Josef Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) was an Austrian composer and organist best known for his symphonies and sacred music, which includes Masses, Te Deum and motets. The symphonies are considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich harmonic language, strongly polyphonic character, and considerable length. His compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving harmonies.

Unlike other musical radicals such as Richard Wagner and Hugo Wolf, Bruckner showed respect, even humility, before other famous musicians, Wagner in particular. This apparent dichotomy between Bruckner the man and Bruckner the composer hampers efforts to describe his life in a way that gives a straightforward context for his music. Hans von Bülow described him as "half genius, half simpleton". Bruckner was critical of his own work and often reworked his compositions. There are several versions of many of his works.

His works, the symphonies in particular, had detractors, most notably the influential Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick and other supporters of Johannes Brahms, who pointed to their large size and use of repetition, as well as to Bruckner's propensity for revising many of his works, often with the assistance of colleagues, and his apparent indecision about which versions he preferred. On the other hand, Bruckner was greatly admired by subsequent composers, including his friend Gustav Mahler.

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).

Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nachruf,_WAB_81a).

Although originally created for Male Chorus (TTBB), I created this Interpretation of Trösterin Musik (WAB 88) for String Quartet (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).