September 4, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Austrian Composer
Anton Bruckner –What Does He Say to Us in 2018?
Friends,
Something
very different today from the usual themes of my regular commentaries…but let
me suggest that the subject is profoundly relevant to us living in 2018.
Today is
the 194th anniversary of the birth of the great Austrian composer and organist
Anton Bruckner (September 4, 1824 - October 11, 1896) who was born in
Ansfelden in Upper Austria. His father was the local schoolmaster. At an early
age he received extensive training in the organ, choral music, and violin—and
he excelled brilliantly in those endeavors. For much of his early education he was
a student in the famous Augustinian monastery of St. Florian, where the young
Bruckner developed an extraordinary interest in and familiarity with the great
Baroque and Medieval musical heritage created and cultivated by the Catholic
Church. His own firm orthodox faith, very simple but extremely profound, grew
as well…and would be the incredibly rich and vibrant foundation for his amazing
later work as a composer, his, as he called it, “giving back to God in music
what he had received from Him through grace.”
Recognized
for his unique talent Bruckner later removed to Vienna, where he eventually
became professor of music theory in the internationally-famed Vienna
Conservatory and later Vienna University. And it was there over a thirty year
period that he made monumental contributions not just to the classical musical
tradition of Europe, but to the corpus of Western and Christian culture.
If that
were the summation of his position in musical history and European culture,
certainly it would be quite noteworthy. But Bruckner occupies, in our modern age,
another role; he represents in a way a veritable “sign of contradiction”
against the cultural, historical, and religious tide that has engulfed Western
and Christian society since his death in 1896.
And he
does this uniquely through his music—his great choral music, his masses, and,
above all, his nine symphonies, which are, as some writers have rightly
suggested, “great orchestral moments of prayer,” immense architectural
constructs musically that point Heavenward. But Bruckner’s music-making is not,
certainly at first hearing, easy on the ear, combining, as it were, the
intricacies of the Baroque organ and the sensibilities of a man steeped in the
harmonies and chants of the Church, and yet fully cognizant of and familiar
with the great orchestral possibilities of the late Romantic period.
I recall
distinctly as a young high school freshman the first time I heard any Bruckner.
It seemed like, aurally, one giant over-large mass of orchestral playing, every
instrument performing at the same time, theme layered over theme—but missing
those soothing, memorable and hummable “tunes” that you could hear in, say,
Tchaikovsky, Chopin, or Johann Strauss, Jr.
Yet, even so, despite my initial reaction, there was something special
there—a kind of irresistible and overpowering movement, an immense and
encompassing ambience that pulled you in and eventually surrounded you, and
finally overwhelmed and convinced you. And I recall in particular, after coming
home from school one day and listening to the end of Bruckner’s very long
eighth symphony—perhaps his most difficult to bring off successfully—I was left
perspiring, emotionally drained, but also, in a way, deeply and spiritually
affected. I wanted to pray.
As I
listened over the years to more Bruckner and read about him and his life, and
his conscious effort to utilize his music as a way to serve and honor God and
God’s creation, and accomplish this task as very few masters either before or
after have, an understanding of his significance in our culture and what it can
mean for us today also grew.
Bruckner
composed at the end of the Age of Christendom, at the end of 1,500 years of
Christian and European culture. He is often grouped with another great end-of-the-19th
century composer, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). But while both men were musical
geniuses who employed all the many achievements, techniques, and accumulated
wealth of musical knowledge in their respective compositions—both wrote lengthy
symphonic works and composed numerous choral and vocal selections—Mahler looks
resolutely forward musically to the uncertainties, to the angst, to the
disjointedness, and to the collapse of
Western culture and its civility and orthodoxy in the 20th
century, while Bruckner, incorporating that same rich artistic tradition and heritage,
resolutely looks backward to what has gone before and offers in sound an
incredibly unique defense of it and its orthodoxies.
For him,
despite the currents in the arts and culture that seemed unstoppable at the end
of his life, the Great Tradition yet offered real and inexhaustible sustenance
in the form in which it was received. His role, he believed, was to take those
older forms and reveal their continuing inspiration to a society, to a Europe,
that, as Sir Simon Rattle has described it, “was sitting on a volcano,” with
revolutionary ferment politically, the rise of radical ideologies, amazing
advances in science, and the questioning of all previous certitudes in faith.
The late
German-Austrian historian, Brigitte Hamann, in her superb volume of history, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship
(1999) and in studies of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, has recounted the
swirling intellectual turmoil in Europe late in the 19th and early
20th centuries, with the advent politically of Communism and Fascism, the
birth of Freudian theory, the burgeoning
influence of “modernism” in the arts, the radical effects of World War
I, and the continuing liberal belief in the essential perfectibility of Man.
As a
period of revolutionary change in our history, that time in some ways parallels
our own. For we see around us the results of eighty years of a Marxist “long
march” through our institutions and our culture, profoundly affecting our
educational system, our arts, our entertainment, our news media, and our
politics. And, as well, the rise of a new nationalism, the emergence of worldwide
Islam, and the triumph of electronic technology affecting every sphere of our
lives. As such it is reminiscent of the intellectual and cultural breakdown and turbulence that characterized the end of the 19th century.
Bruckner
now, as then, is a “sign of contradiction,” an overpowering, difficult-at-times
to fully absorb, reminder of the still-unexhausted wealth and richness of the
older Western Christian (and European) heritage. He stands, in a way impressionistically,
athwart the seemingly irresistible modern “Idea of Progress,” the “movement of
history,” so cultivated and celebrated today, and in opposition to the
gangrenous and poisonous decay of Christianity, to the ravages of cultural
decline and the triumph of cultural Marxism, which would sever the ties uniting
us to our past and to memory.
In his
life Anton Bruckner had no idea or realization that he might ever symbolize or
represent such a contradiction to the age; indeed, a man of simple and direct
faith, his objective was just to glorify his Lord through the magnificent
talent he had received. And this he did abundantly.
Gustav
Mahler, who greatly admired Bruckner, once said of him that he was “half
simpleton, half god.” Bruckner, himself,
described his role this way:
“They want me to write differently. Certainly I
could, but I must not. God has chosen me from thousands and given me, of all
people, this talent. It is to Him that I must give account. How then would I
stand there before Almighty God, if I followed the others and not Him?”
In so
doing he was, actually, one of the last great Christian crusaders in the arts,
certainly in music, to engage the enemies of our civilization. Our culture is
dying for the lack of such artists, such giants.
I want to
offer here a brief musical representative selection from Bruckner, but
excerpting anything from his works is difficult: everything he wrote generally
is very lengthy and thus, hard to encapsulate in a short few minutes. But I did
find a short YouTube item which, I think, will offer an idea, a kind of musical
sampling of Bruckner that may illustrate what I mean.
It comes
from his Fifth Symphony, which is arguably his most spiritual symphony and has
come to be my favorite of his nine. Although the late conductors Wilhelm
Furtwangler, Eugen Jochum, and Carl Schuricht have given us magisterial
performances of the Fifth—unmatched in my view, there is a short video
highlighting a performance of the Staatskapelle Berlin under Daniel
Barenboim (a great admirer of
Furtwangler and his way with this music). It offers short excerpts from each of
the movements and lasts a little over four minutes.
I
encourage you to listen and watch.
And if this should engage you, then I pass on
a slightly longer (6 minute) excerpt from just the monumental final movement of
the Fifth, a slightly better performance (in my view), this time under the late
Gunter Wand (d. 2002), a Bruckner specialist, directing the North German Radio
Symphony. Wand regarded Bruckner as the "most important symphonist
after Beethoven." As the
movement concludes, it is as if the Gates of Heaven itself open and the Holy
Ghost appears triumphantly to embrace you:
Will we
ever see its like again?
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