Awesome Music / Anton Bruckner

Richard Wagner sometimes named Anton Bruckner as the "third B" alongside Bach and Beethoven; while the idea never caught on, Bruckner certainly left his fair share of awesome music for future listeners to enjoy.

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• Before finding his mission as a symphonist, Bruckner wrote lots of music for use in church. This religious music was suppressed during the Nazi era, as it did not fit the Nazi idea of Bruckner's greatness on account of his being an Aryan man of the land. This music was quite a discovery after World War II.
  • The Mass in F minor has the most dramatic Credo ever written. Though the mass as a whole is shorter than more famous masses like Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Bruckner really takes his time in the Incarnatus, then moves to genuine sorrow for the Crucifixus and Passus, before the earthquake of the Resurrexit.
  • The Te Deum is one of only two significant religious compositions after he started writing symphonies. The Te Deum starts off with the first section ("Te Deum laudamus") opening in blazing C major by the choir in unison alongside a powerful open-fifth pedal point by the organ and an open-fifths motive in the strings. The second section in F minor ("Te ergo quaesumus") is serene and features an expressive tenor solo and a solo violin. The third section ("Aeterna fac"), in Bruckner's favoured key of D minor, is almost apocalyptic in its fury and draws upon the full resources of the choir. The fourth section ("Salvum fac populum tuum"), evolves after a bass solo and a pedal point by the choir to recall the opening salvo of the first section. The fifth and final section takes place in C major begins with a solo quartet, then culminates in a joyous fugue. What follows is an impassioned chorale on the words "non confundar in aeternum", which has a melody that is similar to the main theme of the second movement Adagio of Symphony No. 7 in E major. The opening string figure returns to help the full ensemble carry the work to a powerful conclusion. Gustav Mahler raved about the Te Deum, saying it was "written for the tongues of angels, heaven-blessed, chastened hearts, and souls purified in the fire!"
• As a symphonist, Bruckner is often mentioned in the same breath as his friend Gustav Mahler, but while both composers were Austrians born in the 19th century and composed nine numbered symphonies, nearly all of which last an hour or more in most performances and recordings, their music has little in common. Mahler believed a symphony should contain the universe, including the good and bad, and so even his triumphant endings have dark edges to them, while Bruckner believed in the symphony as apotheosis, all nine of them unfolding in grand gestures and building to codas of sublime glorification.
  • An early Symphony in D minor, which was first performed and published posthumously, though not as inspired as his later works, has its moments of awesome, in particular the Scherzo and a theme in the finale that was perhaps inspired by Beethoven's Große Fuge. It came to be known as Symphony No. 0, and it has many ideas Bruckner improved in No. 3. An even earlier and less inspired Symphony in F minor could be called Symphony No. −1, but most fans prefer to instead call it No. 00.
  • While Bruckner's earlier symphonies (including two unnumbered ones) have their moments of interest and inspiration, Symphony No.3 in D minor was probably the first one where we hear his mature symphonic style. For better or for worse, it was probably his most revised work. The original version contained many thematic quotations from the operas of his musical idol Richard Wagner, many of which were removed in the greatly shortened revisions.^note The symphony's premiere in December 1877 was an unmitigated disaster, partly due to Viennese audiences' distaste for Bruckner's music and partly because he conducted it himself (the original conductor, Johann von Herbeck, having died a month before the performance) despite only knowing how to conduct choirs, not orchestras. By the end of the performance, all but 25 audience members (and even many members of the orchestra) had walked out; among those who stayed was a 17-year-old Gustav Mahler, who later purchased the autograph of the first three movements.
  • It is quite possible that the opening of Symphony No.4 in E-flat major (Romantic, the only one named by Bruckner himself)^note He also called Symphony No.5 in B-flat major the "Fantastic" but didn't apply the name formally. was meant to make you shiver, with its signature string tremolo, horn solo echoed by woodwinds, building slowly, steadily, and suddenly low brasses and strings moving in unison to what we now call the Bruckner rhythm. And after the grandeur of the first movement, we have a solemn funeral march with occasional glimpses of heavenly light, a boisterous "hunting" scherzo dominated by brass fanfares, and a finale that, like most of Bruckner's symphonies, brings the whole piece back to where it began with a full orchestral glow in its final pages.
  • Symphony No.5 in B-flat major immediately makes waves by being the only one of Bruckner's symphonies to have a slow introduction. The first movement's opening theme takes place in B-flat minor; the exposition contains three main key regions instead of the customary two, during which modulations to several keys occur. The coda takes place in B-flat minor, then resolves to B-flat major. The second movement uses two alternating themes quite effectively, the first of which has a metrical superimposition of 6 against 4. The third movement scherzo defies tradition by having a three-theme sonata form instead of the standard binary form; in a creative masterstroke, Bruckner uses the same bassline to open the second and third movements. But all that pales in comparison to the finale, which transforms into an absolutely mammoth sonata allegro moderato packed to the brim with highly elaborate counterpoint after a reprise of the first movement's slow introduction; two, three, four, and five-part strettos are given out in many different combinations all the way through. Bruckner called it his contrapuntal masterpiece for good reason.
  • Symphony No.6 in A major may lack some of his stylistic hallmarks, but the music in it is no less captivating.^note Bruckner said of the symphony, "Die Sechste ist die keckste," or "The Sixth is the boldest." The first movement turns the Bruckner rhythm into a driving force right off the bat and challenges the audience's sense of melody; while the first theme is in A major, notes that aren't in that key's tonality^note Mainly G, B-flat, and F. appear in the melodic line, and the rest of the movement seems to pull away from the home key instead of moving toward it. The second movement Adagio is part love song, part funeral march; the doleful lament first heard in the oboe is one of his loveliest melodies.^note It also stands out as Bruckner's only slow movement in sonata form apart from Symphony No.0 in D minor. The unusually leisurely Scherzo has three contrasting rhythmical motives instead of a theme and defers a resolution into the home key of A minor until the very end of the scherzo section. The finale starts off with a theme in A minor, but it soon goes into A major, although, as in the first movement, Bruckner seems to keep pulling away from and then back to the movement's home key. Though the finale quotes the oboe theme from the Adagio, and the coda features a trademark magnification of the first movement's main theme, there is still a sense of questions left unanswered after the final affirmation of A major that makes this symphony truly special.
  • Symphony No.7 in E major^note Similar to how Symphony No.46 by Joseph Haydn used B major, a key which was rarely used for anything in the 18th century, E major wasn't a popular key for symphonies in the 19th century. was the most popular in Bruckner's lifetime, and is a great introduction to his symphonies. In contrast to Symphony No.6, it includes all the hallmarks of his style: hushed violin tremolos as the symphony opens under which the cellos and a solo horn play a vocal melody that Bruckner claimed came to him in a dream, a sombre slow movement featuring Wagner tubas for the first time in any symphony,^note Bruckner returned Wagner's respect for him with interest, having dedicated his Symphony No.3 to the older composer; No.7 was composed when Wagner was terminally ill, and the slow movement was composed with his impending death and funeral in mind. The original score includes a cymbal crash supported by a triangle (the only use of percussion other than timpani in Bruckner's symphonies) at the exact moment when Wagner died, but it has been crossed out — but not by Bruckner. The cymbal crash is rarely used in performances and recordings. a grim scherzo led by a solo trumpet figure imitating a crowing rooster, and a majestic finale that culminates in another full orchestral affirmation with more string tremolos, brass fanfares, thundering timpani, and a magnification of the first movement's opening theme... it doesn't get much more Brucknerian than that.
  • The gargantuan Symphony No.8 in C minor starts off with an ethereal first movement that has a three-subject sonata form (as typical of Bruckner) and a quiet, somber ending. The tense scherzo starts off with a five-note Deutscher Michel theme and is the largest one in all of Bruckner's symphonic output. The beatific Adagio begins in 4/4 time and traverses a few keys. The finale begins from a single bouncing note in the strings, then suddenly blossoms into a massive brass fanfare. If that's not enough, prepare to be blown away by some of the most spectacular final pages across all of Bruckner's symphonies, in which the main motifs of all four movements — which are all sweeping epics in their own right — are played simultaneously in C major.
  • Bruckner intended Symphony No.9 in D minor to be his last word in the genre, but sadly died before he could finish the finale. However, he went way beyond sketches, he got very close to a performable score. The symphony was more complete than the executor of Bruckner's last will and testament cared to admit, because his negligence to secure Bruckner's apartment after the composer's death allowed souvenir hunters to take random mementoes. Despite the gaps in the otherwise almost complete score, several performance versions of the movement have been created, which all begin the same and end very similarly. The team of Nicola Samale, Giuseppe Mazzuca, John A. Phillips, and Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs spent nearly twenty years on one of the most celebrated completions. The three movements Bruckner did manage to complete stand surprisingly well on their own, in the opinion of some, including the negligent executor. Though these three movements do leave us wondering how the usual Bruckner coda of glorification might grow out of the eerie first movement, the brutally savage scherzo, and the melancholy E major Adagio in a way that puts a worthy capstone on his entire symphonic oeuvre.^note When it became clear to Bruckner, a deeply devout Catholic who had dedicated the symphony to God Himself, that he would not live to finish it, he tried proposing his setting of the Te Deum prayer as a finale, but this is rarely followed as the Te Deum is in C major, while a proper finale would involve a journey from D minor to D major — as is done in the attempts at completing his sketches. It is speculated that he planned to join together the main motifs of all four movements in the coda, as he did in Symphony No. 8, and several of the performance versions of the finale incorporate this idea; Belgian composer Sébastien Letocart takes the "capstone" idea in a different direction by quoting the main motifs of Nos.5, 7, and 8, the mid-subject of the Trio, then combining the main theme from every movement in the coda of his completion of the finale of No.9.
• What do you get when you combine Artistic License – History, Patriotic Fervor, Testosterone Poisoning, and Gratuitous German? The "Helgoland" cantata, and it is as gloriously over-the-top as you'd expect.