We think of Anton Bruckner as a symphonist and devout Wagnerian. In fact, he had long experience as a composer of church music before he ever heard Wagner’s music or attempted to compose a symphony. He had apparently experimented with chromatic harmonies, too.

His best-known large-scale sacred music includes three masses and the Te Deum. He also composed motets throughout his career. Many of them are performed much more frequently than the larger works. Several include trombones, continuing a long-standing Austrian tradition.

Bruckner’s childhood and youth

Anton Brucker was born in 1824 in Ansfelden, Upper Austria. His father was a school master and organist at St. Florian Cathedral and his mother sang in the church choir. His love of sacred music thus started in childhood. By the time the boy was four, his father had started to teach him to play violin. By the age of ten, he played organ well enough to substitute for his father. He was only thirteen when his father died. At that time, his mother secured a position as chorister at St. Florian for him.

St, Florian had a small choir, few instrumentalists, and a large library of music, mostly by composers who died before Bruckner was born. These include Antonio Caldara, Michael and Joseph Haydn, Franz Joseph Aumann, Johann Albrechtsberger and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Bruckner considered St. Florian his spiritual home for the rest of his life and returned when he could.

Most successful composers have a burning ambition. Bruckner sought no career beyond following his father’s footsteps as a school teacher. After his choirboy days were over, he served as assistant teacher in the two small villages of Windhaag and Kronstorf and then became assistant teacher at St. Florian in 1845. He continued to study music, discovering Mendelssohn and then, on the urging of a friend, J.S. Bach. At some time, he also studied the music of Palestrina and other Renaissance composers.

The music of Bruckner’s time in St. Florian is often very effective and must have genuinely appealed to its musically conservative audience. It lacked any strong individuality. Without the later works that made him famous, they would have been unknown elsewhere and soon forgotten there.

Maturity as a composer and worldwide fame

At about the time Bruckner qualified to teach high school, the position of cathedral organist at Linz become open. He lacked the confidence to apply for it, but he decided to observe the auditions. All the applicants failed, mostly for inability to perform a good fugal improvisation.

Someone persuaded Bruckner to play something, and his improvisation won the position for him. He served there from 1855 to 1868. In this larger city, his reputation as an organist and composer reached a wider audience.

While at Linz, Bruckner studied counterpoint with Simon Sechter. At Sechter’s insistence, he composed little during that time. Then, he studied form and orchestration with Otto Kitzler.

 Kitzler introduced him to Wagner’s Tannhäuser. It became a life-changing turning point, yet Bruckner never became an imitator of Wagner. He had no interest in composing operas. He never adopted Wagner’s greatly enlarged orchestra. And his approach to chromaticism and harmonic progression remained his own.

Bruckner was not attracted to Wagner’s style so much as overwhelmed that Wagner could break so many of the harmonic rules that Sechter taught and make such good effect.

When asked about the bold, new harmonies first made evident in his D minor Mass, Bruckner commented, “I didn’t dare before.” He never wrote down any of his organ improvisations, but probably he explored radical harmonies in them and did not have the confidence to include them in his compositions until he found similar daring in Wagner.

In 1868, the Vienna Conservatory offered him a position. He left Linz with the same hesitation with which he had moved there. In Vienna, he started composing symphonies and earned an international reputation. He also became a victim of the disputes between the partisans of Brahms and Wagner. More important for the purpose of his post, he continued to compose motets and other sacred music. He lived until 1896.

The Cecilan movement: an attempt to reform church music

J.S. Bach is the last major composer to view himself as primarily a composer of church music. Ten years before his death, Frederick the Great became king of Prussia and dedicated himself to the principles of the Enlightenment. In this, he was joined by other monarchs, including Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II.

Joseph’s reforms were so drastic that Mozart and the best of his Viennese contemporaries turned away from composing church music entirely until after his death. Even after Joseph died, churches in the Holy Roman Empire could no longer afford the musical establishments they enjoyed earlier.

Church music in general suffered, both in terms of composition and performance. The quality of both organ playing, church choirs, and congregational singing (in Protestant churches) declined.  Eventually, such writers as Carl Friedrich Zelter, Anton Thibaut, and E.T.A. Hoffman urged reform.

Singing societies arose under their influence, which generally decried the prominence of orchestral instruments in modern culture. According to this view, church music ought to be for voices only or accompanied only by a keyboard instrument. The reformers also disapproved of operatic elements in church music.

Both Catholics and Protestants began to look to the music of Palestrina as the ideal model for sacred music. At the most extreme, composers simply imitated Palestrina and other Renaissance composers. On the other hand, Felix Mendelssohn, a student of Zelter, believed that liturgical music should be based on a fusion of a composer’s own style with Renaissance ideals. And he did not, of course, shun orchestral accompaniments.

German priest Franz Xaver Witt founded the Cecilian Society in 1869 to promote Gregorian chant and pre-classical counterpoint in Catholic church music. Bruckner was certainly aware of the Cecilian movement, although he never became a part of it.

Bruckner’s large-scale church compositions

An early mass for solo alto, organ, and two horns survives from his time in Windhaag (1842). The earliest major work Bruckner considered worth preserving was his Requiem, composed at Saint Florian in 1849. Scored for choir, soloists, strings, and three trombones (one of whom doubles on horn), it clearly shows Bruckner’s love for Mozart’s Requiem.

Other works from his residence in St. Florian include three more mass settings and settings of Psalms 22, 114, and 146 (according to the Vulgate numbering). He composed Psalm 114 for five-part chorus and three trombones.

All these works are very old-fashioned for the time, given how early all his available models were. He still wrote organ parts with figured bass. The counterpoint in these pieces does not always work. Had he written nothing else, no one would remember his name. Yet this music is still worthy of performance and still gives pleasure.

This fact raises an interesting question: how many other monasteries and churches had competent resident composers, now completely forgotten, whose music would be worth hearing? For that matter, how many of these unknown composers used trombones in sacred music as extensively as Bruckner did?

Three masses composed in Linz

After he moved to Linz and completed his studies with Sechter, he dismissed most of his earlier compositions as student works and, in 1864, composed what he called Mass no. 1 in D minor. It is his first masterpiece in a large form and predates his Symphony no. 1. It was his first music performed in Vienna. In form, this mass still follows the familiar Viennese classical model, with chorus, soloists and a large orchestra. But Bruckner was emboldened by his acquaintance with Wagner’s music to give free reign to his mastery of chromatic harmonies.

His Mass no. 2 in E minor is very different. Scored for an eight-voice choir, small wind ensemble, and no soloists, it shows some influence of the Cecilian movement and may have even been an attempt to win its approval. The absence of soloists removes any possibility of operatic writing. The wind ensemble functions much like an organ. In long stretches of music, the choir has no accompaniment at all.

Before Bruckner left Linz, he started to compose Mass no. 3 in F minor. In this mass, he returned to the full Viennese mass. By the time he finished it, he had moved to Vienna, and the premiere took place there.

The two large masses are symphonic in scale. The Second Symphony includes quotations from the F minor mass. While it would be too much to claim the symphonies as masses without words, they frequently contain thematic and harmonic elements he first developed in his church music.

Two more large-scale works composed in Vienna

In Vienna, Bruckner turned his attention to composing the symphonies for which he is best known. He did not completely abandon sacred music, however. In fact, he considered all of his music as an offering to God.

The Te Deum (1881-1884) was conceived as a concert work, not a liturgical piece. The most frequently performed of his large-scale choral pieces, it is every bit as symphonic as the two large masses. Bruckner had such high appreciation of it that, when it became apparent that he would not live to finish his Ninth Symphony, he suggested the Te Deum as a suitable finale. That would be difficult to achieve, considering that the symphony is in D minor and the Te Deum is in C major.

Bruckner’s last completed sacred piece is a massive setting of Psalm 150 for choir and orchestra. That is the psalm that exhorts using various musical instruments to praise God. Bruckner’s setting has much the same celebratory mood as the Te Deum.

Bruckner’s motets

Some 40 motets are attributed to Bruckner. Attribution of some is doubtful. Some others are lost. The remaining 32 motets span his entire career as a composer. These include eight settings of the hymn “Tantum ergo” and three each of “Asperges me,” “Christus factus est,” and “Ave Maria.”

Bruckner must have had special affection for a “Pange lingua” he composed in 1835 when he was only 11 years old. He wrote a second version of it in 1891. Otherwise, the motets he composed before his counterpoint lessons with Sechter have not been described in any source I have found. Here are some highlights of the later ones.

Christus factus ese

Bruckner composed three settings of “Christus factus est.” The first, actually part of one of his early masses composed in 1844, was published separately in 1931. He set the text again in 1873 for eight-voice chorus, three trombones, and strings that double the voices. He wrote on his manuscript that it is better without the strings. The final setting (1884), for mixed unaccompanied choir, is the best known.

Ave Maris

He composed his second setting of “Ave Maria” for seven-part unaccompanied chorus in 1861 to celebrate the end of his studies with Sechter. The first performance took place at the Linz Cathedral by the Liedertafel Frohsinn, an amateur men’s chorus Bruckner conducted, augmented by women’s voices. It is widely considered his first masterpiece.

Inveni David

“Inveni David” for four-part men’s chorus and four trombones was likewise written for Liedertafel Frohsinn in 1868. The concluding Alleluia section shows the influence of Handel’s “Hallelujah” from Messiah, a piece Bruckner often improvised on.

Locus iste

Bruckner’s friend Bishop Franz Joseph Rudigier commissioned “Locus iste” in 1869 to dedicate a chapel in the new cathedral in Linz. It is a very restrained, simple setting of the text, with limited but very effective chromaticism, which occurs only in the central section.

Tota pulchra es

“Tota pulchra es” for solo tenor, choir, and organ commemorated Rudigier’s 25th anniversary as bishop in 1878. It also served to dedicate the Votive Chapel at the newly constructed Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception” in Linz.

Os justi

Although Bruckner moved away from St. Florian in 1855, he maintained ties with it. He sent “Os justi” there in 1879 to the director of music Ignaz Traumihler, a dedicated follower of the Cecilian movement. The piece for a cappella choir is entirely in the Lydian mode in accordance with what the movement supposed was Palestrina’s style. At the time, “a cappella” could include organ doubling of the voices. Traumihler conducted the premier with Bruckner at the organ.

Ecce sacerdos magus

Bruckner interrupted work on his Eighth Symphony to compose “Ecce sacerdos magnus” (for choir, three trombones, and organ) in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the diocese of Linz in 1885. It was not, however performed for that occasion, nor anywhere else until after Bruckner’s death. It is his most exuberant motet and has the widest dynamic range (from ppp to fff).

Virga Jesse

Bruckner apparently intended for the quieter Virga Jesse (for a cappella choir) to be performed for the centennial of the diocese. It was not performed at the time, but it was premiered in Vienna later that year. Like “Inveni David,” it shows influence of Handel’s “Hallelujah.” It is generally considered among the best of Bruckner’s a cappella motets.

Vexilla regis

Bruckner’s very last motet, and second to last sacred choral work, “Vexilla regis,” is a very short a cappella piece. He composed it in 1892 and sent it to St. Florian. It is a simple setting in the Phrygian mode.

Bruckner’s use of trombones in sacred music

The Holy Roman Empire had a long history of soloistic trombone parts in sacred music dating back to the time of Antonio Caldara and Johann Joseph Fux. The War of Austrian Succession ultimately doomed the tradition. Mozart’s Requiem is the last important piece that represents it. Non-soloistic use of trombones in church orchestras continued unabated. Trombones were still available to Beethoven, but the standard of performance had fallen considerably.

The musical establishment at the Linz cathedral apparently did not suffer as much as that in Vienna. While it apparently had no composers worthy of comparison with the finest composers of Vienna, Salzburg, Olomouc, or Melk, it maintained the tradition of using trombones in sacred music, especially for important funerals. Beethoven wrote his “Three Equali for Four Trombones” while he was in Linz at the request of the cathedral’s music director.

Bruckner composed his own “Two Aequali” for three trombones in 1847 for the funeral of his aunt while he was teaching at St. Florian. He also included trombone parts in the following motets and similar pieces:

• Libera me, for five-part chorus, three trombones, and organ with figured bass (1854, St. Florian)
• Vor Arneth’s Grab, for men’s chorus and three trombones, setting a non-liturgical text for the funeral of his mentor Michael Arneth (1854, St. Florian)
• Afferentur regi, for mixed choir and three trombones ad libitum (1861, Linz)
• Inveni David, for men’s choir and four trombones (1868, Linz)
• Christus factus est, for eight-part choir, three trombones, and strings, which Bruckner considered better omitted (1873, Vienna)
• Settings of two pieces by Franz Joseph Aumann (“Ecce quomodo moritur justus” and “Tenebrae facta sunt”), to which he added the accompaniment of three trombones (1879, Vienna)
• Ecce sacerdos magnam, for choir, three trombones, and organ (Vienna, 1885)

Sources:

Bruckner, (Joseph) Anton / Deryck Cook, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Grove Dictionaries of Music, 1980)
Bruckner in church / Graham Abbott, Graham’s Music. November 19, 2020
List of motets by Anton Bruckner / Wikipedia
Nineteenth Century sacred music: Bruckner and the rise of the Cäcilien-Verein / Nicholas Bygate (Master of Music: Western Washington University, 2020)
Programme notes for seven motets by Bruckner, one motet by Brahms and Chilcott St. John Passion / Paul Steinson, Rochester Choral Society. March 2017