On September 4th, two hundred years ago today, one of the most sublime souls in the history of humanity was born. He was not a man of words, but rather a humble, good-natured man of provincial appearance, a resident of Ansfelden (Austria).

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God wanted the Word to be Music, and in the mind of this genius were born pillars that would support the most overwhelming Symphonic Cathedrals of this eminent art; and God saw that it was good.

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The one who was the great Organist in Sankt Florian, would become a composer in a complicated time for music and politics… which said like this could perfectly seem like I am talking about our time, but no, that was better.

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I´m not going to go into the details of how much he produced: Motets, Psalms, Master Masses, his Marvellous Requiem, a Te Deum of incontestable genius and the immense symphonies painstakingly revised by this giant not exempt from doubts and published outside his time by Leopold Nowak or Robert Hass.

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Bruckner, aware of his talent, lived in eternal compositional doubt, any opinion was considered, in such a way that the array of variants in the different versions is considerably notable.

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Perhaps, with the amazing Third Symphony, he found the perfect way to carry out his complex musical architecture, always by and for the Good God to whom he dedicated his life along with tireless work.

All lovers of music and the historical context of Anton Bruckner know that nothing played in his favour, hence he was the eternal “great forgotten” in the history of classical music due to the injustice of the mediocre and the fervour of those who partisanly followed the currents of agitating and destructive ink against him, such as the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, staunch defender of the Beethovenian tradition embodied by Brahms and declared enemy of Richard Wagner.

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The love that the master from Ansfelden felt for Wagner's work was, in large part, his condemnation to oblivion; all that was missing for Bruckner was to dedicate his third symphony to the genius from Leipzig.

 

While the composer's life was going on and some more than wonderful works opened the souls of true music lovers (as happened with his brilliant Seventh Symphony premiered at the end of 1884 under the baton of Arthur Nikisch), there were also those musical fans where, rather than considering the greatness of the artist, the position imposed by the critics predominated. Fortunately, other young talents saw the greatness of this giant, thus, undisputed geniuses like Gustav Mahler always had him present in their works; Famous are the words that Mahler wrote when reading a score of the “Te Deum” signed by the maestro that express his profound admiration:

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“For the tongue of angels, those who seek God, the hearts that suffer and the souls purified by fire”

 

Gustav Mahler

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Today, Bruckner is already a main pillar of the history of music, a composer who has been followed and imitated throughout post-romanticism well into the 20th century. He shares the glory of the great and the shamelessness of the incompetent. A good man who never bowed his head to submit to the taste of the manipulated masses in an absurd cultural battle for the type of music required at that historical moment.

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“Out of thousands, God has given me talent… And how would the Good God who is in Heaven judge me if I followed others and not Him?”

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Anton Bruckner

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His devout life and his immense work should be an example today so that people would be more independent and less vulnerable to manipulation and deception and so that their own eyes and ears would serve to form their own opinion about art, life, history and the world.

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Today, Anton Bruckner's work has thousands of recordings; even those of the persevering and rigorous conductor Sergiu Celibidache, the complete versions of Eliahu Inbal, the orthodoxy of Eugen Jochum, the majesty of Karl Böhm, the great effect artist Herbert von Karajan on different record labels, that of his physical mirror Günter Wand, Sir George Solti, Daniel Baremboim, Ivan Fischer, Bernard Haitink, Stanislav Skrowaczewsky, Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Simon Rattle, Manfred Honeck, Wilhelm Furtwängler and an almost endless etc…

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We must remember this date and honor the great Austrian genius, honor his methodical study always accompanied by the Divine inspiration that he honored with all his soul. Admire his austerity to exalt personal merit. Remembering the good man he was and the firm testimony of the example before a world, the one we have to live in, where merit died in the jaws of advertising manipulated by checkbook, turning art into a speculative, absurd and boring market where stupidity leads us to the hands of uneducated "scholars" who lead us to a universe filled with amalgams of the most absolute simplicity.

 

If we want music to continue being the art that it was, we must also deserve it.

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Francisco Sanchis Cortés

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