two-part performance scenario, the ending of IV leaves one with a provisional feeling, and was never meant to conclude the entire Psalm.

Psalm 146: IV. “Der Herr nimmt auf die Sanften. Nicht zu langsam.”


The most unexpected aspect of Psalm 146 is Movement III, where Bruckner suddenly takes on his persona of radical innovator. Again, as a possible standalone work, this audacious movement features the intense rhythmic impetus, abrupt tempo changes, and roving harmonics roughly akin to those found in the Credo of the Mass #1 in D Minor, while also achieving at its ending a very satisfying point of resolution. The problem this presents is its placement between the conventional movements before and after, creating (to my ear) an awkward back-and-forth dichotomy. Could Bruckner have resolved this with a  summative final movement that tied these divergent threads together? We’ll never know, because the concluding movement Bruckner did compose for Psalm 146 is (while technically accomplished in its extended fugal composition) seems the least expressively effective part of the entire psalm. Given Bruckner’s well-documented penchant for revision, one only wishes he had returned to this last movement at a later time with a fresh burst of inspiration and energy.

          There remains one performance alternative-- perhaps the most interesting: programming the three finest movements of this work as a tripartite suite, while swapping the order of movements three and four. This means playing the equivalent videos in the same order of their YouTube links in this text; starting with movement I (the serenely lyrical “Alleluja”), followed by movement IV (uptempo solo, duet, and choral themes and variations), followed by the innovative intensity of movement III. This sequence carries the expressive force of a work that begins within languid idyllic spirituality, then moves into and through an accelerating interplay of melodic development, and finally launches into the powerful intensity that leads to the third movement’s ending, bringing this entire re-setting of Psalm 146 to a sense of conclusive finality.


Psalm 146: III. “Groß ist unser Herr. Schnell.”


Changing the order of text-based movements is hardly unknown in concert-hall music. The selective ordering of texts Carl Orff chose for Carmina Burana does not reflect the larger order of texts in their original publication. While those texts are not liturgical, they were likely authored and originally printed in a monastic setting.

In contrast to 146, Bruckner’s excellent setting of Psalm 150 needs little commentary here. Its continued success on national and international venues seems secure, partly due to its crowd-pleasing vocal and instrumental flourishes, and partly, I suspect, because it is one of his few sacred choral works to incorporate some overt elements of Wagnerian influence. Beyond that, its fugal finale (to my ear) anticipates Mahler to a notable degree. The YouTube performance I would choose is the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus with Daniel Barenboim. This performance has two strengths certain others lack: lovely passages for solo flute and solo violin are nicely brought to the foreground at key points instead of being submerged within the massed sound of chorus and orchestra. Secondly, Barenboim executes a well-judged tempo ritardando and pause just prior to commencing the extended fugal finale:

Psalm 150


For listeners who enjoy videos of concert-hall performances (instead of seeing a static album cover), I recommend a video of the May 2019 Madrid performance by Orquesta y Coro de Radiotelevisión Española. There is about a 45 sec. Spanish language welcome and introduction, but listeners with patience to wait that out will be rewarded by the entertaining performance that follows, including the too-brief passage of solo singing by yet another ascending opera star on the European scene, soprano Natalia Labourdette.


Psalm 150—in performance



All commentators emphasize the seminal impact Wagner’s (and Liszt’s) “music of the future” had on Bruckner. Bruckner was certainly studying some Wagner scores by the mid-1860’s, which means that he may have internalized some Wagnerian influence by the Mass #3 in F Minor (1868). But that Mass shows more commonalities with his early pre-Wagner symphonies. I remain skeptical that he felt ready to incorporate Wagner’s influence before the 1873 version of the Third Symphony. In any case, Bruckner had clearly composed the great majority of his sacred music before his exposure to Wagner. But the few sacred works he composed after that event, while not superior in quality to his pre-Wagner choral works, do seem to share a distinctively different aesthetic.

Much ink has been spilled about Bruckner’s excessive humility on personally meeting Wagner. Yet, whether these anecdotes help us understand or appreciate Wagnerian elements in Bruckner’s music remains dubious. His social interactions with Wagner would have meant nothing had he not listened to Wagner’s innovative style with a keen conceptual understanding of, and appreciation for, its musical significance. This alone distinguished Bruckner from his own relentless critics in Vienna who failed to grasp (or perhaps resented?) the scope of Wagner’s achievement. This entire episode entails a fascinating irony: the stereotypes of “naïve bumpkin” and “sophisticated critic” historically produced a reversal of roles. With over a century of hindsight, we can now acknowledge that Bruckner’s critic Eduard Hanslick ended up playing the role of “bumpkin” in this scenario, completely misjudging Wagner’s long-term significance, while it was the supposedly-naïve and unsophisticated Bruckner who immediately (and perhaps intuitively) grasped the importance of Wagner’s innovations.

          Even this understanding would have meant very little had Bruckner not then been able to then take the further step of assimilating those innovations, and incorporating them into his personal compositional style. This was no small achievement. This was a musician who had started serious composition late in life, from an initial schooling in Gregorian chant and Palestrina’s church music, then onward through exposure to Haydn and Beethoven. From this background, the instantaneous “Aha!” moment he seems to have experienced on first hearing Wagner remains remarkable—the sign of a sophisticated aesthetic breadth well beyond many of his contemporaries (e.g., Hanslick, Brahms) who fancied themselves to be Bruckner’s intellectual and musical superiors. To be fair to Hanslick, it does seem plausible that Wagner’s anti-semitism became a factor for this critic whose mother had Jewish ancestry. And as for Brahms, it does also seem true that in the end he played some role in paving the way for one of the triumphant Vienna performances of Bruckner’s Te Deum. For a discriminating and appreciative glimpse into the personal and musical intersections of these two great composers, see Simon Russell Beale's BBC series, SACRED MUSIC: Episode #1: Brahms and Bruckner: https://youtu.be/AFvwkLTgA30

When singer Rosa Papiers once questioned Bruckner why he wouldn't compose songs like Johannes Brahms did she recalled him responding, "I could, if I wanted to, but I don't." This lack of interest seems to have been genuine, given how few German “lieder” survive in his archives. But his confidence in his innate ability to compose songs on a high level is certainly supported by his splendid settings of  “Um Mitternacht” (“At Midnight.”) and "Abendzauber."

         After years of ignoring the genre of the "lieder," it seems telling that Bruckner composed three settings around the "Mitternacht" or “At Midnight” subject, though none may quite fit the strict academic definition of lieder. The version linked below has become the most-performed, and for good reason. My personal opinion is that this text motivated Bruckner to compose in a form he normally ignored because (like "Abendzauber") it is not exclusively secular. It does express a sense of profound “aloneness” that Bruckner doubtless experienced after years of unsuccessful overtures to women. But the text is hardly that simple, for it also evokes a sense of “the dark night of the soul” that came to loom large in Bruckner’s spirituality. That is my justification for including it in a blog about Bruckner’s sacred choral and vocal music. Like Psalm 150, it evokes an aesthetic reminiscent of certain music by Wagner, though the careful listener may feel it projects harmonics more closely akin to Liszt. As brilliant as Brahms’ own song-writing became, I personally find no single lieder by Brahms more compelling than this single song by his arch-rival composer in Vienna.

Um Mitternacht, (WAB 89)


Having mentioned Bruckner's life of relative solitude with respect to his unsuccessful overtures to women, this seems a convenient place to comment further. There has (understandably) been a great deal of tut-tutting about Bruckner's awkward late-in-life approaches to women far younger in age. Few of these commentaries, however, acknowledge a number of salient points. During Bruckner's triumphal stay in London as one of Europe's foremost organ virtuosos in his 50's, when he performed to standing room only audiences at Royal Albert Hall and the Crystal Palace, one star-struck woman did approach him between recitals and even (apparently) broached the possibility of marriage. We know no details of this odd encounter, except that Bruckner seems to have been taken aback and brushed her off. Evidence also exists that at least one of the women Bruckner later approached (far younger in age) did respond with a provisional "yes," but expressed an aversion to converting to Catholicism.
          Certainly, one can impute psychoanalytic possibilities here. But I suspect the real dilemma Bruckner faced was simpler than Freud might have surmised. Having been left bereft at age 12 by his own father's death, Bruckner had to cope with two conflicting barriers: wordly success and its  financial rewards came very late in his career, and he lived in devotion to a religious tradition that defined procreation as the primary reason for marriage. Put simply, by the time Bruckner could afford to support a wife, an age-appropriate partner would likely have found it difficult or impossible to help him sire a little "Anton Junior." Whether and how much he may have yearned for fatherhood we'll likely never know. For that  matter, my simple interpretation of Bruckner's late-blooming and vulnerable humanity may be naïve on my part. Whether the Freudians are right or wrong, there seems little to be gained in  heaping further speculation on the void.


"Abendzauber" is also typically described as secular, but it clearly draws on the affinity between human spirituality and the natural wilderness that motivated European poets of the Romantic era to trek into the Alps in search of "the sublime." Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony is an outstanding large-scale musical work in this genre. Bruckner was native to rural Austria, and in yet another contradiction to the stereotype of Bruckner's monumentalism, one striking element of "Abendzauber" is how effectively it evokes its sense of wilderness-inspired spiritual transcendence in its brief 6-to-8 min. runtime, and with the constrained resources of a solo male singer backed by a male choir,  3 female singers, and 2 or 3 horns. The work begins with overt references to the Bavarian milieu with Alpine horns. They sound their calls intermittently, and repetitively, because Bruckner is clearly harking back to the very ancient tradition of mountain horns of folk culture used primarily as tools for signaling rather than melodic amusements (even if modern brass instruments are used to imitate them). And here we find the first of several performance pitfalls that complicate the task of any musicians trying to help this unique work rise to its considerable potential. Folk-horns may offer somewhat limited tonal options, but they can vary in volume from soft to loud. But all too many YouTube performances simply sound and re-sound those horn-calls with unvarying volume. A second pitfall emerges about a third of the way into this work when the score calls for the horn calls to be echoed by a small ensemble of  upper-register human voices (typically 3). The effect can be striking when the conductor and performers take the "echoing" role seriously, as if angels (or Wagnerian forest-spirits?) are responding to the calls of human horns in kind, from some distant ethereal elevation. But here again, all too many performances on YouTube treat these brief upper-register voicings as exclamations instead of echoes, and thereby (to my ear) ruin the aesthetic effect with a sound of urgent shrillness that seems entirely out-of-place. Also, Bruckner's score leaves ample opportunity for rubato--the temporary slowing of tempo--and this is an opportunity too few conductors exploit in those echoing intervals. And in some YouTubes, the effect of the upper register echoes goes from bad to worse when, instead of casting female voices as the angels or forest-spirits, a few members of the male choir are tasked with trying to voice them in falsetto(!) The effect, on this deeply-resonant and reverential tone-poem, can be disastrous; the mood becomes completely unhinged with unintentionally-funny "doo-dee-doo-dee-doo" interruptions. Somewhere in the literature I once read that Bruckner never heard a live performance of this work. Had he ever heard a live flawed performance one wonders whether he might have notated his score with a few more specific instructions.

          The greatest performance pitfall awaits us near the end, when the music does a subtle modal shift from its largely secular beginning to its sacred destination. This is a faithful execution of the poem's original lyrics, which begin in rhapsodic reflections on natural beauty: "The lake dreams between rocks, / The forest whispers gently. / The mountain slope is lit / By the silvery light of the moon." But in a following stanza, the poet directly invokes Heaven: "I sat at the lakeshore, / Lost in sweet dream; / I dreamed to hover / Aloft to Heaven's realm." As we reach this stage in the poem, Bruckner reshapes his music accordingly, using the lowest-register bass singers to shift its entire harmonic field from something akin to Romantic-era lieder to something rather more akin to the motets of his youth. It requires considerable acumen to fully sense the implications of this shift and then successfully express this reshaping in a performance (however apropos it may be to the sense of the poem). Surprisingly, perhaps, this shift is carried out most effectively in a YouTube of the Korean Male Choir--a performance that also largely steers clear of the other pitfalls mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, here is another case where the technical merits of the recording don't quite measure up to the  musical interpretation, as the audio track captures some low-level feedback interference--never enough to ruin the impact , only annoying.


          "Abendzauber"








          For those who really want the presumed authenticity of a Germanic performance, the following YouTube is not terrible. But to my ear, it could and should have been a much better performance had the echoing vocalizations of the 3 female singers been muted, and slowed by rubato. The conductor does stage them very nicely in an upper balcony to the side, so it is possible that their echoes were muted for the live audience by their elevated perch in ways that their microphone failed to convey. 


          Before bringing this blog to a conclusion with two of Bruckner's final choral works, I find it interesting to speculate why Bruckner left so few works for solo keyboard-- and especially for pipe organ, given that he was universally hailed as one of the greatest organists of his age. And the piano part just heard in "Um Mitternacht," while only an accompaniment, certainly hints at greater potentialities. "Erinnerung" is, in my opinion, Bruckner's finest solo piano composition, whereas the "Vorspeil and Fugue in C Minor " commands my praise as his finest achievement for organ. 


          Bruckner was himself dismissive of his sundry piano works, but "Erinnerung" does reveal a very different side of his musical aesthetic than do his solo works for organ. It's delicate, Chopinesque lyricism belies the sense of weightiness we typically associate with Bruckner. Interestingly, however, we still hear hints of those stylistic points that prompted Bartmans to characterize his 'radicalism." There are freely roving harmonics throughout, and in one 10-second sequence of descending chords (starting at the 1min 43sec mark), we even hear a series of unexpected but unapologetic dissonances. Nearly all romantic era composers employed some elements of dissonance, of course, but not quite so overtly. These dissonant chords are surprising enough to momentarily fool some listeners into suspecting fingering mistakes by the pianist. But more surprising is how the music then changes direction in such a way as to make clear why and how the brief intrusion of dissonance makes perfect compositional sense. The brief interval of descending dissonance serves as an expressive pivot point between the earlier and later sections where Bruckner's creative persona seems to express a lyricism and transparency less evident in his works for organ or orchestra.

                   Erinnerung







          But when Bruckner improvised and / or composed for pipe organ, he seems to have taken on an alternate aesthetic persona. Some of this contrast, of course, simply emerged from his grasp of how these two instruments offered  him very different expressive potentialities. "Nachspiel" carries a single name, but to my ear, it is a prelude-and-fugue variant: a brief but forceful prelude followed by a fugal mid-section, then concluding with an even more abbreviated chord sequence serving as postlude. In this work (and in the next), I've chosen video recordings from performances by Klaus Sonnleitner playing the "Bruckner Organ," the instrument the composer himself played for years at the St. Florian Monastery in Austria. Whenever Bruckner may have turned his gaze from the keyboards toward Heaven, he would have seen the ornate and beautiful ceiling shown from the album cover in these videos. Immediately after the "Nachspiel," I've linked the "Vorspiel and Fugue," which may well be Bruckner's finest surviving work for a solo instrument.


          Nachspiel

          https://youtu.be/1FAwp5TMAoE

          
         Vorspiel and Fugue
          https://youtu.be/F7E2h19cxVA

          
          Earlier I described the  interesting aspect of this composer schooled in the antiquity of plainchant and Palestrina, reaching the culmination of his career while incorporating Wagnerian “music of the future” into his personal style. If Wagner and Liszt had been Gregorian monks, what sort of sacred choral music might they have composed? To express it another way, could the chromaticism of the avant-garde in Bruckner’s time somehow find expression in the ancient choral form known from medieval times as “the chant?” We have two examples of how Bruckner pulled off this seemingly unlikely fusion of form and substance straddling centuries of musical expression in the brief Trosterin Musik, and the more extensive Te Deum.

Trosterin Musik, like “Um Mitternacht,” is described as “secular” in certain reference works. But the text belies this narrow categorization. Bruckner’s work on this composition began in the form of an elegy titled “Nachruf,” following the death of Joseph Seiberl, with a text that conjoined musical and spiritual dimensions (translation quoted here in part):

“You joined, hero and master of sounds,
This grand cohort of spirits,
Who here already ran a higher existence,
Because they sensed the spirit of the world of sounds.
 

Bruckner sensed in this work a bridge to further possibilities, as he returned to revise it in 1886 with the new title “Trosterin Musik,” using a new text that, while perhaps slightly more secular, still exorts the allure of music to spirituality and the soul (again, a partial translation):

“Like the tone of the organ and the waves of the sea,
The consolation draws then into the heart,
And calms the wild longings of the soul
And loosens the pain in mild tears.

Trosterin Musik 1886


While only 4 min in length, this work has an exceptionally interesting harmonic sequence beginning at the 30sec mark. As a sort of fusion of plainchant and a late-romantic aesthetic / harmonic idiom, it feels much akin to the Te Deum of the same period

Bruckner’s Te Deum may have been the greatest success of his lifetime; to quote Wikipedia: “Hans Richter conducted the first performance with full orchestra on 10 January 1886 in the Großer Musikvereinssaal of Vienna. Thereafter, there were almost thirty more performances within Bruckner's lifetime. The last performance, which Bruckner attended, was conducted by Richard von Perger at the suggestion of Johannes Brahms. On his copy of the score, Gustav Mahler crossed out "für Chor, Soli und Orchester, Orgel ad libitum" (for choir, solos and orchestra, organ ad libitum) and wrote "für Engelzungen, Gottsucher, gequälte Herzen und im Feuer gereinigte Seelen!" (for the tongues of angels, heaven-blest, chastened hearts, and souls purified in the fire!). The composer himself called the work "the pride of his life". This triumph also brought him the personal patronage of Emperor Franz Joseph, who then arranged for Bruckner to perform at the wedding of his daughter, Archduchess Marie Valerie, and who also then granted Bruckner a private residence in Vienna's sumptuous Belvedere Palace, complete with stipend.

The work forms a powerfully organic whole, but somewhat paradoxically, is perhaps best discussed in sections. The first 6min. section, Te Deum Laudamus, leaps swiftly from orchestra to the chorus in an extended and modulated linear chant, pausing only for the first entry of the soloists. As so often with Bruckner, one can readily find performances where the comparatively brief solo parts have nevertheless attracted all-star singers. In this case, the inimitable Jessye Norman takes center stage against the backdrop of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by Barenboim.

Te Deum Laudamus


 The powerful momentum of the opening chant transitions into the quasi-recitative “Te ergo," and then returns to conclude the work’s first section. Orchestra and full chorus then explode into the powerful Aeterna fac. This passage, less than 2 min. in runtime, is far shorter than it could have become. Its dynamism projects the potential for elaboration and expression beyond what its existing length allows. We may never know why Bruckner chose to keep it so brief, but some musicologists have theorized that Bruckner’s completion of a fourth movement for his unfinished Ninth Symphony may have been delayed due to his thoughts of incorporating a fugal elaboration of this Aeterna fac within the Ninth's concluding movement, perhaps even anchoring its coda.

Aeterna fac (from Te Deum)



          Bruckner brings the Te Deum to a majestic conclusion with an extended chromatic ascent borrowed and then elaborated from the Seventh Symphony, a triumphant achievement that exemplifies A, C. Howie’s original description of his climactic process. One could readily return to Jessye Norman’s powerful rendition with the Chicago Symphony, but to my thinking, Barenboim impedes his own interpretation at this critical juncture with excessive ritardando. For my link below, I’ve chosen the UK cathedral performance by Sir Gilbert Levin. This video presents the entire work from beginning to end, but the web link is cued to open the video at 16min 49sec point which marks the start of the final section, In Te Dominie Speravi:

Te Deum -- In Te, Domine, speravi


As I wrote earlier, we have two examples of how Anton Bruckner pulled off a seemingly unlikely fusion of form and substance straddling centuries of musical expression in the brief Trosterin Musik, and in the far more extensive Te Deum. These works, in a sense, bring this blog full circle-- linking the earliest plainchant motets of his youth to his most innovative compositional work as he neared the end of his life.

BRUCKNER BICENTENNIAL BLOG / PART 3 OF 4
Sacred Music of Anton Bruckner, Part 3: 
A Blog of Personal  Reflections

Three Festive Masses; Requiem; Missa Solemnis

by Donald Beagle



      Bruckner’s rural background inspired several early Masses for small church ensembles. One of these, the C Major, is potentially a finer work than is generally assumed; I think it still awaits an adequate performance and recording. Bruckner ostensibly scored its vocal parts for solo Alto, but even in the flawed and fragmented performances available on YouTube, it sounds so much better sung by a choir that one suspects Bruckner scaled its first scored version down for a small church without an adequate choir. 

      The later three numbered Masses stand apart from those modest early settings, both in their quality of musical inspiration and in their aspirational orchestration and staging. But they also stand apart from each other, to such a degree that one might almost suspect them to have been the work of three different composers, were not the archival provenance of Bruckner’s hand-notated scores beyond dispute. A careful listener will hear unmistakable Brucknerian acoustic signatures within the depths of all three, but extending not so much to his other masses as to his symphonies and other works. The Mass #1 in D Minor features dynamic orchestral effects akin to the Symphony #1 in C Minor. The majestic Mass #3 in F Minor, and its Credo in particular, moves us to the boundaries of Bruckner’s powerful brass perorations from symphonies #4 and #8, while the flowing lyricism of its Benedictus, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei include brief passages found in his early symphonic adagios, while at other points anticipating the more visionary adagio movements in symphonies #6 and #7. The beautiful Mass #2 in E Minor comes across as a more visionary exploration of tonalities from his motet: Pange lingua in E Phrygian Mode. Because this post immediately follows my post about Bruckner’s motets, I’ll begin with comments about the Mass #2.


      Bruckner’s Mass #2 in E Minor is profoundly different from its sister compositions, and from nearly any other late 19th century Mass. I’m reminded of a quote by musicologist Bartje Bartmans: “Bruckner's compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving harmonies.” Unlike the Requiem where dissonant strings are “out front” (as I’ll also discuss later), this Mass #2 plays with subtly dissonant wind accompaniment at key junctures, while singers execute the roving harmonies; as Rolf’s Music Blog describes: “…the score asks for narrow, dissonant intervals, as well as huge jumps.”  The following brief introductory video by members of the Chicago Chorale may help the listener better appreciate this work’s unique qualities. The Music Director includes brief mention of other works on the Chorale’s program (motets by Brahms and Mendelssohn) but all the music played in the video (background and foreground) is from the E Minor Mass.
Mass in E Minor (Chicago Chorale Preview)


The Kyrie movement best showcases the sheer beauty of this work, though I’m a bit torn trying to choose one video to represent it. This is the performance I've come to prefer:
Mass #2 in E Minor--Kyrie 

While the Credo of #2 does not seem to dominate the expressive weight of this Mass to the same degree as its counterpart Credo movements dominate the D Minor and F Minor mass settings, this Credo does offer an excerpt that nicely exemplifies the often-unorthodox originality of Bruckner's musical language. I’ve chosen a video of the complete Mass as performed in Inchon, South Korea, by the InchonCity Chorale conducted by Kim Jong-Hyun. Before discussing this performance as a whole, I've cued the following link to begin at the 16min 30sec point, where the chorus begins its elegiac reflections on the Crucifixion. Two minutes into this a capella chorale sequence, at the 18min 30sec point, Bruckner subtly moves into deeper level of solemnity with a modal shift that adds a wind instrument to accompany the choir. But of the multiple wind instruments at his disposal, Bruckner makes the seemingly unlikely choice of bassoon (!) to usher the choir into and through the spiritual depths that lead to the suffering conveyed by repeated references to "Passus" two minutes later at the 20min 30sec mark. Other wind instruments enter briefly to play cameo roles throughout, but the bassoon carries the emotive weight. Opinions and tastes may differ, but I personally find this sequence almost magical in its exhortation of understated sublimity. Yet I confess I would never have guessed that the tonal quality of the bassoon could have lent this passage such gravitas:

                   Mass #2 in E Minor-- Credo (excerpt)

                https://youtu.be/h4c8n1pPuC0?t=996
    
     This Inchon City performance points to the whole phenomenon of the celebrated reception Bruckner’s works have received in Japan (and South Korea) over the past 20 years; a topic too complex to adequately discuss here. An academic colleague in Japan who knows Bruckner and who knows something of the Japanese music scene commented: “I think it’s a Zen thing.” I’m no expert on Zen Buddhism, but found it interesting that when the Munich Philharmonic toured Japan under the baton of their renowned Music Director Sergiu Celibidache, the cd’s of Bruckner symphonies recorded in those Tokyo performances all featured cover photos of Zen rock gardens. Of course,  Celibidache himself practiced Zen Buddhism, so the cd cover images may have held both personal and cultural significance. 

Mass in E Minor—Complete


Bruckner once apparently commented that he felt his Te Deum was his greatest choral work. Certainly, the later Te Deum brought him great long-awaited recognition. It’s hugely successful Vienna premier, soon after the equally successful Eighth Symphony premier, brought him the patronage of Emperor Franz Joseph himself, to be described in more detail in a future post. But while the Te Deum is impressive, I think most modern conductors, singers, and listeners agree that  the Mass #3 in F Minor ranks as Bruckner’s finest choral work. Writing in the journal of the American Choral Directors’ Association, William Weinert comments: “Rooted in the traditions of Haydn's church music, Bruckner's last three masses are expansive and highly organized works that give rise to his mature symphonies. His Mass in F Minor, one of the last significant masses written in the symphonic tradition, stands at the final juncture between mass and symphony.”

Nearly all critics and reviewers agree that the Credo is the heart of this work. In selecting a YouTube version, the challenge is finding one excerpt that combines strong but not overly fast pacing in the opening series of choruses, but that also exploits the beauty of solo baritone writing Bruckner achieved in the “Et Incarnatus Est” section that follows. This performance by the  Stuttgart Bach Collegium and Stuttgart Gachinger Kantorei accomplishes the former as well as the latter

Mass #3 in F Minor – Credo
           https://youtu.be/FzydJ9uT7ZU



Given the stature of this Credo (one of the greatest settings of this text ever composed), some have overlooked other musical highlights of this Mass, with a standout example being the remarkable fugue that ends the Gloria, on the text “In Gloria Dei Patris;”-- certainly one of the finest fugues to be found in any sacred choral music of the romantic era:
Mass #3 in F Minor – Fugue: “In Gloria Dei Patris”

And no commentary on this work should fail to address the beauty and significance of the Benedictus. While not very long, it seems to anticipate his later more expansive treatment of the adagio form in Symphonies #6, #7, and #8.
Most discussions of Bruckner sooner or later mention Sergiu Celibidache, controversial conductor of the Munich Philharmonic. Undoubtedly brilliant and highly gifted on multiple levels (a true polyglot, his finely-honed articulation in French, German, and English interviews left many listeners unaware of his Romanian birth and upbringing).
His unyielding determination to push his orchestra into longer and more frequent rehearsals than normal did allow him to explore large-scale works with a probing attention to detail. In some performances, this elicits dimensions overlooked by other conductors. I think one interesting example emerges in the Benedictus of the F Minor Mass. The following video is an 11 minute excerpt from a longer French / German documentary film that followed Celibidache through his exhaustive phases of rehearsals and performance: first, a choir rehearsal with simple piano accompaniment; second, a concert hall rehearsal with solo singers, chorus, and full orchestra; third, an extended excerpt from the actual performance. The video is carefully edited so that the two brief rehearsal scenes flow into the final performance without pause or interruption.

If you were to listen first to a typical performance of this Benedictus, you would hear Bruckner suddenly interrupt his smoothly flowing harmonics for an unexpectedly austere string passage, typically at or around the 4min mark. While this passage lasts only 30 seconds or so, it immediately casts a pall over the mood. This passage was viewed by some early critics as a musical misstep; an example of Bruckner’s supposedly unrefined compositional taste, with one calling it “clumsy.” Consequently, early conductors sometimes tried to soften its impact, either by reducing volume, or by arbitrarily accelerating tempo to get past its seemingly awkward interlude.
But Celibidache hears something more, and I think important, in this 30 or 40 seconds of music. Instead of minimizing this passage (starting at the 5min 18sec mark in this video), he instead accentuates it by increasing its relative volume while subtly slowing its tempo and extending its length. Why focus on a brief transitory passage? Because, I would suggest, it points toward Bruckner’s inner struggle between faith and doubt. In the Chicago Chorale preview of the E Minor Mass linked earlier, the conductor mentions Bruckner’s music being “imbued with unquestioning faith.” Perhaps “unquestioning” would have been an accurate adjective to use at that earlier life stage of the E Minor Mass. But between that point and this subsequent F Minor Mass, Bruckner had suffered a nervous breakdown. Coming out of that trauma, the F Minor Mass would be his first major composition. Consequently, I feel in this brief but bleak string passage what I think Celibidache sensed: a first sign of surfacing skeptical questioning that I hear also for brief moments in the Kyrie and in the Agnus Dei. That same sense of spiritual searching and questioning would later surface into long and even bleaker string passages (along with the massively dissonant climactic ascents and descents) of the Eighth and Ninth symphonies.
Mass in F Minor – Benedictus – Rehearsals / part performance


Lastly, to my mind there is no disputing the finest YouTube video of the complete F Minor Mass: the early 2019 performance by the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Edo de Waart, to mark the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Vredenburg Great Hall of Music in Utrecht. It meets every challenge I noted above: superb tempo and clear articulation of the fugue concluding the Gloria; excellent dynamic balance between chorus and orchestra in the Credo; superb vocal quality for the baritone solo "Et Incarnatus Est;" and a contemporary reading of the Benedictus that makes no attempt to minimize the brief intrusion of  melancholic doubt
Mass in F Minor – Complete



Now looking back, the Mass #1 in D Minor  was a remarkably audacious setting of the Mass for its time period, in light of controversies within the church, when some clerics argued that composers of the day should properly exercise more restraint, to “keep the concert hall out of the Church.” Those disputes clearly did not dissuade Bruckner in composing this work. Why is this a key point? Because this first full-scale symphonic mass directly contradicts the standard cliche about the composer’s supposedly “humble, obsequious, and reticent” personality. Especially in the Gloria and Credo sections, this music is anything but humble, obsequious, and reticent. Instead, it practically seethes with a vibrant, virulent energy; not until his late-in-life Trosterin Musik and Te Deum would Bruckner compose choral works that further explored and extended the unusual soundfield we find in this D Minor Mass.

My personal favorite among YouTube versions of this work is a live church performance by the Philharmonischer Chor and the Saar Orchester des Staatlichen Konservatorium, under the baton of Leo Krämer. But before discussing that rather idiosyncratic and imperfect video, let me first recommend the more traditional (and technically superior) live performance video of the Credo as conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. This video presents the complete Mass, but the link below is cued to start at the 13min mark, a moment before the start of the Credo (which ends at the 25min 40sec mark):

          Mass #1 in D Minor -- Credo

         https://youtu.be/bnIDsCVIb_o?t=780


          While the fine Gardiner performance linked above is my favorite among concert hall performances, this next video / recording was made in the vast and opulent Church of St. Ignatius in Rome in 2017. St. Ignatius’s echoing heights and reverberating marble walls presented insuperable technical challenges for microphone placement and tuning. There are further problems: at least twice, a technician seems to bump or rattle equipment enclosures. Even worse, the video abruptly cuts off a few seconds before the Credo reaches its conclusion (inexcusably sloppy editing seems to have been at fault here). Still, for all the faults of this video recording (and there are many), I find this interpretation more captivating than alternatives on YouTube, because Conductor Leo Krämer allows the music to fully come alive; he never tries to tame the music’s adventurous exhortations of supernatural elements in the Credo’s narrative. Much like Gardiner,  Krämer allows this music to plunge into the depths when the liturgy text takes us there, while also allowing swift dynamic changes to suddenly soar to the heights when Bruckner’s interpretation requires. As is oft the case with Bruckner, the solo singers perform for relatively brief passages, but at impactful moments and to splendid effect. Of special note here, is the singing of the rising European opera star, soprano Rebekkah Reister.

Mass #1 in D Minor-- Credo


What reviewer Ralph Moore says with reference to the Credo of the later F Minor Mass applies equally here: “…Bruckner makes no compromise in his emphasis upon his elevation of the hieratic and mysterious aspects of Catholicism. Hence, we are rarely consoled by the reassurances such as temper the uncomfortable realities of death and grief in Brahms’ roughly contemporary Requiem….no other liturgical works save those by Berlioz create such majestic and awe-inspiring scenarios as, for example, the holy row which heralds Bruckner’s depiction of the Resurrection. The grandeur and urgency of his idiom here leave no room for the period finickiness of ‘transparent textures’; this is music which seeks to confront the Believer with the terror of the Last Judgement.”
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2019/Sep/Bruckner_mass_HDTT.htm


I think the sense of aural cacophony surrounding this St. Ignatius performance also suggests that Bruckner deliberately composed this work with an attentive ear for how it would resonate within a cathedral,  reconciling each musical passage with an anticipated overlay of echoing upper registers and undercurrents of lower-register reverberations. As a listener, I might have assumed echoes and reverberations to be distracting, but in this setting of the Mass, the opposite seems true. Once I permitted myself to think beyond the typical “studio sound” where every melodic line must be insulated (or isolated), the penumbra of re-echoing sounds in this recording imparted a vibrancy I’d not sensed before. I’m not going to even suggest a link for a full YouTube of this entire Mass, because I don’t believe any conductor has yet interpreted and recorded this Mass to its full potential; I suppose the live performance by John  Eliot Gardiner comes closest.

Along the same lines, I now want to do flashbacks to two works that formed the transitional period between the modest rural church masses mentioned at the outset, and the great festive masses numbered 1, 2, and 3 just discussed. These transitional works are the Requiem in D Minor (1849), and the Missa Solemnis (1852).

         The Requiem has long been the more-frequently performed of these two "bridge" compositions; sufficiently highly-regarded to be included in the NAXOS multi-CD set, “A History of the Requiem,” where it shares a CD (part III) with the Requiem by Duruflé. But until after this blog was first posted, I felt this work, like the Mass #1 in D Minor, had never been performed, interpreted, and recorded to its potential—at least in YouTube recordings. The NAXOS recording mentioned above sadly typified the rather pedestrian performances of the full work one usually hears.

Knowing Bruckner’s knack for composing thunderous, apocalyptic passages, as in the Aeterna Fac of the Te Deum, or the coda of the Ninth Symphony’s 1st movement, a casual listener might first come to this work expecting something like the "Dies Irae" of Verdi’s Requiem. But I feel Bruckner envisioned his Requiem being centered on a more introspective mood of mourning and remembrance, while still confronting emotional tensions and spiritual dimensions he found within our rituals surrounding death. In this respect, I find it interesting to compare and contrast the requiem settings by Bruckner (1849) and Schumann(1852). Composed only three years apart, they each have a very similar runtime of just over 30min, and both find a middle path of solemn contemplation of mortality without naïve sentimentality on the one hand, or hand-wringing histrionics at the other extreme. Just as an aside, I find it intriguing that both composers also forego Mozart's emphasis on two sections of the Sequentia (with Mozart achieving superb expressive effect in each); I'm referring to "Tuba mirum" and "Lacrimosa." Yet neither is given focus by these romantic age composers.The former seems surprising for Bruckner, given his penchant for brilliant brass perorations; the latter seems surprising for Schumann, given his talents for evoking elegiac moods.
          The key technical quality setting Bruckner's Requiem apart from both Mozart and Schumann arises from his intense study of Bach, evidenced by the superb fugue in the Offertorium (video #5 in the playlist). Mozart certainly deployed fugal writing to brilliant effect in his Requiem, but his fugues are firmly cast in the Classical idiom. Bruckner, by contrast, creates his own uniquely brilliant fusion of counterpoint as intricate as anything from the baroque period, with the more adventurous harmonics of the romantic age. His fugue in the Requiem's Offertorium on "Quam Olim" is nearly as masterful as the great fugue noted earlier that ends the Gloria of the F Minor Mass:

          Requiem (WAB 39)—Fugue: Offertorium. Quam Olim.

          https://youtu.be/37XBgxXEExM

          Bruckner also deploys solo singers in sequential variations that show influence of Bach, as revealed by the inventive beauty of the Agnus Dei. This strikes me as a point where Bruckner’s years of extensive formal study bear special fruit. This Agnus Dei is another 4 minute miniature, like many of the motets, even showing influence of antiphonal form. But while it wears a patina of antiquity, this work is also firmly situated in the romantic idiom, finding its way to a fitting climax in light, when the music seems itself to shine with the ecstatic utterances: “Lux! Lux Aeterna!” In this video, that climax is followed by a brief “Requiem aeternam” passage (1min.) that returns to the reflective, philosophical mood, and then concludes with another brief (1min.) but impressively definitive rendering of the “Cum sanctus.” I personally suspect it was this unique genius of Bruckner's in fusing elements from across different historical periods that gives his Requiem a more powerful cumulative stature that Schumann's. Schumann's Requiem appeals to me personally, but has never enjoyed much performance success or critical esteem. I suspect the reason is that Schumann's work seems entirely a creation within its particular time period, while Bruckner's Requiem takes on that aspect of so many of his greatest works: an aspect of "standing outside of normal time," to paraphrase one comment by Celibidache.

Requiem (WAB 39)—Agnus Dei – Requiem-Cum Sanctus


After this blog's first version was posted (literally within a week), a new recording was issued by RIAS Kammerchor of Berlin, that finally brought the Requiem's potential to better light. And I mean light in a literal sense, because this Requiem differs from stereotypical masses of mourning that seem suffused in darkness and despair. The RIAS performance is athletic, swiftly paced (for the most part), and seems suffused with light, which I think was Bruckner's original intent. But the music is not celebratory, nor does it present a façade of false happiness. It simply confronts the loss and grief attending death within a more philosophical and reflective context. Because RIAS issued each movement of the Requiem as a separate YouTube video, I've assembled a playlist of the 10 videos so the listener can hear them in order:


           Requiem (WAB 39)


          In spite of my sense that this interpretation of the Requiem presents a truer (and long overdue) insight into Bruckner's musical intentions, it is not perfect, and still falls a bit short of the performance in Budapest I'll discuss below. I feel it falls short of the Budapest performance in 3 respects: 1) the initial movement, Introitus, is paced a bit too slowly for the string introduction to set the stage with its strident dissonance. Bruckner generates dissonance here not by the proverbial pressing of two adjacent keys of the scale at exactly the same time, but by playing those adjacent notes in rapid and slightly overlapping succession. Any slowing of tempo thus relieves some of the emotional tension the string passages provide. 2) The Agnus Dei, by contrast, seems played by RIES Kammerchor a bit too hastily; I feel a touch of elegaic calmness is called for here, to let the lyrical beauty of the solo singing prevail. 3) Most importantly, throughout this performance, the lower register resonance normally provided by cellos seems oddly attenuated and minimized. In one sense, this contributes to the sense of this music being suffused by light and lightness. But this is still a Requiem, after all, and the lower-register sonority so effective in the Budapest performance simply doesn't resonate.
The parallels I sense between this Requiem and the Mass #1 extend beyond their shared D Minor key. Just as it seemed to take an unorthodox performance in the Church of St. Ignatius to uncover hidden expressive dimensions in the Mass #1, I first found a church performance of the Requiem that is also unorthodox, and that also invites us to consider this music’s unexplored depths. This is a performance in Budapest by the ELTE Béla Bartók Orchestra and Concertchoir. Let me now repeat that quote from Bartje Bartmans: “Bruckner's compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving harmonies.”
As indicated earlier, Bruckner begins this Requiem with what were meant to be strident dissonant passages in the strings, as noted by musicologist A. J. Howie as far back as 1981, when he described the “…extremely sharp, closely-spaced dissonant sounds…” (“Traditional and Novel Elements in Bruckner’s Sacred Music;” The Musical Quarterly. Oct. 1981).  Yet, conservative conductors have been so adept at softening or hushing that dissonance, their impact has largely been lost, and their emotive force driving the entire Requiem has been undermined. But this ELTE Béla Bartók ensemble and their conductor have no such discomfort—perhaps because of their familiarity with Bartok’s dissonant string music? In this performance, Bruckner’s radical dissonance is dramatically “out there” –emphasized from the very first notes. The choir then enters and weaves equally dramatic chorales over the dissonant “sawing” of the strings. Even the soloists add to the drama, with finely articulated phrasings. But it remains, nevertheless, (and somewhat paradoxically) a philosophical and reflective sort of drama, searching for meaning in the rituals surrounding death, and finding a unique dimension not found in Mozart, not found in Verdi. I’m not claiming that makes this work better, or even as good as, those great requiems by Mozart and Verdi. But this is a unique work, and I think potentially better than conventional wisdom currently assumes.

As good as this Budapest performance was, this video recording was made by an amateur with a portable device(!), and the result is technically flawed; the sound is very substandard, and in the weirdest parallel of all to the St. Ignatius performance of the Mass #1 Credo, this recording also ends before the Requiem is concluded (in the “Comments” section, the amateur remarks that the storage card in his device ran out of memory). Oddly, the one place where this recording outdoes the RIAS Kammerchor video in technical quality is heard in the passages sung by solo singers midway through the Dies Irae; the phrasings are beautifully articulated, and the recording quality seems at least adequate to the task. This link is cued to the 5min 20sec start point in the video where solo singers begin; this section with the soloists runs 4 minutes to the 9min 20sec point:

          Requiem Mass – Dies Irae--solo singers

         https://youtu.be/_Ebfzu-pCW4?t=320


          Until and unless some conductor with a quality orchestra, chorus, and venue for recording, somedays hears this video from Budapest, comprehends the distinctively different and dynamic aspects of Bruckner’s Requiem it reveals, and then works to surpass it, the RIAS Kammerchor performance I playlisted earlier remains the recording of choice, with the ELTE Béla Bartók Orchestra and Concertchoir performance being the interpretation of my preference. For those who can tolerate its flaws, here is the complete Budapest performance video:
Requiem Mass – Complete (minus the final Agnus Dei—Cum Sanctus)
https://youtu.be/_Ebfzu-pCW4

      A last thought about dissonance is worth mentioning here: the strident sawing of strings in the Requiem's early passages was certainly not unique in Bruckner's compositional history. Years after the Requiem, Bruckner created a very similar effect in his so-called Symphony #0. Here, in a performance by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, the passage begins a bit beyond the 12min point into the video; the effect here is to generate the tension-building of Bruckner's climactic technique in a way that builds into the coda of the symphony's first movement. (the link below is cued to start the video at the inception of the dissonant passage in question, instead of the symphony's beginning). The dissonant sawing weaves between foreground and background and then to foreground again,  with Bruckner overlaying threads of contrasting harmonics from brass and woodwinds, just as in the Requiem where the choir provides the weaving effect. The dissonance  is not of extended length, again as in the Requiem, lasting just over a minute until the 13min 30sec point. But pronounced duration is not needed here precisely because the dissonance is so immediately effective in its intended effect. 
Symphony #0 -- 1st movement coda interlude

          https://youtu.be/Fj_VwS7jGz4?t=732

    I'll close with comments about the second major transitional work, the Missa Solemnis in B-flat Minor. Here is a case where I feel Bruckner's remarkable fusion of elements from the range of musical traditions -- plainchant, Palestrina, baroque, classical, romantic-- fell short of mastery. The music never quite entirely fails, yet almost never quite entirely fulfills its promise, leaving the work as a whole oddly uneven, with impressive and unimpressive passages sometimes following upon one another in quick succession. The "Kyrie," in and of itself, seems to me its one section of sustained success, and in its episodes of emphatic descending choral articulations even sounds unexpectedly modernistic:
Missa Solemnis-- Kyrie 


         Earlier I summarized my feeling about the Missa Solemnis by saying: "Here is a case where I feel Bruckner's remarkable fusion of elements from the range of musical traditions -- plainchant, Palestrina, baroque, classical, romantic-- fell short of mastery." Two further thoughts: 1) given the technical challenges of this unlikely stylistic fusion, the remarkable thing is not that Bruckner ever fell short of full success, but that he ever succeeded at all--and indeed, then often went beyond success to musical mastery. 2) Given the uneven performance history of the Requiem, I think we have to conclude that much of Bruckner's early choral sacred music remains vulnerable to unsatisfactory performances based on expressive misinterpretations and misjudged choral / instrumental dynamics. So I feel I must leave the door open a crack for some future performance of the Missa Solemnis to do what RIAS Kammerchor did with the Requiem: to force us to reconsider this work by discovering that it has previously unrealized expressive dimensions.