Dhe short, lively Magnificat (WAB 24), which was played at the beginning of the lecture, was probably first heard in St. Florian on Assumption Day in 1852. Anton Bruckner, schoolteacher in the market town's school and provisional organist in the Augustinian canons' monastery there, dedicated it to the Regens chori Ignaz Traumihler, who had a very "cäcilian" taste, i.e. orientated towards the ascetic church music reform movement of Cäcilianism, but must nevertheless have greatly appreciated the work, as the repeated performances testify.
I.
Bruckner's personal situation at the time stands in marked contrast to the joyful attitude of the composition. The work was written at a time of great human and artistic dissatisfaction, as Bruckner's talent forced him out of a sphere of activity that had become too narrow. In a letter to the Viennese court conductor Ignaz Aßmayr, he complained about the lack of support from those responsible at the monastery, a circumstance that did not at all correspond to the objective situation. But subjectively, Bruckner was in "ferment", as it were, and this made him unhappy, dissatisfied and ungrateful towards the monastery from which he had received so much support: After the early death of his father in 1837, Provost Michael Arneth had taken him in as a choirboy, even though he was already on the cusp of breaking his voice. From 1841, he was allowed to train as a school teacher, and after two posts as a "school assistant" (trainee) in two small villages belonging to the monastery (Windhaag and Kronstorf), he was allowed to return to St Florian as a school assistant, where he worked as a school teacher from 1845 to 1855, and from 1850 also as a provisional monastery organist. "Provisional" and not "definitive" because two years after the revolution of 1848, the responsibilities of school teachers had not yet been clarified.
The Augustinian monastery of St. Florian in Upper Austria was a place of the world (as the title of an extremely readable book by Friedrich Buchmayr suggests), a centre of scholarship and enjoyment of the arts, and for Bruckner an invaluable source of inspiration, enrichment, broadening of horizons and the opportunity for musical studies, even if he did not perceive it as such in his current situation at the time.
His curriculum was a gradual career: After his time in St Florian, he worked as cathedral and parish organist in Linz from 1855 to 1868, making him one of the city's leading cultural figures. During these years, he, who was already a respectable composer in the succession of the late Classical and early Romantic periods (in addition to the Magnificat, he had already written a Requiem and a Missa solemnis), had undergone fundamental, extremely strict and ascetic training in harmony, counterpoint, theory of form, instrumentation and composition with the greatest music theory authority of his time, Simon Sechter in Vienna and then with the accomplished theatre conductor Otto Kitzler in Linz. The experience of Richard Wagner's "modern" music and his Tannhäuser, which he studied with Kitzler, was a true initiation experience for him and the breakthrough to his own creativity and personal style.
From 1868, Bruckner lived in Vienna as a professor of harmony, counterpoint and organ at the conservatory of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, as imperial and royal court organist and later as a lecturer at the university. Court organist and later also as a lecturer at the university. However, he saw his true vocation in composition, not in the composition of church music, but in the composition of symphonies, and it was precisely this that he wanted to be recorded in the decree appointing him an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1891, as this, according to Bruckner, was his true "life's vocation".
A few years earlier, on 12 January 1885, Johannes Brahms, also living in Vienna and stylised as Bruckner's antipode in the aesthetic party dispute between "conservatives" and "moderns", had written to his friend Elisabet von Herzogenberg, who urgently expected a judgement on the symphonic composer Bruckner from him: "Everything has its limits. Bruckner lies beyond, you can't talk back and forth about his things, you can't talk about him. Not about the man either. He is a poor, crazy person who has the priests of St Florian on his conscience. I don't know if you have any idea what it means to have spent your youth with the priests? I could tell you about that and about Bruckner. Oh, I shouldn't talk to you about such ugly things."
Apart from the fact that this judgement is full of human contempt, it is also, as I have tried to show, completely unjustified in the case of St. Florian's Abbey. But some Viennese music critics struck a similar note to Brahms, and so the question arises: how did Bruckner's contemporaries actually perceive his practised Catholic Christianity? What effect did he have, what effect did it have on the outside observer?
II.
The Viennese church historian Rupert Klieber describes the years 1840 to 1870, the period in which Bruckner moved from Linz to Vienna, as a clear low point in church life in Vienna. The churches were almost empty, the practitioners were almost exclusively women, and only around 5 % of the men publicly professed their faith in the church. A fair amount of anti-clericalism was even considered good form in large parts of the middle and upper middle classes, in teaching circles and among workers. This trend was only halted by the Christian social movement.
This remained the case until 1896, the year of Bruckner's death, when Karl Lueger was elected mayor of Vienna. From then on, anti-clericalism was suddenly no longer part of good manners, but on the contrary, a certain ecclesiasticism, which, however, remained quite diffuse among many Catholics personally. Against this background, the fact that Bruckner's practised Catholicism appeared to many of his Viennese contemporaries to be an outlandish quirk is somewhat easier to understand.
The situation in Linz had previously been quite different: In the first reviews of performances of Bruckner's works, not a single mention is made of his personal piety - it had no place here and no one seems to have noticed it as peculiar or worthy of special mention.
In stark contrast to this was the situation in the Viennese period, i.e. the years 1868 to 1896, in this milieu of cercles and salons, with the bourgeoisie quite distant from the faith, in which the latest feuilleton (and the latest gossip), for example in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, in which the Brahms friend and feared music critic Max Kalbeck (1850-1921) sharpened his sharp pen, was enjoyed with coffee in the morning. At the end of the 1980s, Kalbeck's attacks on Bruckner became increasingly aggressive. Even among journalists at the time, who were extremely ruthless with their victims, Kalbeck's outbursts represented a peak. In his Bruckner reviews, he became increasingly obsessed with two central themes: The first of these, Bruckner's supposed dependence on Wagner, had a perfectly legitimate place in music criticism. The second, however, focussed on something personal, something very valuable and existential for Bruckner, namely his Catholic Christianity.
This point appealed to Kalbeck about Bruckner to such an extent that allusions to it or typical vocabulary could be found in almost every review. For him, Bruckner was the "pious hermit" who wrote a "scholarly work, perhaps on the defence of the celibacy" (Montags-Revue, 21 December 1891), he is the "holy Anton", the "Ansfelden Messiah" (Montags-Revue, 19 December 1892). Indeed, Bruckner's piety seemed almost like a mental defect, as Kalbeck hoped to amuse his readers even after Bruckner's death in the feature section of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt on 3 February 1900: "Anton Bruckner's E flat major Symphony (the 'Romantic') celebrated a brilliant festival of rebirth in the sixth Philharmonic Concert under Mahler's direction. For the first time, the entire large audience was captivated by the magic circles of the wondrous magician, who was so strong in faith and so weak in thought."
To most of Bruckner's contemporaries, it simply seemed incompatible with the image of an artist that he openly professed his allegiance to the church and tried to observe its rules, such as regular confession, regular church attendance and fasting. Bruckner's contemporaries only rarely knew that he devoted long periods of time to prayer every day. What's more, Bruckner's social non-conformity contributed to the public's perception of him as an eccentric.
Despite his apparent communicativeness and sociability, Bruckner was basically a very secretive person. He had that in common with Johannes Brahms. But what Brahms, who came from a completely different urban milieu and who was able to lead a free and prosperous life thanks to his royalty income, who felt perfectly at home on the dangerously smooth parquet floor of Viennese society, indeed for whom every coarseness and every sarcasm was forgiven as legitimate personal mimicry, was interpreted as a mental limitation, a defect, at best a quirk, in Bruckner, who had spent his life in the yoke of a breadwinning profession.
This was undoubtedly compounded by Bruckner's great verbal awkwardness, which in his letters was only able to conceal itself in a makeshift manner behind a pre-Marchant formulaic language that he retained throughout his life. Only in the rarest of cases do Bruckner's letters provide an insight into his personal inner life. From about the time of his great psychological crisis in the summer of 1867 onwards, what seemed worth communicating concerned almost exclusively his work, not his person.
This makes his only truly personal records all the more important: his notes in his pocket notebooks, which he kept exclusively for himself. Here, too, we should not expect an eloquent diary; here, too, Bruckner remains shy and reticent, and his shyness increases in proportion to the extent to which he is affected. However, his personal diaries are an invaluable source of intimate information, especially for the question of Bruckner's religiousness. They were published by the author in 2001 under the title Verborgene Persönlichkeit. Anton Bruckner in his private notes.
A total of 22 note calendars and several fragments of calendars have survived. Before Bruckner moved from his flat in Heßgasse to the court flat in the Kustodenstöckl of the Belvedere on 4 July 1895, which had been granted to him by the Emperor, he subjected "the piles of notes stacked high" to a rigorous sifting with the help of his pupil and secretary Anton Meißner, "whereby much had to be consigned to the flames on the master's orders", as Bruckner's biographers August Göllerich and Max Auer wrote. Surprisingly, however, these 22 calendars escaped destruction, probably because they contained countless important addresses. We now have notes from the years 1860, 1872 and 1876 to 1896. The "prayer notes" take up a lot of space in them.
Bruckner was in the habit of giving a daily account of his prayer life. He was presumably encouraged to make a daily "Révision de vie" by his Jesuit confessors, Fr Karl Schneeweiß SJ (in Linz) and Fr Karl Graff SJ (in Vienna). Bruckner tried to conceal these notes from the public - and even from his students, who had access to his flat - until his death by not using the current calendar for his prayer entries, but instead writing them on the blank pages of an older calendar. That he was completely successful in this endeavour is evident not least from the fact that not a single anecdote or memoir mentions this habit of his, in contrast to his uninhibited and, in the opinion of liberal Vienna, very often inappropriate praying in public. When looking at Bruckner's prayer records, one must therefore be aware of touching his innermost being. The number of prayers performed is noted with dashes under the respective abbreviations. This adds up to a daily prayer time of up to two hours.
III.
These times of prayer were undoubtedly a source of strength and support for Bruckner, as his lifetime was also a time of great intellectual and spiritual upheaval. As a contemporary of Friedrich Nietzsche, the pressing ideological questions did not pass him by without a trace. A note, which I would like to go into in more detail here, sheds a moving light on what deeply troubled the already terminally ill Bruckner, who was writing his unfinished Ninth at the time.
The entire Ninth Symphony is characterised by gloom. Without being too quick to make the connection between the biography of the terminally ill man struggling to survive and the music he writes: Here, the existential shock has become sound. The dark D minor soundscape of the first movement, entitled "Feierlich, Misterioso", the fantastic nocturnal image of the Scherzo with its almost demonic serenity (which, as in the Eighth, also comes second here) is followed by an Adagio, before which even scholars endeavouring to be sober confess: "The Adagio is a monstrosity." Bruckner deviates strikingly from "his" Adagio form here: "The climax does not lead to a breakthrough into the light, the climax leads to the final appearance of the main theme, but now in double and triple fortissimo, culminating in an unheard-of tredecim chord of seven notes, a screaming dissonance, a chord of terror, a catastrophe, after which the music breaks off in a general pause. The calm ending only turns peacefully to a major key at the very end, as the horror of having looked into an abyss continues to shake in the flickering and flickering of notes that are out of key until shortly before the end," writes Felix Diergarten in his recently published book.
This "abyss" was, we can assume, probably also the horror of the ever-closer certainty of his own finiteness, of approaching death. Or could he, Bruckner, hope to be caught in the end, to be safe at last? This question certainly preoccupied him in his final years. In one of his notebooks, he had written down a quote from the famous anatomist Josef Hyrtl (1810-1894), which came from his inauguration speech as Rector of the University of Vienna in 1864 and was probably printed in a newspaper on the occasion of his death in 1894. This quote represents one of the most urgent, if not the most urgent philosophical-psychological-anthropological fundamental question from the 19th century to the present day.
In other words: Is our person, the core of our person, which we call the "soul", merely the result of organic processes in our brain, and do we consequently expire at death? Do we only have nothingness in front of us? Or is there a soul that is independent of organic processes and outlasts our earthly existence?
Hyrtl gave the speech at the beginning of the 1864/65 academic year. As he increasingly emphasised the connection (and not the opposition!) between faith and science, he had lost the sympathy of liberal, "enlightened" Vienna and caused an enormous stir in Vienna's academic circles. After his death in 1894, a newspaper will probably have printed this quote in an obituary, and Bruckner had written it down, had taken up this anxious question. The fact that he, a completely non-literary person, more than awkward in his linguistic expression, but intelligent and definitely interested in scientific problems, wrote down the central philosophical question of the late 19th century in Hyrtl's formulation, places him right in the middle of the disputes and challenges of his time.
With this "look into the abyss", Bruckner continued to write the finale of the Ninth. Would he have managed the breakthrough to apotheosis in the finale after the shocks of the Adagio, as he had intended? After all, around 600 bars of the original particell sketch and 172 fully orchestrated bars of the finale had already been written down.
Bruckner's aforementioned habit of noting down his prayers has been the subject of several studies, some of which explain it as a relic of a baroque pious exercise, others as a result of the "performance-related" spirituality of the 19th century, and finally as a result of the scrupulosity that Bruckner suffered from his severe mental crisis (which had manifested itself in compulsive control, among other things) in 1867. It remains to be seen whether the desire to record the prayers he performed actually stemmed from a fear for his own salvation. However, Bruckner never referred to his prayers when the conversation centred on his future fate. Rather, he saw the fulfilment of his profession as a composer as his actual mission in life and his vocation in a religious sense. For Bruckner, the work, created with the utmost sense of artistic responsibility, was a service to God as a whole, because it represented the realisation of the talent entrusted to him. This perspective of ultimate responsibility also explains much of the long and arduous path of training, of slow creation, of discarding, recreating, revising and checking what had already been created.
The last calendar, the professors' and teachers' calendar for the 1894/95 school year, shows the shaky handwriting of a seriously ill old man. Bruckner collects his scores, packs them in view of the forthcoming move to the court flat in the Belvedere, makes a list of his valuables - doctor's ring, watch chain, gold box, diamond pin - and notes the address of his doctor and his future executor. The prayer entries are initially of varying clarity, agonising witnesses to his unstable mental state, and become increasingly confused. Bruckner struggles to orientate himself in time; the date, the prayer entry and the noteheads are placed in one place and are merely ciphers for an increasing distance from temporal existence.
Short-term improvements alternate with renewed, ever deeper falls. In the last days of his life, the writing becomes somewhat clearer again. Bruckner entered his prayers on two different pages of the calendar until 10 October, the day before his death.
IV.
Bruckner wanted to end the finale of his Ninth Symphony with a special chorale, "with a song of praise and glory to the dear God, to whom I owe so much", as he himself said. As this report comes from the physician Dr Heller, who writes with great sobriety in his letters to his wife about Bruckner's physical and mental decline, we cannot deny that his memories are highly authentic.
But how should this chorale sound? All those who have attempted to bring the final fragment of the Ninth into a performable version have struggled greatly over its form and come to different conclusions. There is agreement that this ending should have conveyed "a formative and overwhelming impression of the upswing to the laudatio" and that it would probably have been a non-confundar motif, according to John A. Phillips in his essay Neue Erkenntnisse zum Finale der Neunten Symphonie Anton Bruckners (Bruckner-Jahrbuch 1989/90, Linz 1992). Some time earlier, Bruckner had discussed the question of the finale with friends, and Rudolf Weinwurm had suggested the old hymn Christ ist erstanden to him.
Franz Schneiderhan, the former chairman of the Vienna Männergesangverein, agrees: "Anton Bruckner was in the Musikvereinssaal at a rehearsal of one of his works, which the Männergesangverein was performing. At the end of the rehearsal, I accompanied the master, who expressed the wish to have a cup of coffee. We took a seat at one of the round tables on the Ringstrasse in front of Café Kremser. In the course of the conversation I also asked about his future plans. He replied that he was working on the finale of the Ninth Symphony, picked up a pencil, drew musical lines on the marble top of the small round table and said: 'This is the theme I want to use for the finale' and wrote down the old church tune that used to be sung by the priest in Vienna and elsewhere after he had unveiled the Blessed Sacrament at the resurrection ceremony on Holy Saturday: 'The Saviour is risen'."
This song, which Bruckner quoted as an Easter hymn, can also be found in the last years of Bruckner's life in his notes on prayers during the Easter period. However, it is nothing other than the motif of the Non confundar, as the last of the two verses in the second version by Michael Denis and Adolph Hasse reads: "My faith must not waver, / O comforting thought! I will go to my grave through his resurrection / like him. Hallelujah!"
And would Bruckner really have dedicated the symphony, which was to end apotheotically with this chorale, to "Dem lieben Gott", as he had so often said in his final years? Or would gloom have prevailed? Opinions on this are very divided among experts. Since I published all the pocket diary entries in 2001 (see above), this quotation by Hyrtl has developed its own history and momentum. Whereas until then the image of a Bruckner unshakeably at peace in his faith, who at best was conceded a few relics from his neurosis, had dominated biographies (provided he was not stylised as a trivial and stupid musician of God, as happened in a play in 1924), for some authors he now became a shaken doubter, who in his last music could only formulate the horror of nothingness, the horror of destruction.
Klaus-Heinrich Kohrs, for example, in his very readable and profound book Anton Bruckner. Angst vor der Unermeßlichkeit is of the opinion that "a dedication to the 'dear God' at the level of disturbance realised here would have been blasphemy". And in his essay ... if he accepts it". Did Bruckner dedicate his 9th Symphony to the 'dear God'? In the Bruckner Yearbook 2018-2020, the same author states: "The great crisis of the Adagio radically changed the view. While the idea of a dedication was at the beginning of the work on the Ninth Symphony [...], the work de facto moved further and further away from it during the compositional process. An idea of the afterlife, however it could be grasped, turned more and more into a thought of fear. Views into the immeasurable turned into catastrophe and with it into annihilation. [...]"
Bruckner does not make it easy for us to try to understand his spiritual life. What sources could help us here? Philology? A sober examination of the musical text? The fact is that the musical text of the Ninth has no dedication to the "Dear God". But how could it? After all, the symphony was not yet complete, and Bruckner only explicitly gave dedications after completing a work.
Does the biography help? Here we already have more sources: Witnesses such as Dr Richard Heller, Bruckner's attending physician, the Augustinian canon Josef Kluger from Klosterneuburg and several friends such as Carl Almeroth, Adalbert von Goldschmidt and Amalie Klose report that Bruckner continued to adhere to his dedication plan for the symphony until the very end.
However, Bruckner also stuck to his prayers, which he entered in his diary every evening without anyone but himself knowing about them. As it turns out, these prayers were not merely routine. For in the last days of his life, a new sigil was added to the abbreviations we are familiar with: a triple capital "D", "D D D", once even arranged in a triangle. The abbreviation for "Deus, Deus, Deus"? The sigil for the Trinity? We do not know. Silent witnesses to Bruckner's intense prayer life until the end. Disturbance, even a cry for help, can also be an expression of a relationship, perhaps it is particularly intense.
Bruckner thus leaves us with many questions which, surprising as it may sound, still lead to very conflicting views in musicology today. The "quotations" in Bruckner's symphonies, the incorporation of some phrases from his own or other composers' works - here above all from his own church music or Richard Wagner's stage works - are also part of this problem area. While some musicologists attempt to semantically decipher the quotations (as the revered doyen of musicology, Constantin Floros, masterfully did with Bruckner, but also with Alban Berg, for example), others, such as the renowned Wagner scholar Egon Voss, believe that these phrases lose their meaning when transferred to a different context, to the symphonic repertoire, and that their "quotation character" is, according to Voss, "nothing more than a legend, a myth".
So each of us will probably form our own "Bruckner picture". However, we leave the last word in the performance to Anton Bruckner again, to him and his last motet for liturgical use, which he composed 40 years after the Magnificat played at the beginning, for Good Friday in St Florian: the Vexilla regis (WAB 51) on a text by Venantius Fortunatus (6th century), in which the cross is praised as the only hope: "O crux ave, spes unica".
