A Great Man's Prayers in Music

Because today is Anton Bruckner's birthday, I wanted to share some thoughts about his unique and inspiring music.

During his lifetime, Bruckner was often acclaimed as a "Wagnerian symphonist", not least by Wagner himself.  But that misleading label drove both Bruckner and his followers into a blind alley, because the only really common factor between the music dramas of Wagner and the symphonies of Bruckner is their length.  And the common factors between their personalities were virtually non-existent.

Nobody can truly understand or come to terms with the music of Anton Bruckner without appreciating the immense depth of his faith in God.  To many people today, the concept of believing in any kind of God is laughable, but somehow that cynical amusement tends to fall silent when confronted with the greatest products of that faith -- such as the massive Gothic cathedrals of Europe and Britain or great works of religious art.  Bruckner's symphonic output is a little like that.  His symphonies can best be appreciated as gigantic cathedrals in sound, each one bringing the composer closer to the moment when, in his Ninth Symphony, he finally dedicated his work to "der liebe Gott".

In relation to those cathedrals, Bruckner's short motets for unaccompanied chorus are like tiny chapels surrounding the high altar.  Unlike the symphonies, the motets are short, mostly lasting only a few minutes.  And like those chapels, no two are alike although they share a common shape and purpose.  Their texts are religious and all are sung in Latin, the liturgical language of the Roman Catholic church.  The motets tend to start quietly, in a lower register of the voices, rise both in pitch and intensity to a climax, and then decline in volume as they drop back down to a lower pitch at the quiet ending.

I had the privilege of singing several of these motets in younger days in Toronto, and the beauty and power of this music never failed to move me.  That was especially true of his final setting of Christus factus est (he set that text three times in all) which reaches a chromatic climax of shuddering intensity followed by a silent bar in which that astounding chord echoes into silence before the singers resume with the downward decline of the piece. 

Recordings of these devotional works, prayers in music indeed, have been few and far between.  I've had just two.  A fine selection was recorded by the Corydon Singers under Matthew Best on Hyperion CD, and is available to download.  An earlier version of many of the same numbers comes on DGG under Eugen Jochum.  Many of Jochum's pieces first appeared as fill-ups on LP in his original cycle of all the symphonies.  In the CD reissue they are all gathered together with his recordings of the three great Masses, the Te Deum, and Psalm 150.

Best's recording has the advantage of cleaner, more modern sound, and his choir has much better intonation.  Jochum's sopranos tend to be wobbly and sing a bit under the note in some very high passages (Bruckner could be as merciless as Beethoven to his sopranos!).  The sound also has a slightly dim quality, almost as if heard through the audio equivalent of a scrim or veil.  But I always felt, and still feel, that Jochum has a much better sense of the music as music, and is more at home in the idiom.  I'm biased, I still feel that way about his recordings of the symphonies as well, and they have few competitors in my appreciation.  So it's a trade-off.

Both recordings also include three motets with accompaniment by a trio of trombones.  Afferentur regi and Inveni David are both rather similar to the outline I've given above.  Ecce sacerdos magnus is another matter altogether, an almost Gabrieli-like mixture of pomp and ceremony with the organ adding its majesty and power.  This, by the way, is one of the very few works by Bruckner (one of the greatest organ improvisers in history) in which an independent organ part appears.