BRUCKNER, ANTON (1824-1896), Austrian musical composer, was born on Sept. 4, 1824, at Ansfelden in Upper Austria. He successfully competed for the organistship for Linz cathedral in 1885. In 1867 he succeeded his former master of counterpoint, Sechter, as organist of the Ho f kapelle in Vienna, and also became professor in the conservatorium. In 1875 he was appointed to a lectureship in the university. He made a great impression by his extemporizations on the organ, and his success in an organ competition at Nancy in 1869 led to his playing in Paris and London (six recitals at the Albert hall, 1871). His permanent reputation, however, rests on his compositions.
At first church music was the medium in which he best ex pressed himself. Always humbly obedient to his priest, and never at ease among intellectuals and men of the world, he developed his talent in the composition of masses and other choral works that mark the not unworthy close of a classical (though provin cially classical) epoch in Viennese church music—the church music that could not digest Beethoven, though it was not uncon genial to Schubert. The instrumental music of Bruckner's first period is so uncouth that its disinterment is an extraordinary tribute to the triumph of his later symphonies. His Mass in F minor, written in 1868, seems in comparison with his first sym phony (produced in that year) like a metropolitan bishop com pared with Dominie Sampson. But by 1884 (when he had settled in Vienna) the position is reversed. The grand Te Deum (1883 84) has one or two lapses into a style fairly describable as paro chial, and seems to belong to a much more primitive art than the sixth symphony, which was finished in 1881. The seventh symphony, finished while the Te Deum was in hand, quotes the "non confundar in aeternum" in its slow movement, an elegy on the death of Wagner. The effect is almost as if the Wagner of Parsifal were to quote not Lohengrin (as he does) but Rienzi. Bruckner, in the last months of his life, feeling unable to write a finale to his ninth symphony, expressed the wish that this Te Deum should be performed in that position. Apart from the fact that Bruckner's ninth symphony has enough naïvely provoc ative resemblances to Beethoven's without the crowning exter nal feature of a choral finale, conductors who seriously appreciate Bruckner's art find abundant reason for not carrying out this wish; the discrepancy of styles is grotesque. Yet the Te Deum is a fine work with a sledge-hammer Handelian power, alternating with pious meditative passages which have nothing in common with its few lapses into provinciality.
Nevertheless, Bruckner the Wagnerian symphonist is a com poser remarkably different from Bruckner the writer of church music; even though he dedicates his ninth symphony an meinen lieben Gott the musical sources of his inspiration are two, or rather twin; the opening of Beethoven's ninth symphony and the openings and crescendos of Wagner's Ring. These "lapidary" materials (as Bruckner's partisans aptly called them) Bruckner builds into forms quite uncritically taken over from classical tra dition, with results that blind many critics to the grandeur of style. But the reputation of Bruckner's symphonies has survived the hostilities provoked by his position as symphonic stalking horse for the Wagnerians. (D. F. T.; X.)