Josef Anton Bruckner was born on September 4, 1824 in
the upper Austrian town of Ansfelden. His father was a
schoolteacher and church organist, and Bruckner's
initial studies followed similar lines. When Bruckner
was 13, his father died, and he enrolled in the church
school at St. Florian (some ten miles from Linz) as a
chorister. There, he studied organ, piano, and music
theory.
To the extent that audiences are familiar with the
works of Anton Bruckner, they know him primarily as a
co...(+)
Josef Anton Bruckner was born on September 4, 1824 in
the upper Austrian town of Ansfelden. His father was a
schoolteacher and church organist, and Bruckner's
initial studies followed similar lines. When Bruckner
was 13, his father died, and he enrolled in the church
school at St. Florian (some ten miles from Linz) as a
chorister. There, he studied organ, piano, and music
theory.
To the extent that audiences are familiar with the
works of Anton Bruckner, they know him primarily as a
composer of symphonies. A few sacred works occasionally
come up on the concert radar, but mostly there are
those very long symphonies, characterized by a singular
breadth of discourse, not to be mistaken for the work
of any other composer. Thus Bruckner the Anomaly has
earned a niche in concert life, his very peculiar
personality adding to his strange and pious aura. Yet
there is more to this music than its uniqueness.
One of the composer's most successful Men's choral
pieces, Trösterin Musik (1877, rev. 1886) with organ
accompaniment, and the dramatic Helgoland for chorus
and orchestra (composed in 1893, Bruckner's last
completed work). Music for male voices was a very
important genre both in professional and amateur
music-making, and one well represented in Bruckner's
ouevre. These two works were both written for famous
Viennese Choral Societies, and feature a range of
male-voice timbre to which concert audiences these days
are perhaps unaccustomed — some very high yet sweet
first tenor parts, for example, performed in
falsetto.
Together the two works revealed quite a bit about
Bruckner the composer. Many are the melodies in the
symphonies with the unmistakable cadence of hymnody; it
would stand to reason that Bruckner also wrote fine
hymns. The brief Trösterin Musik (Music the Comforter)
is such a hymn, in this case to the power of Music
itself. As with many hymn-tunes, it served him for more
than one text: the piece was first composed to another
poem entirely, whose length and meter were identical to
the later text. Nonetheless the text-setting is quite
apt, and rhythmically vital enough to rescue the poem
from its perilously monotonous scansion (for an English
equivalent, think Robert Service in an
uncharacteristically pious mood).
Although originally created for Male Chorus (TTBB), I
adapted this work for a Bassoon quartet.
PARTITION