September 14, 2022

 

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

My Latest Article in CHRONICLES Magazine – Anton Bruckner, a Sign of Contradiction

Friends,

As I have done in the past, I like to publicize articles and essays I have written originally for and have been published by various publications. And by now, if you’ve been reading my occasional pieces, you’ll know that I write about a wide diversity of topics, in particular on the arts and music.

I fully understand that such subjects may not interest those accustomed to my items dealing with current politics, Southern history, religion, or foreign affairs. But, I believe that the defense of our cultural heritage and its artifacts, including our legacy in great art, architecture, literature, and music, are  also vitally essential to our survival and the survival of Western Christian civilization, which is now so critically imperiled, especially from within.

So, I pass on today an essay I recently had published in CHRONICLES magazine. I strongly encourage you to subscribe to it, if you have not already done so, as it is practically the only place among printed journals (it also is available online) where you will receive a full, intelligent, and at times very graceful, defense of who we are and represent as a civilization.

My essay is titled: Composer Anton Bruckner: A Sign of Contradiction in the Modern Age. I offer here (below) the opening few paragraphs, and for a limited time (about two weeks or so), you can read the essay in its entirety.

However, after that a paywall may exist.

Again, I recognize that this is not something you may be accustomed to read by me; nevertheless, I urge you to give it a try…and also to subscribe to the finest journal of traditional conservative thinking out there.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 Composer Anton Bruckner: A Sign of Contradiction in the Modern Age

 SEPTEMBER 1, 2022      BY   BOYD D. CATHEY

Noted British conductor Sir Simon Rattle has described Europe at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries as “sitting on a volcano,” with the rise of radical ideologies, revolutionary ferment, amazing advances in science, the questioning of all previous certitudes in faith, and new currents in the arts.

This was especially true in opera as well as in symphonic music, where two giants— Anton Bruckner (1824–1896) and Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)—towered over others. The two men are often grouped together, as they wrote lengthy symphonic works and composed numerous choral and vocal selections. Both men were musical geniuses who employed all the many achievements, techniques, and accumulated wealth of musical knowledge in their respective compositions. Mahler looked resolutely forward musically to the uncertainties, to the angst, to the disjointedness, and to the 20^th-century collapse of Western culture’s civility and orthodoxy, while Bruckner, incorporating the same rich artistic tradition and heritage, resolutely looked backward to what had gone before. He offered in sound an incredibly and uniquely creative defense of that tradition and its orthodoxies.

Bruckner was born in Ansfelden, in Upper Austria, on Sept. 4, 1824. His father, who died when Bruckner was only 13, was the local schoolmaster. For much of Bruckner’s early education, he attended school at the famous nearby Augustinian monastery of St. Florian, where he developed an extraordinary interest in and familiarity with the great Baroque musical heritage created and cultivated by the Catholic Church. There he received extensive training in the organ, choral music, and violin—and he excelled brilliantly in all three. Because of his precocious talent, at an early age he became organist for the Augustinians. Bruckner’s firm Catholic faith, simple but profound, would be the incredibly rich and vibrant foundation for his later work as a composer—his, as he described it, “giving back to God in music what he had received from Him through grace.” He consciously took as his mentors Beethoven and, before him, the masters of the Austrian Baroque, who would form the essential inspiration for Bruckner’s later monumental symphonies….

 

PLEASE CONTINUE READING THE FULL ARTICLE AT:

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/featured/composer-anton-bruckner-a-sign-of-contradiction-in-the-modern-age/