In the final decades of the nineteenth century the symphony was a loaded genre, both culturally and compositionally. Beethoven's great examples, especially the Eroica, the Fifth, and the Ninth, had long since secured the symphony as the highest, most elevated, and most meaningful genre of instrumental music. Yet, despite its cultural prestige, symphonic composition was beset by special challenges in the late nineteenth century. A sine qua non of the symphony during this era was monumentality, a trait that was essential to the public significance of the genre in an age given to bourgeois expansiveness and increasing rationalization, in which the construction of historical memory (which is what monuments do) increasingly substituted for religion and myth. During this period many progressive composers, including Bruckner, also desired to enrich the symphony with an infusion of “Wagnerian” vocabulary. Gustav Mahler put it simply: “Wagner took over the expressive means of symphonic music, just as now the symphonist will lay claim in his turn to the expressive riches gained for music through Wagner's efforts.” This desire to win some of Wagner's “expressive riches” for the symphony raised something of a compositional puzzle. Monumentality presupposes grandeur, solidity, massiveness; therefore, a crucial task of the symphonist was to find ways of articulating large, coherent formal spans, which rested upon strong tonal and metrical frameworks, out of harmonic and motivic substance that was weighted toward expressive detail and pointed characterization and thus prone to fragmentation.