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By Root 1562 0

stories about Bruckner went the rounds in Vienna, many of them true. Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop. There were, for instance, the incidents regarding the Beethoven and Schubert remains. Both composers were exhumed in 1888 for reburial in “Graves of Honor” in Vienna’s Central Cemetery. Before reburial the coffins were opened for the inspection of doctors and scientists. Bruckner, then sixty-four, showed up uninvited on both occasions. When he saw Beethoven’s open casket, he shoved past the horrified doctors and seized the skull in both his hands, staring into the empty sockets as if he were trying to divine the sublime riddle of genius, and declaimed in his Upper Austrian drawl, “Now ain’t it true, dear Beethoven, that if you were alive today you’d allow me to touch you? And now them strange gentlemen here want to forbid me that!” He had to be forcibly removed. Beethoven’s bones may be decorated to this day by a lens from Bruckner’s spectacles, which fell out during the ruckus.34 He pulled the same stunt at Schubert’s exhumation, refusing to release the skull until they allowed him to place it in the coffin himself.35

As always, Brahms could have forgiven a rival all that (he forgave Wagner much more) if he had been able to find any admiration for the music. He owned and studied some of Bruckner’s scores, but they only confirmed his enmity. To Brahms, Hanslick, and most of their circle the scope and ambition of those symphonies were unwarranted, the occasional worthwhile ideas lost in a meandering maze. Carl Dahlhaus writes of “the supreme nonchalance with which Bruckner presupposed symphonic monumentality while casually abandoning everything which the classical-romantic tradition, as represented by Brahms, understood to be musical logic.”36

At one point Brahms expressed his objections in these terms: “Everything is affectation with him, nothing natural. As to his piety—that’s his business, it’s nothing to me. But this thrashing around is disgusting to me, completely repugnant. He has no conception of a musical logic, no idea of an orderly musical structure.”37 If Wagner strung his operas together in loose quasi-symphonic form, that approach at least was relegated to the dramatic stage and its traditions. Bruckner appeared to bring the same cavalier approach to the genre of the symphony, intoxicating the public with brassy perorations and soaring themes without making any demands on their intelligence, their understanding of formal conventions. In other words, to Brahms and his followers Bruckner pandered to a public in some degree corrupted by Wagner, who wanted only to plunge into a voluptuous bath of sound and emotion.38

While Brahms sniped at Bruckner behind the scenes, Hanslick kept up a relentless attack in print. It was in 1892 that the critic’s review greeted the premiere of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony as “interesting in detail but strange as a whole and even repugnant.… [it features] the immediate juxtaposition of dry schoolroom counterpoint with unbounded exaltation.… Everything flows, without clarity and without order, willy-nilly into dismal long-windedness.… It is not out of the question that the future belongs to this muddled hangover style—which is no reason to regard the future with envy.”39 These diatribes, certainly incited, perhaps in some degree even worded by Brahms, caused Bruckner endless agonies and materially impeded the progress of his career. Carl Dahlhaus wrote, “The anti-Bruckner polemics indulged in by the Brahms party in the 1880s form one of the sorriest chapters in the history of music criticism, mainly because they struck a man who, unlike Wagner, was largely unable to defend himself.”40

Even with Bruckner in his grave, Brahms’s outrage still ran strong. Maybe his most sustained volley came in the last year of his life, a testament he vented to Richard Specht that says much about his relations not only to Bruckner but to Wagner, the Wagnerians, and the Brahmsians.