AntonBruckner

On 16 December 1877 Bruckner conducted his Third Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic. Johann Herbeck, who had intended to conduct it, had died in October. The audience began to leave during the performance. Among the supporters who stayed was the seventeen-year-old Mahler, who helped arrange the large score for piano duet. Bruckner was then fifty-three, a professor at the conservatory and an organist admired internationally. As a symphonist he was still little known in the concert hall.

1824–⁠61Ansfelden, St Florian and Linz

He was born in Ansfelden, near Linz, where his father taught school and played church music. After his father died in 1837, his mother took him to the Augustinian abbey of St Florian as a choirboy. He learned the organ, trained as a teacher and worked in the villages of Windhaag and Kronstorf. In Windhaag he also played the fiddle for dancing.

He returned to St Florian in 1845, taught at the school and later became the abbey organist. In 1855 he began lessons with Simon Sechter in Vienna, and the following January he obtained the post of cathedral and parish organist in Linz. He was then thirty-one. For six years he sent exercises to Sechter and travelled to Vienna for lessons. During this time he wrote no free compositions and worked through harmony, fugue and counterpoint. In November 1861 he took another examination, in which he improvised an introduction and fugue on a theme given by his teacher.

1861–⁠68Studies with Kitzler and the Masses

Then he started again with Otto Kitzler, the conductor at the Linz theatre, studying orchestration and musical form. One exercise was to orchestrate the first movement of Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata; a larger one was the F minor Study Symphony of 1863. When Kitzler conducted Tannhäuser in Linz that year, Bruckner studied the score and prepared the Pilgrims’ Chorus with his choral society, Frohsinn. Two years later he went to Munich for Tristan und Isolde and met Wagner.

The D minor Mass followed in 1864, the First Symphony and the E minor Mass in 1866, and the F minor Mass in 1867–⁠68. His choral singers could divide into eight parts. In 1867 he suffered a serious nervous crisis and spent three months at Bad Kreuzen for treatment. His pupil Karl Waldeck remembered him stopping on a walk to count the leaves of a tree. At night he begged Waldeck to stay, afraid of being left alone with his fixations. He began the F minor Mass after returning home. In 1868 he conducted the First Symphony in Linz and accepted Sechter’s former teaching post at the Vienna Conservatory.

ViennaTeaching, Wagner and the Fifth Symphony

In Vienna he had students, an organ post at the court chapel and, from 1875, a university lectureship. His diary for 1877 records thirty-one hours of teaching each week, and the symphonies had to fit around them. In 1873 he took the Third to Wagner in Bayreuth and obtained permission to dedicate it to him. The first version includes quotations from Wagner’s operas. This made Bruckner easy to enlist in Vienna’s quarrels over Wagner and Brahms; the critic Eduard Hanslick became a persistent opponent.

The Third’s première had been a disaster. In April 1878 Liszt played through the Fifth Symphony and spoke favourably of it. Bruckner reported this to Wagner on 20 May as “certainly my last comfort in Vienna”. Meanwhile the Fifth was finished, and he was rebuilding the Fourth, eventually replacing its scherzo with the familiar hunt, in which horns and trumpets call across the orchestra and the strings rush beneath them.

The Fifth draws most fully on those years of exercises. It opens with plucked bass notes and widely separated outbursts; at the beginning of the finale, a clarinet interrupts the returning introduction. A fugue follows. Later the brass play a chorale, and Bruckner combines the two themes. He never heard an orchestra play it. Illness kept him away from the 1894 première in Graz, where Franz Schalk conducted a version with extensive cuts and altered scoring.

1884–⁠92The Seventh and Eighth Symphonies

Arthur Nikisch conducted the première of the Seventh in Leipzig on 30 December 1884, and it brought Bruckner his first real success. He was sixty. The symphony opens with cellos and horn playing a long E major melody over tremolo violins. In the Adagio, four Wagner tubas join the brass. Bruckner wrote its closing funeral music after Wagner’s death in February 1883.

Hermann Levi took up the Seventh in Munich in March 1885. After a performance of Die Walküre the following evening, he had the orchestra play the Seventh’s funeral music for Bruckner in the emptied theatre. Two years later the same conductor could make nothing of the Eighth. Bruckner revised it. On 27 February 1888 he told Levi that “it is already beginning to look quite different”. He worked on it until 1890.

1893–⁠96The Ninth Symphony and death

By 1894 Bruckner had completed three movements of the Ninth. The Adagio climbs to a dissonance and then ends quietly in E major. He went on composing the finale. When the stairs to his apartment became too much for him, the emperor provided ground-floor rooms at the Belvedere in 1895. There he continued to write.