There are oddballs among the ranks of the so-called great composers, and then there’s Anton Bruckner. Speaking about him earlier this year, the conductor Simon Rattle said: “He was an otherworldly person, even to the standards of composers… He seemed to have been a strange and eccentric person.” He adds that he was a composer with “an extraordinary vision and spirituality” and that his best-known symphony, the Seventh, is “absolutely one of the glories of the whole repertoire”.
It’s always been hard to weigh Bruckner the man against the scale and certitude of his music. He was a neurotic, bumbling sort of a character, prone to blurting out the first thing that would come into his mind and dropping to his knees at the sound of church bells (such was his devotion to God). He did the same in front of his hero Richard Wagner once, kissing his hand and saying, “Oh, Master, I worship you!” In The Lives of the Great Composers, Harold C. Schonberg writes: “Bruckner was a simple man, incredibly rustic and naïve. He had a shaven head and a county dialect; he wore homespun and ill-fitting clothes and moved in constant awe of those great city people who knew so much about everything than he did. A child of nature, he was not well read; was completely unsophisticated.”
That was one side of him. He was also macabre. Death fascinated him; as did corpses. When the remains of Beethoven and Schubert were moved to Vienna Central Cemetery, he was reported to have “fingered and kissed” their skulls. He had his dead mother photographed and kept the picture in his classroom, no matter that he taught children. He died a virgin, and was seemingly only interested in teenage girls. He kept lists of their names in his diaries, and almost married one later in life. But she wouldn’t convert to Catholicism. He was motivated by a fear of committing sin, biographers believe, and traumatised by being surrounded by death as a child. He lost his father to tuberculosis when he was 13; seven of his siblings died as infants.
He’s a composer who tests our abilities to separate the art from the artist. Some don’t bother. In his book The Story of Music, Howard Goodall mentions Bruckner only briefly, describing his nine symphonies as “numbingly long” and speculating that his obsession with Wagner’s music dramas may have been partly driven by “a voyeuristic attachment to the sexual content in them”. To others, far beyond classical music, Bruckner is an unending source of deep intrigue. Ken Russell made a short film about him in 1990, The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner, focussing on his fixation with counting – numeromania, as it was called then – after a nervous breakdown in 1867. Five years later, another film was made about his breakdown, Jan Schmidt-Garre’s Bruckner’s Decision.
Bruckner was born 200 years ago on September 4 in the village of Ansfelden, Austria (now a suburb of Linz). He was a teacher’s son and taught music himself until his late-30s, while also mastering organ playing. He committed to composing after an intense period of studying orthodox counterpoint and harmony in Vienna. His symphonies have a curious hue – they’re both radical and traditional; and impossible to place in the context of what was happening elsewhere in music at the time. The trick is to not try. Writing in the Grove music dictionary, musicologist Deryck Cooke says: “Despite its general debt to Beethoven and Wagner, the ‘Bruckner Symphony’ is a unique conception, not only because of the individuality of its spirit and its materials, but even more because of the absolute originality of its formal processes.”
On December 16, 1877, Bruckner conducted the premiere of his first mature symphony, his Third (as it existed then – he was notorious was tinkering with his own works). It was a disaster. Huge swathes of the Viennese audience walked out, the orchestra fled, but two significant people were enraptured – a 17-year-old Gustav Mahler, whom Bruckner profoundly influenced, and a local music publisher. When the publisher offered to print the score at his own expense, Bruckner, was reported to have responded in tears: “Let me go. The people don’t want to know anything about me.”
The reviews were damning. The most powerful critic in Vienna, Eduard Hanslick, called it “a vision of Beethoven’s Ninth becoming friendly with Wagner’s Valkyries and finishing up trampled under their hooves.” Hanslick, originally supportive of Bruckner’s music, became his bête noire, routinely trashing his symphonies. He called his Seventh (1884) “so unnatural, pretentious, morbid, and pernicious” despite it offering Bruckner acceptance – fame, even – after years of struggle and mockery. By the time his Eighth was premiered in 1892, Bruckner was being spoken about as the future of music. But not by Hanslick. He dismissed the work’s “nightmarish hangover style”.
Hanslick fed Bruckner’s lifelong persecution complex, but the critic had skin in the game of a culture war that Bruckner shouldn’t have been included in. In what’s now been dubbed the “War of the Romantics”, Hanslick fervently supported composers from the school of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms – writers of “program” music, or music with an extramusical narrative. He loathed composers of more-progressive “absolute” music; music freed of narrative constraints. Liszt and Wagner were placed in the latter camp, along with Bruckner: mostly because of his friendship with Wagner. The divide, spurious as it was, captured the public imagination. In Vienna, Alex Ross writes in Listen to This, “everyone had to answer the question, ‘Brahmsianer oder Wagnerianer?’”
Few sounds are as electrifying in the concert hall as hearing the thunderous ‘Scherzo’ from Bruckner’s final, unfinished Symphony No. 9. Few sights are as electrifying as witnessing the vast, slashing ranks of string players bringing it to life. Music of such conviction and power was attractive to the Nazis. Hitler saw it as epitomising the German volk, further placing Bruckner’s music in a context it did not deserve. A famous photograph from 1937 captures Hitler placing a wreath at a bust of Bruckner in the Walhalla temple in Bavaria. During World War II, he planned to turn Bruckner’s resting place, the monastery of St. Florian in Linz, into a shrine of sorts and repository of Bruckner’s original manuscripts.
It’s a miracle Bruckner’s music managed to survive such a close association with the Third Reich. However, by the 1960s, it began to be spoken about as capturing the anxieties of the age, much like Mahler’s music did. Since then, it’s slipped in and out of fashion. There’s no convincing many, who will loathe Bruckner in perpetuity, but it always seems to return. Three live recordings of three symphonies by the London Symphony Orchestra from last year found a new potency in the old warhorses that somehow expresses the complexities and fears of our age. The conductor was Simon Rattle, Bruckner’s highest-profile supporter of recent times. The key Prom left in what’s already been a dynamite season is Rattle conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 on September 5 – 200 years and a day after the birth of music’s strangest man.
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