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Bruckner? That’s a swindle that will be forgotten a year or two after my death. Take it as you will, Bruckner owes his fame entirely to me, and but for me nobody would have cared a brass farthing for him. Of course I had nothing to do with it; in fact it happened very much against my will. Nietzsche once declared that I had become famous through mere chance, because the anti-Wagner party required me as anti-pope. That’s nonsense, because I’m not the man to be placed at the head of any party whatsoever. I must go my way alone and in peace.…

After Wagner’s death his party naturally had need of another pope, and they managed to find no better one than Bruckner. Do you really think that anyone in that childish crowd has the least notion what those symphonic boa-constrictors are all about? And don’t you think that I am the musician who knows and understands Wagner’s works best today, certainly better than any of his so-called followers, who would like nothing better than to poison me?

I once told Wagner himself that I was the best Wagnerian of our time. Do you take me to be too dull to have been as enchanted as anyone by the joyousness and sublimity of the Meistersinger? Or dishonest enough to conceal my view that I consider a few bars of this work as of more value than all the operas that have been written since? I an antipope? It’s too absurd! And Bruckner’s works immortal and “symphonies”? It’s preposterous!41

In that mélange of spleen, dubious assertion, and good sense, Brahms’s admiration of Wagner rings true. He repeated the line many times for many years: “I am the best of Wagnerians.” If that seems impossible, there is no doubt that he believed it. Nor was he exaggerating the Wagnerians’ need for a new pope. When the first one died, Bruckner was the available candidate.

Brahms did not mention another and more malevolent dimension to the exalting of Bruckner, which he certainly understood as well. Students like Mahler and musicians like Hans Richter took up Bruckner’s cause because they heard something in the music. (Mahler later deplored it, but he would do the same with Brahms after early enthusiasm.) As the 1880s progressed, however, music in Austria was caught up in the burgeoning struggle between the ascending right wing and the waning left.

A peculiarity noted at the time was that in their musical tastes liberals were largely conservative (i.e., Brahmsian), while the reactionaries took up Wagner’s revolutionary social and German-nationalistic agenda along with his revolutionary music. For the right wing, the exigencies of form proclaimed by the old liberals were to be swept away by a music of passion and blood-instinct. Against the tight, intellectualized chamber music of Brahms were placed Bruckner’s fortissimo rhapsodies: let his pealing trumpets and horns blow away the effete rationalism and elitist aestheticism of the past!

The pan-Germans, the aristocrats, the conservative Catholics and Christian Socialists, took up Bruckner in the same spirit as they had Wagner, as a holy cause. The struggle to gain a hearing for Bruckner was declared identical with the struggle to form a new society purged of the Jew-ridden liberals. There rose the cult of emotion, antirationalism, and German blood that would find its denouement with the Nazis, who exalted Bruckner alongside Wagner. In 1889 the antisemitic organ Deutsches Volksblatt proclaimed, “To invent melodies requires only strong feeling and that involuntary, unerring creative instinct which must be inborn.—Both reside unweakened even today in the raw core of the Volk.” (Brahms preached distrust of instinct, his opponents that instinct is unerring.) That year the same critic inveighed against Brahms’s Third in these terms: “What wretched barrenness of ideas reigns in this … movement, which does not even disdain Jewish-temple triplets simply to appear properly ‘understandable.’ ” Soon after, following Wagner’s lead, another critic simply transformed Brahms into a Jew, alongside his friends and sympathetic critics:

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