Julian Horton explores Anton Bruckner's enigmatic persona and his music's associations with religious, metaphysical, and mystical experiences.
Bruckner remains an enigmatic figure in the history of Western music. His unwavering Catholic faith and the anecdotal evidence of his naïve and deferential character have encouraged popular perceptions of the composer as an other-worldly mystic, who was ill-matched with his time and place. Bruckner’s music has, since his lifetime, fostered associations with religious, metaphysical or mystical experience to an extent equalled in the reception of few other composers. Confronted with his music’s bold modernity, contemporary critics often turned to religion by way of explanation, not always sympathetically. Struggling to grasp the idiom of Bruckner’s String Quintet, Brahms’s biographer Max Kalbeck described it as ‘music of pure revelation, as he has received it from above or below, without any profane addition of worldly logic, art or good sense’. Bruckner’s Wagnerian advocates often styled such transcendental aspirations as an advantage, contrasting Brahms’s secular intellectualism. In Britain, Bruckner’s religious convictions played a major role in securing his symphonies’ place in the concert repertoire. When Deryck Cooke insisted that ‘Experiencing Bruckner’s symphonic music is more like walking round a cathedral, and taking in each aspect of it, than like setting out on a journey to some hoped-for goal’, he forged a link with a kind of pre-modern religiosity, which has become a commonplace of public opinion. Bruckner’s penchant for revision and the symphonies’ forbiddingly complex editorial circumstances have also generated one of the great mysteries of musical scholarship, as musicologists and performers wrestled with tangled and opaque textual difficulties.