10. Vocal music.

Bruckner's upbringing at St Florian ensured that his models for sacred music would include Austrian masses, beginning with Lotti, Assmayr and Mozart, and including Michael and Joseph Haydn. His first large-scale sacred choral works, the Requiem in D minor (1849) and the Missa solemnis (1854), reveal the strong influence of these Classical precedents. Later, Mendelssohn's influence can be detected in the cantata-like structure of a work such as Psalm cxlvi, composed in the mid-1850s. The setting of Psalm cxii (1863), which Bruckner wrote under Kitzler's tutelage, however, remains Classical – even neo-Baroque – in spirit and inspiration.

Bruckner's short works for the Liedertafel Frohsinn consist of songs on patriotic German texts and poems about nature, and drinking-songs, which were in vogue with the German male-chorus movement in the mid-19th century. They sometimes feature special effects such as humming and even yodelling, occasionally combined with some of Bruckner's most sophisticated and idiosyncratic harmonic gestures.

With the Ave Maria and Afferentur regi, both composed in 1861, Bruckner found his own distinctive style of vocal music. Later, in Germanenzug (1863–4), and especially the masses in D minor (1864) and F minor (1867–8), he succeeded in combining the neo-Baroque structural matrix of his earlier choral music with the freedom and expressiveness of Wagnerian chromatic harmony. Simultaneously, the D minor and F minor masses continue the tradition of the Viennese concerted mass; in style and scope they are the direct descendants of Mozart's Requiem and Beethoven's Missa solemnis.

While the great choral works of Bruckner's later period such as the Te Deum (1881–4), Psalm cl (1892) and Helgoland (1893) all extend the stylistic synthesis first achieved in the masses in D and F minor, the Mass in E minor and the later small-scale sacred choral works develop a neo-Palestrinian style enriched by chromatic harmony. In these masterpieces, Bruckner frequently exploited enharmonic transformation to represent redemption through faith. In Christus factus est (1884), for example, the pain of Christ's Crucifixion and Original Sin are associated with the ‘fallen’ D (bars 14–19). Through Christ's sacrifice, the fallen D is then raised, on the word ‘Christ’, by its emphatic enharmonic transformation into ‘risen’ (i.e. resurrected) C (bars 38–40). With Os justi (1879), Bruckner proved to the sceptical Ignaz Traumihler, choirmaster at St Florian, that he could compose a work in the best spirit of the Cecilian movement entirely in the Lydian mode. In spite of relinquishing all chromatic-harmonic metaphors, Bruckner was still able to do justice to the text: in this magnificent motet, the ‘all-encompassing’ laws of God are represented by the dramatic octave jumps in contrary motion in the outer voices in the opening bars (1–10) and by the marvellous suspension sequences (bars 10–16) that realize divine law expressed in musical terms.

Mozart's Requiem continued to fascinate Bruckner throughout his life and to serve as the yardstick against which he measured his own sacred music. Research has revealed that, in the process of revising the Mass in F minor in 1877, Bruckner referred directly to the Requiem for justification of his own composition procedures. An interesting feature of his method with regard to the large-scale choral works is that he generally wrote out the choral lines in their entirety before filling in the instrumentation. While, in later revisions, changes made to the accompaniment could be far-reaching, the vocal parts tended to remain – like a sacred cantus firmus – largely untouched. Thus, the choral part of the first version of the Mass in F minor (completed in 1868) remained the same while the figuration in the instrumental accompaniment was substantially reworked in later revisions (1877, 1881 and the 1890s). The structural priority of the vocal lines can be observed in the genesis of the later large-scale choral works such as the Te Deum and Helgoland.

Some writers have commented on the ‘gothic’ quality of Bruckner's music, both symphonic and choral. Perhaps this stylistic trait is most noticeable in the neo-gothic style – organum-like parallel octaves and 5ths – of the Te Deum. Bruckner first sketched the work in May 1881 but was apparently dissatisfied with it and put the draft aside. In September 1883 he returned to the project, inserted the fugue (bars 402–48) and recomposed the ascending harmonies from the climax of the Adagio (bars 163–76) of the Seventh Symphony at the climax of the Te Deum (bars 449–66). Wagner's death provided the impulse to finish the Te Deum. Indeed, it was the possibility of a programmatic connection between the two compositions – the earlier passage in the Adagio of the Seventh representing Wagner's apotheosis and the music of the ‘non confundar’ passage in the Te Deum derived from it – that precipitated completion of the Te Deum, which Bruckner himself considered his greatest work. Surely, the motivic reference to the Te Deum in the finale of the Ninth Symphony and Bruckner's proposal that it crown the Ninth if the finale remained unfinished, suggest that he considered the Te Deum his ultimate statement of faith. Bruckner's faithful disciple Mahler concurred; in his personal score, he crossed out the instrumentation and wrote: ‘For the tongues of angels, heaven-blest, chastened hearts and souls purified by fire’.

Bruckner, Anton