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IT is remarkable that at a period when a type of music, whose elusive colouring symbolised a doubting mind, had been established by Wagner and had promised to dominate the future, there arose an original and forceful musician who directly opposed this tendency. He was, like Hugo Wolf, an Austrian, but the two men were very unlike in their approach to art. Wolf's interest was in the future; he was drawn to Wagner by a romantic and sensitive temperament, and his achievement was to apply the new outlook in music to songwriting. Bruckner, on the other hand, drew upon a rich inheritance of Austrian musical instinct, which he expressed with absolute faith and the downright strength of the peasant. The doubts which at once enrich and torment the modern composer were for him non-existent, and he attacked the difficulties of that sublime form, the symphony, with all the confidence of simple faith.
Circumstances and the judgment of his contemporaries connected and contrasted him with a great reactionary, Johannes Brahms, and to-day, though from a different standpoint, they must still be considered together. In Vienna they were rivals. The Northerner came there for the stimulus of Viennese instinctive musicality, and his austere symphonies and chamber-music won the approval of the Viennese, but Bruckner had great difficulty in obtaining a hearing from his compatriots, though he did at last win over a certain section of the German musical world. Brahms certainly outclasses Bruckner in the difficult medium of the sonata (symphony); yet the latter has a congregation of his own. We do not say this merely because, from Hanslick onwards, the critics have hailed Brahms as the great revivifier of the sonata-form. Joachim and Hans von Bülow did indeed strongly influence public opinion on Brahms's behalf; but the public were quite willing to acknowledge the value of his work, and there can be no doubt that Brahms was in many ways a man of his time. It is said with some truth that he is bourgeois and limited; but to those who discern the deep background of his work, the restraint which marks his multiform rhythm, the earnestness which informs his symphonies and gives weight to his adagios, signify the victory of the spirit over stubborn material, and faithfully reflect the outlook, at once romantic and practical, characteristic of so many of the middle class. Those who are least inclined to become partisans of Brahms are forced to admit that, more than any other, he achieved a definite and original style. Though apparently reactionary, he was by no means opposed to the modern spirit.
In this matter Bruckner was very different. Wagnerians used to represent Brahms and Bruckner as opposites, and although the modern conductor and the modern concertprogramme have effected a kind of reconciliation, the feud between their followers secretly persists. Bruckner is to the Brucknerians a holy mystery which only the initiated dare approach. August Halm is his prophet and has made him the creed of the Wickersdorf school. Thus, strangely enough, he dominates a section of present-day youth, and some of those most advanced in the ways of modern art do him homage. It is not a logical position. Bruckner's unproblematic and absolute affirmations are a direct contradiction of all modern music, and nothing can bridge the intervening gulf.
The connection between Wagner and Bruckner is often misunderstood. It is true that Bruckner was ifluenced by Wagner's work, but it was by just those elements in it which contributed least to Wagner's general result and success. The natural simplicity and gravity of Bruckner is opposed to Wagner's futurism, his genuine religious emotion to Wagner's theatrical pathos. If there is any echo of Wagnerism in Bruckner's work it is simply because Bruckner in his humility mistook that theatrical pathos for something in which he shared, just as many Wagnerians accept it in perfect good faith. Nevertheless, this mistaken appreciation bore fruit; the Catholic faith demanded the splendour of Bruckner's orchestration. It is easy to see how the mysticism of Lobengrin and Parsifal, speaking from highest violins and penetrating brass, appeared as a revelation to the creative imagination and eager ears of the devout and reverent-minded Bruckner, and he reproduces his impressions in his own use of wind instruments and horns. His grand emotional use of the Wagnerian C major, bringing overstrung nerves and tormented senses back to serenity, strength, beauty, nature, with a single gesture, is a thing to delight mankind, and seems to have represented to him the apotheosis of his desire. He delighted in the common triad worked out, accentuated firmly chiselled in manifold paraphrase above a powerful pedal-note. Of less consequence is his chromatic retardation, another echo, though strongly marked with his individuality, of his admiration for Wagner. It springs neither from eager senses nor a speculative mind; it remains a non-essential note, although it plays a part in enhancing the brilliance of the whole.
That whole is indeed monumentally conceived. Bruckner's serious emotion and primitive strength can only find expression in the greatest musical forms. The spirit of a man whose imagination is full of the love and fear of God endows the grave rhythm of his melody, and when the mighty diatonics of his brass thunder out, the world seems one vast cathedral.
Yet his works do not possess the flawless unity of the classical sonata (symphony). Ponderous rhythm, carefully worked-out melody, emotion and primitive musical sense, all seem to prevent such unity. It is clear that he has in his mind the example of that master of symphony, Beethoven; yet he is unable himself to achieve that perfect self-disciphne, that clear logic which breaks up melodies into motives, and motives into their atoms, so that they may all contribute in due proportion to a perfect whole. The nineteenth-century composer's sense of responsibility forces him to such selfdiscipline and clear thinking. He is anxious to produce genuine and original work, and tests his material with care, knowing that he is the heir of other men's labours and that many a vein has been worked out. Bruckner was troubled with no such thoughts. He took his own impulses to composition as a matter of course, and it never occurred to him to criticise any fancy which arose in him. He left matters of workmanship, as of creative imagination, to instinct alone.
Each sonata, each symphony of Beethoven, was the creation of a new type, both the expression and the fulfilment of an idea; Bruckner is the natural instinctive musician, but in the grand manner. His nine symphonies vary a little, perhaps, in individual features, but each possesses the same general physiognomy. We may refuse to contemplate the strange, doubting spirit of modern art, or we may be willing, as we listen to Bruckner's symphonies, to accept their own form as our ideal, but we are inevitably astonished by the marvel of his work, and bound to acknowledge that nothing of similar greatness has been created since Bach. Those who recognise Beethoven's sonata (symphony) as the perfection of the intellectual type and delight in his infinite variety, will consider certain of Bruckner's peculiarities as limitations, and while accepting the copious wealth of his natural inspiration, will nevertheless feel that he was born in an age to which he did not belong. Bruckner's style can never be accused of formlessness. Each work is made up of independent, artistically-conceived sections which, however, are not always kept in due proportion. The sections are sufficient in themselves, but they do not blend, so that the result is not organic unity, but a string of phantasies held loosely together by melody. At times one is reminded of Schubert, but he, more a man of the world than Bruckner, could yet lay bare the hidden things of the soul, and by his use of colour proved himself a true progressive. Bruckner knew nothing of "mental beyonds" and his work, free from tragedy, expresses the beauty of an innocent and simple nature. He took an air and repeated it, making it an ever-increasing delight. Contrapuntal devices, especially the inversion of themes, occur frequently, but he shows no trace of those artistic nuances which are the glory of modern music and were foreshadowed in Schubert. Such romanticism as he had (in the Romantic Symphony, for example) was pure natureromanticism without emotional afterthought; his elaborate codas and cadences show the same personality, the organist's delight in triads, in a sunny, shining landscape.
His spirit, dwelling in humility, was not flexible enough for humour. His security, his gravity, were far removed from Beethoven's demoniacal defiance, from Latin versatility, from the banter of programme-music, from the swaying Viennese rhythm. In their main construction his scherzos are like Beethoven's, but for the most part they breathe a rustic bluntness, and fall at times (as in the trios of the Second and Fourth Symphonies) into slow country waltzes. These shorter movements of Bruckner are generally terse and well-knit, and therefore make the slackness of the finales all the more remarkable. Even the Fourth Symphony, the noble landscape of which is more rigidly constructed, crumbles away in the finale. Just where Bruckner looks back over his works and strives with severe effort to sum it up in his conclusion, he proves himself not alert enough to co-ordinate, not speedy enough to combine all in one whole. He relies as a matter of course on sequence, on the beautifully-modulated recurrence of earlier melodious phrases.
Bruckner, the singer of hymns, the man of solemn and weighty rhythm, is at his best in the adagio. He finds his heaven in the slow movements of his symphonies as much as in any orchestral Mass or Te Deum, and in the atmosphere of infinity which he there achieves he has no rival. Primitive strength expressed in absolute calm--it is unlike anything attempted by the artists of his time, and seems independent even of an audience. In his adagios, as in all his work, Bruckner is particularly free from calculated effects. He allows the strength and pathos of primitive music to well.up in him unrestrained, with never a thought of the practical problems of the concert-platform. When Ms works came to be performed in public he found himself--helpless, as he was in worldly affairs, and too weak to assert the integrity of his work to himself and to others--obliged to agree to the shortening of his scores.
In Bruckner, music found again its age of innocence. His symphony--for all his symphonies are one--lies Eke some mighty monument of a bygone race across the pathway of the new music. To participate in it fully, a man must receive it as a grace in absolute humility, at the same time utterly renouncing all part in later developments of art.
Bruckner is the idol of the mystics, the rallying-point of many stricken souls whom no ordinary interpreter, relying for effect upon orchestral technique, can satisfy. Only a conductor naturally serious and humble-minded, of conviction and spiritual experience, can achieve the synthesis of these passive, contemplative works.
Yet, pure and humble-minded as his music is, he will not bear comparison with Bach. Bach's form, which many forerunners had moulded to the highest degree of intellectual and technical perfection, makes Bruckner's seem by comparison fortuitous; and, moreover, Bach's music of faith, the product of a different age, was at the same time the work of a fully-awakened mind. It is unlikely that Bruckner, SouthGerman and limited as he is, will win the ear of the great world, for all the rich beauty of his work. The world's public demands a perfect relationship between tension and relaxation in form. Bruckner's form arouses perpetual exptotation of a conclusion without satisfying it. He will remain the possession of a few, but he will, at least for a time, lead many a weary futurist back to the source of music.
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