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.
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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).
PARTITION