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