Bruckner's bicentenary

This year, we celebrate Anton Bruckner's 200th birthday. Composer of massive, timeless and time-consuming symphonies. Ever since I was introduced to Bruckner's music (via a recording of the 7th symphony, in a performance by the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Karl Böhm), Bruckner's music has never failed to move me. Whereas Bruckner was initially still a kind of symphonic Richard Wagner to me, his music has since increased my awareness of him and I grant him, unconditionally, his well-deserved place in the Pantheon of Greats on his own merits. I kept and keep discovering new layers, new meaning, in the symphonies - so often referred to as cathedrals of sound - of dear Anton. 

But before we (we will be switching from the "I" of the writer to the "we" of Wagner & Heavy Metal, as with the pluralis majestatis) embark upon our journey through the music of the composer and organist from Ansfelden, we pause briefly and lend an ear to the brooding, dark sounds of heavy metal.

Up the Irony!
There is a peculiar irony in the modern mind's pursuit of comfort through what is, ostensibly, discomforting music. The scream that rends the air, the violent cacophony of guitars and drums, the suffocating symphonic blackness of gothic metal – these elements, one would assume, are designed to unsettle, to disturb the soul, to plunge it into an abyss of existential terror. And yet, it is precisely here, amidst the frenetic intensity of symphonic deathcore or the baroque theatrics of gothic metal, that we find a curious solace, a strange and disturbing sense of comfort. For all the ostensible chaos and violence, the listener is, in fact, ensconced in a realm of safety, shielded from true peril by the very structure of the music itself. The roaring abyss, it seems, is neatly framed.

I spent some time with Cradle of Filth's latest studio album, Existence is Futile, a hallucinatory metal masterpiece where ideas and execution find each other in stunning, edifying ways. Darkness be praised. But I noticed, with all the carefully curated darkness and immaculate brutality, that everything remains in place, that the form and content are kept neatly delineated. There is talk of death, there are invocations of the void, thrilling in their artifice, but ultimately rendered as mere entertainment. There is no terror here that can linger in the heart, no shadow that truly threatens to consume the soul. The violence is contained, the darkness tempered by its own predictability. In this respect, such music – for all its intensity – is as comforting as any pastoral symphony (ha!), offering not a glimpse into the void, but a carefully controlled masquerade of dread.

​If we really want to hear something grand that alienates and disconcerts us, we have to turn to something else, to the modern, avant-garde composers of the 19th and 20th centuries for example. To music that questions form as well as content. 

Enter: Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
My affinity for metal, without question, rendered Bruckner's music, much like Wagner's, more accessible. In Bruckner, as in metal, I discovered a profound resonance between grand, sweeping gestures and the intimate stirrings of the soul—a connection imbued with a depth of feeling not unfamiliar to those who journey through life with a certain melancholy and reflective mind. And it was, in turn, through listening to heavy metal—that "other music" to which this very website owes its name—that the surprising and innovative nature of Bruckner’s work became so vividly clear to me. 

It is not the loudness or the violence of music that disconcerts us most. It is when it dares to question the very nature of sound, when it peels back the thin veneer of order to reveal the chaos beneath, that we are truly alienated.

Especially after listening to a few hours of metal, the music of Anton Bruckner can sound unusually unsettling and nervous. Like in metal, Bruckner comes with grandness and evocative power but here the music trembles on the precipice of revelation, unable to find comfort in its own beauty. Beautiful things, indeed, happen within his symphonies, but they are not an end in themselves. There is a sense, as one listens, of something deeper at work – something that cannot be safely contained within the formal bounds of composition. The music is seeking, striving towards a form that, in turn, must define its content, and yet there remains an uncertainty, a nervousness, as if the composer himself is unsure of the end towards which he gropes.

Anton Bruckner, often associated with the grandiose and spiritual symphonic traditions of the 19th century, is perhaps paradoxically one of the most forward-thinking composers of his era. While his symphonies may evoke the majesty of classical forms, they also possess qualities that align him with modernist and avant-garde composers who would come decades later. His music, characterized by unconventional structures, complex harmonic language, and a defiance of traditional compositional norms, challenges the boundaries between tradition and innovation.

Bruckner's Radical Use of Form
At first glance, Bruckner’s symphonies seem to adhere to the grand Austro-Germanic tradition established by Beethoven with expansive symphonic structures and a reverence for spiritual expression. However, beneath the surface, Bruckner’s approach to musical form was far more radical than his predecessors or contemporaries. Unlike Brahms, who worked meticulously within the constraints of classical forms, Bruckner took an entirely different approach. His symphonies are vast, architectural works, often spanning over an hour, but they do not conform to traditional expectations of symphonic development.

Bruckner’s music builds through massive, almost static blocks of sound, interspersed with long periods of quiet contemplation, creating an architecture that feels suspended in time. As if time becomes space. The scale and pacing of these blocks reject the conventional dynamic flow and linear progression expected in symphonic movements. His use of repetition and cyclical patterns, rather than continuous development, draws the listener into a more meditative and abstract sound world. This technique foreshadows the “block” structures of 20th-century composers like Igor Stravinsky and György Ligeti, who similarly fragmented and reorganized the linearity of music.

In Bruckner, there is a essential unease – a tension that arises not from the mere imitation of achieving an effect, be it dark, solemn or grandiose, but from the composer’s very struggle to grasp at something ineffable. The music does not simply seek to please or to titillate; it seeks to offer an experience that may, in some shadowy, uncertain way, illuminate the mysteries of life and perhaps even that which lies beyond.

The Adagios of his last three symphonies are expanses of magnificent, sublime vastness. Spaces in which time stands still and expands. Yet, as with the works of his great predecessor, Richard Wagner, the staggering beauty of Bruckner's music does not reveal itself through conventional harmony or easily discerned melodies. Instead, it is a strange, elusive beauty, distinguished by an uncanny abrasion—a wearing away of familiar forms—against a backdrop of enigmatic chord progressions. His music quivers on the edge of dissolution, as if the composer himself is lost in the very darkness or eternity he seeks to comprehend. The nervousness of his symphonies is the nervousness of a man who peers into the void and does not know what he will find there.

Gothic imagery. The tomb of Anton Bruckner in St. Florian. In a crypt where the symphonist lies beneath his organ and opposite a wall of skulls.

The Greatness of Music
Thus, we return to the notion of music as a conduit to something greater – something that transcends the mere performance of discomfort and instead confronts the listener with the raw, unmediated essence of existence. In metal, form and content are safely entwined but in Bruckner there is no such safety. 

Against the grandeur and triumph of the hard-rocking finale of the 8th symphony stands for example the finale of the 5th symphony in which the music seems to strain against its own form. Searching for a way to express that which cannot be contained, and in doing so, it forces us to confront the most essential questions of our lives. What are we? Where are we going? What, if anything, lies beyond the darkness that awaits us all?

In this light, the true power of music lies not in its ability to entertain or to comfort, but in its capacity to unsettle, to disrupt our complacency, and to force us to grapple with the mystery of existence itself. For those willing enough to listen, Bruckner’s monumental symphonies offer not only the comfort of unadultered beauty in well-worn forms, but also the disquieting promise of something far more profound – an experience that, like life itself, refuses to be safely contained.

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- Wouter de Moor