Psychology and environment

Within the last two decades, the study of Bruckner and his music has begun to change radically. For long a generalized picture was current that depicted a simple religious man, ill at ease in society, an anachronism in his age who suffered neglect, misunderstanding, and the malice of critics. The martyrdom of the life bred the mysticism of the artist; the social anachronism became the timeless prophet. Much of this rested on flimsy evidence and critical misunderstanding. When the Bruckner number of Musik-Konzepte appeared in 1982, Norbert Nagler could still bemoan the tendency of anecdotes to swamp analysis. The evidence of recent Bruckner scholarship suggests that criticism and analysis of his music is now flourishing as never before, and with the full arsenal of modern techniques. Anecdotes have also to some extent given way to more complex questions in the area of biographical study. As a result interpretation has acquired new directions that are not simply to be traced in specialized Bruckner scholarship.

That Bruckner's life and times impinged upon his music is now a given of scholarship, and is reflected in the attention devoted specifically to his personality in recent conferences. At least one distinguished scholar has noted that this was not always the case. It is arguable that what has changed is the need to subscribe to one or other of the myths about Bruckner that enrolled him either as a mystic or as a simpleton. Such constructs lead to value judgements about the work; embarrassment at their inadequacy was just as likely to lead to an exclusion of the life from critical accounts.

At the beginning of Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, the Prologue announces a dramatic trajectory that leads from 'jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits' to 'the stately tent of war'. Within this tent, a metaphor for the theatrical playing-space, we will be granted the privilege of listening to the hero's 'high astounding terms' (5); indeed, the extraordinary linguistic impact of Tamburlaine is singled out here as the most self-evident feature of an innovative dramaturgy and provides, as Patrick Cheney states, 'an advertisement for Marlowe as England's new poet'. But an 'astounding' dimension inheres, too, in the implication that the Prologue will 'lead' (3) the audience from one kind of theatre to another: members of a flock, spectators are herded to new horizons in such a way as to make them the sheep-like followers of the shepherd-bandit. In such a process, the visual impression of Tamburlaine plays a prominent part, since 'his picture' (7) is seen to belong with his 'astounding' verbal ability. Building upon the Prologue's suggestions, this chapter argues that Tamburlaine the Great is 'astounding' in multiple respects. Not only do the plays destabilize Elizabethan orthodoxies at the levels of language, class, and ethnicity, they simultaneously query contemporary constructions of identity and authority, to the extent that existing systems of interpretation and classificationare thrown into disarray. So insistent are the plays' unmoorings of the ideologies of their time that even sexual demarcations, and divine norms, enjoy a slim purchase.

Background

The social upheavals that followed the French Revolution and its wars brought accelerating change to musical and concert life, including the rise of vocal and choral societies in many countries. Not only did they fulfil a social need, they enabled people to express feelings of patriotism which became more pronounced as the political map of Europe changed. The great choruses in Verdi's Risorgimento operas had their counterparts in the inspirational pieces for male-voice choir (Liedertafel) which became a vital part of music-making throughout Germany and Austria.

Germany led the way with Zelter's Berlin Liedertafel in 1809, followed by others in Leipzig, Breslau, Magdeburg, and Stuttgart. The first German choral festival took place in Plochingen (Württemberg) in 1827. In Austria, Metternich regarded any kind of popular movement with suspicion and initially refused to allow the establishment of choral societies. The founding of the Wiener Männergesang-Verein in 1843, however, provided the necessary impetus, as did the culturally and politically motivated cultivation of Austrian folksong. Frequent contacts between societies resulted in joint tours and choral festivals as symbols of ‘choral solidarity’. Beginning in the 1850s, choral festivals grew increasingly common in the 1860s, while enlarged bodies emerged such as the ‘Upper Enns Choral Association’ proposed by Josef Hafferl (the president of Linz's Frohsinn), Alois Weinwurm (the conductor of its Sängerbund), and August Göllerich senior in 1863. Its objects were to provide support for new and existing societies, to encourage the writing of new choruses by native composers, and to institute festivals such as the first Oberösterreich-salzburgische Sängerbundesfest in Linz from 4 to 6 June 1865.

Historical and social environment

The imperial capital and residence of Vienna, the central melting pot of The Habsburg monarchy's empire of four million people, contained roughly 600,000 inhabitants at the end of the 1860s and had spread far beyond its old city walls. New architecture quickly determined the city's image. The entire city was a building site: in 1857 the Emperor Franz Joseph I had ordered the razing of the fortifications and in their place the new Ringstrasse emerged with its official buildings and various palaces of the grand bourgeoisie.

Even if Austria's power had declined in 1866 because of its defeat by Prussia, the liberal constitution of 1867 still led to the equality of all citizens. The loosening of the phase of political Restoration as well as Liberalism brought a general commercial upswing followed by a long stagnation after the stock market crash of 1873. The subsequent downfall of Liberalism led in the final decades of the century to the rise of anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism. The Taaffe government's swing away from Liberalism in 1879 led To increased political activity and socio-religious ferment. The strong growth of population and the doubling of the inhabitants up to 1890 revealed new problems in a great city, as also intermittently did problems of nationality through the immigration of essential labour.

People have always noticed that representations affect them, and have variously explained, classified, evaluated, justified, regulated, and enjoyed this phenomenon. Whereas Plato banned poets from his republic in order to restrict influences upon the citizenry, Aristotle formulated his theory of catharsis to legitimate the effects of art upon persons. Noting that drama consistently produces in audiences certain effects - fear, pity, admiration, awe, superiority, affinity, belief, skepticism, compassion, and relief - Aristotle identified these responses as official aims of art, formalizing what audiences feel as the standard moral effects achieved by art.

Since the late seventeenth century, when mass print culture provided greater numbers of persons with the regular affective experience of literature, the novel became another focal point in the ongoing debate and discourse about the effects of representation. Even more than drama and poetry, the novel seemed to demand the reader’s sentiments, through the staged direct address of epistolarity, or through the differently but equally contrived direct address of apostrophe to reader. Thus, when Harriet Beecher Stowe famously enjoins readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to “feel right,” she is writing in an ancient tradition to which modern sentimentalism has contributed its affective techniques, upholding longstanding assumptions about reader response. No less than Aristotle assuming that tragedy arouses terror and pity in audiences, Stowe relies on the sentimental novel to produce sympathy in readers, an abolitionist sympathy for the plight of slaves in mid-nineteenth-century America.

On first consideration, Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris may seem an odd couple to discuss in tandem. In many ways the plays represent polarities within the Marlowe canon. Despite the many questions surrounding the dating of Dido, Queen of Carthage, most scholars agree that it is Marlowe's first dramatic effort, perhaps scripted while he was still a student at Cambridge, and The Massacre at Paris one of his last, probably written sometime in 1592. Moreover, Dido finds its provenance in classical epic, dramatizing Books 1, 2, and 4 of Virgil's Aeneid with a veneer of Ovidian shading from the Heroides, whereas The Massacre is Marlowe's only play based on topical events, a rehearsal of recent upheavals in France. Additionally, whereas Dido was first performed by boy actors for a private theatre, The Massacre was apparently acted by a professional company. Finally, although many aspects of Dido have been interrogated - authorship, date, genre - the text of the play has not been questioned; conversely, The Massacre is generally accepted as Marlowe's most corrupt text, most likely the truncated product of memorial reconstruction by a troop of actors.

However, despite these many antitheses, similarities between the two plays abound, a number of which will be examined in this chapter. Although both plays share a traditional scholarly neglect, both have recently evoked considerable critical interest. Moreover, each play presents tragic protagonists – Dido and the Guise – who struggle for national leadership within a complex web of political and amatory events that determine their downfalls, even though in Dido the web is woven by the gods, in The Massacre by combating political forces. In addition, in typical Marlovian fashion, both plays dramatize multiple inversions of accepted rubrics of politics, gender, and sexuality, and in both plays the accepted audience response to these subversive behaviours has been debated by commentators.

August Göllerich relates this anecdote in his chapter about Viennese concert life and Bruckner's work on his own Te Deum in 1884. In the context of a discussion of Bruckner's large sacred compositions, while admitting the futility of trying to read the composer's mind through Göllerich's filter, it is tempting to speculate as to the nature of the deliberations inspired by Berlioz's monumental work. At the very least it is safe to say that ‘and ecclesiastical it isn't!’ states the obvious: the Berlioz performance had not taken place in church. Göllerich's narrative suggests a more critical stance on Bruckner's part. Perhaps the composer was pondering issues of musical style: had Berlioz, whom he admired, provided an appropriate setting for a sacred Latin text – a text that had been very much on Bruckner's mind in recent months? Or by ‘kirchlich’ did he mean ‘liturgical’, thus questioning the appropriateness of the Berlioz work for use as service music? Perhaps venue and content intersected in Bruckner's mind, and the Berlioz performance caused him to deliberate on broader, one might say Wagnerian, issues of where and how sacred and secular overlap. He had already been accused himself of turning the Credo of the F minor Mass in to a religious ‘Wolf ‘s Glen Scene’. Given that he would finish his career with a symphony dedicated to God, and propose his Te Deum as a suitable Finale, it may not be far fetched to speculate that weighty aesthetic questions of meaning and function in sacred as opposed to secular music were on his mind as he climbed to and from the organ gallery that evening in 1884.

From assistant teacher in the ‘Land ob der Enns’ via professor of music to university lecturer in the capital city of Vienna: that is the astonishing career of Anton Bruckner, who finally in 1891 was also created an honorary doctor of the University of Vienna.

Bruckner was born into the Metternich era. Upper Austria, the land above the Enns, was an agrarian crown land of the Danubian monarchy that was stamped by a patriarchal social structure. The church and its representatives acquired great importance in that the spiritual was regarded as absolute authority. In cultural matters, the visual arts outranked music. From 1854 to 1861 the novelist Adalbert Stifter (1805–68) ran the Oberösterreichischer Kunstverein (founded in 1851) as vice-president, in which capacity he took steps to support numerous artists. On his instigation the Oberösterreichische Landesgalerie was founded. In poetry Stifter (who was also a painter) and the dialect poet Franz Stelzhamer (1802–74) achieved great influence. The dilettantism of the Biedermeier period initially played a great role in music. In the countryside folk music was intensively cultivated while in the towns and cities the nobility and art-loving bourgeoisie emerged as the driving force. The monastic foundations also played an important role in nurturing art and music.

Stabbed by a Catholic assassin at the end of The Massacre at Paris, the dying Henry III of France commands his favourite Epernoun to 'Go call the English agent hither straight', and then begs this 'Agent for England' to return to London and tell 'What this detested Jacobin hath done . . . Salute the Queen of England in my name, / And tell her, Henry dies her faithful friend' (5.5.50- 107). There is a tradition that the mute 'English Agent' in this scene is, in fact, the author's self-portrait in his guise as 'Mr Merlin', the English envoy to Henry of Navarre, and so what he has to tell can be interpreted as the play itself, which therefore ends where it begins, restaging for Londoners the perfidies of the French Wars of Religion. And since the text, which dates from late in 1592, may be the last he wrote, this scene in which he might have depicted himself has an uncanny relation to Marlowe's final mission, which, as retraced by Charles Nicholl, seems to have been an attempt to infiltrate the Brussels headquarters of England's Catholic exiles, so as to 'turn' one of them against their candidate for Elizabeth's throne: Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who happened to be patron of the company then performing the dramatist's works - including The Massacre at Paris - on Bankside.

Maestros, mystics, and monuments

In the Linz Bruckner Symposium of 1982, specifically devoted to interpretation, Daniel Barenboim gave a lecture whose title, ‘Mystische Erfahrung’, is symptomatic of the celebrity conductor's relationship to the cult of the mystic Bruckner. In an extreme form it can be seen in the publicity for the appearance of Celibidache's Munich recordings of Bruckner in Music Theory Online. The writer took pains to link ‘the last surviving great genius of conducting’ to ‘an entirely new and extremely moving Bruckner’. The reminiscences of a member of the Munich Philharmonic detailed the maestro's unusually protracted tempi, extreme demands on players, and the level of abuse that accompanied them. The interpretations, at which people wept openly, were ‘more than mere music’, and ‘clothed the soul of the listener’ like ‘running water’. When not screaming abuse at violinists, Celibidache was a nice man who loved dogs.

A strange Bruckner did indeed emerge, characterized by a breadth of tempo that at times verged on the eccentric. Such passages as the extraordinarily slow coda to the Fourth Symphony's Finale presented a vision that seemed to represent the maestro cult's rage at the lack of truly creative powers. Against this there were moments, and indeed whole movements, that illuminated Bruckner's ideas. Comparison of these eccentric performances with those from his earlier Stuttgart years suggested that extreme breadth came late to Celibidache's Bruckner; in this he played out another element of the maestro cult, the ‘Olympian’ wisdom that comes to conductors with age in the form of increasingly slower tempi.

Textual matters loom large with Bruckner. Not only have they been considered and reconsidered by generations of Bruckner scholars, but anyone, professional, student, or amateur, approaching this repertory soon runs into the ‘Bruckner problem’. Put simply, many of Bruckner's works exist in multiple versions and editions, some of which are clearly authentic, some of which are now known to be not authentic, and some of which are of unclear or disputed authenticity. The existence of multiple versions of Bruckner's symphonies goes back to the composer's time; as is well known, he prepared more than one version of several of his works and the published texts of most of his works deviate in some way or another from his manuscript scores.

Currently the study and performance of Bruckner's works are ordinarily based on a fairly well-defined canon of versions drawn from the Bruckner Gesamtausgabe, the now nearly complete critical edition of Bruckner's works primarily edited by Leopold Nowak. For several symphonies, notably the Second, Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth, some conductors and critics prefer the somewhat different scores edited by Robert Haas, who directed the first collected edition in the 1930s and 1940s. Nowak's and Haas' scores alike are based principally on Bruckner's autograph manuscript scores and, with a few exceptions – most importantly, Haas' editions of the Second and Eighth Symphonies – are examples of sound editorial methodology.

Analysts of late nineteenth-century chromatic harmony must often reconcile both the conservative and progressive aspects of the music. On the one hand, the music has a venerable history to which it is indebted; on the other, musical works are subject to the creativity of individual musical voices, with resultant effect on tonal relations. This situation presents a problem that is perhaps more difficult than a first glance might suggest. In deference to its history, a sensitive analyst might opt to mimic the historical process by applying tried-and-true analytical techniques that have served so well for earlier musical styles. An equally sensitive analyst may be drawn to the opposite pole; in an effort to capture the music's forward-looking, individual nature, an analyst may apply newer methodologies, adapting them to account for the music's veiled tonality.

Certainly, it is a truism that an analytical methodology will return results that betray its bias. For example, Edward Laufer accounts for many of Bruckner's bold harmonic progressions by illustrating how a traditional classical model might be distorted to produce the end result. One of the techniques that Laufer insightfully asserts to be typically Brucknerian is ‘elision’, the process whereby a composer omits essential voices in a texture that provide the understood consonant support for a prolongation. The musical texture present is shown to take its meaning from a set of passing tones originating in a traditional, yet unstated harmonic model. Thus, Laufer's analytical technique is used to normalize Bruckner's composition to a classical model.

Introduction

The majority of Bruckner's smaller sacred works belong to the period in which he was either partly or wholly devoted to the composition of church music – from 1841 in Windhaag until his move to Vienna in 1868. After this, Bruckner was still involved in churchmusic as an organist at the Hofkapelle until October 1892, at the court parish church of St Augustine where he played at two services each month from 1870 to the late 1880s and, occasionally, at other churches in Vienna and its suburbs; but the composition of orchestral music took precedence and sacred works were composed sporadically. Most of these sacred miniatures fall into the category of ‘occasional music’, composed specifically or by demand for church choirs in St. Florian, Linz, and Kremsmünster, but it is a measure of Bruckner's greatness that several of them transcend the limitations of their fairly confined medium and can stand favourable comparison with the three great Masses, the Te Deum and Psalm 150.

The early works (c. 1835–1855)

Bruckner's first faltering attempts at composition were made in the mid-1830s while he was staying with his cousin Johann Baptist Weiss in Hörsching. Weiss gave him organ lessons and some basic instruction in harmony and counterpoint, and the Pange lingua in C major, WAB 31, a setting of St Thomas Aquinas' hymn for unaccompanied four-part choir in a simple homophonic style, is the obvious fruit of this teaching. Bruckner thought highly enough of this early motet to revise it more than fifty years later.

Neither “globalization theory” nor “postcolonial studies” are terms that easily reveal their meanings. The areas of knowledge to which they refer are not what they seem, and a great deal of confusion surrounds their uses. Readers would be forgiven for thinking that “globalization theory” denoted an emergent body of writing called forth by inexorable recent developments in technology and communications, as well as radical shifts in the world economy and in geopolitics, all of them presaging the rise of a truly global culture - the obliteration of state sovereignty in a world marked by fluidity and border-crossing. In turn, these readers might suppose that “postcolonial studies” referred to an inaugural critique of Eurocentrism prompted by a new diasporic wave of intellectuals from the former colonies resident in metropolitan centers who - informed by postwar theories of language and representation - began in the late 1970s to cast older versions of “Western Man” in doubt in an act of writing back to Empire.

Actually, neither is the case. One has to begin by distinguishing between the study of global issues or colonial pasts per se and the fairly recent creation of schools of thought that retrospectively appropriate the more general cases fleetingly echoed in their names. When invoked in European or North American universities since the beginning of the 1990s, globalization theory and postcolonial studies turn out to be very specialized discursive formations passing for older and more varied types of enquiry. This slippage between connotation and code is one of the first things to understand about the conjunction of the two terms.

Against poetics

Postmodernism was not the invention of literary critics, but literature can certainly claim to be one of the most important laboratories of postmodernism. Perhaps because of the sheer weight of numbers in literary studies during the 1970s and 1980s, as compared with the numbers of scholars writing or students reading in architecture, film studies, or the embryonic disciplines of women's studies or cultural studies, ideas of postmodernism tended in these formative decades to be framed by reference to literary examples.

Literary postmodernism has tended to be focused on one kind of writing, namely, narrative fiction. The most influential books on literary postmodernism, such as Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism and Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction, are devoted to postmodern fiction. It seems oddly fitting that what Hutcheon calls the “poetics of postmodernism” should turn out to be most in evidence in its fiction. One might almost say that the move from modernism to postmodernism involves a move from poetry to fiction. Whether in the puckered vortex of the imagist poem or in the dynamic anthologies of allusions, meanings, and voices characteristic of long poems like Eliot’s The Waste Land, Pound’s Cantos, David Jones’s In Parenthesis and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, the effort of the modernist poem was to condense the complexity of time and history, to make them apprehensible in a single frame.

Bruckner reception has long exhausted itself in footnotes to hermeneutics and criticism and in the circumstances of, and commentaries on, performances. The need for a classification of Bruckner literature according to sociological criteria and authors' intentions has only been answered hesitantly. Not until the 1980s did works appear with important consequences for the analysis of authors' strategies. Mathias Hansen stated then that ‘The complicated history of the effect of Anton Bruckner's work is an unparalleled result of the accumulation and intertwining of irrational meanings, which revealed their concrete intentions with ever less pretence since the twenties and were completely exposed under German Fascism.’ By 1991, when the first study of Bruckner anecdotes appeared, reappraisal of Bruckner reception history and its ideology still hardly registered. It still dealt mainly in documenting the dates of reception, which was undeniably necessary and useful. Far-reaching discussions then began with international conferences in the USA and Britain in 1994 and 1996.

Why question the views, intentions, actions, and effects of authors? Is it mostly just a matter of eliciting politico-ideological implications of Bruckner reception and letting them run towards National Socialism? This would certainly be too simple and one-sided. If it is assumed that biographies or general accounts of artists not only represent but also construct and (re)constitute reality, then it is a major purpose of music history to investigate how and why this happened.