The image that most naturally comes to my mind when I think of the music of Anton Bruckner is that of a vast cathedral. This image catches both the vast monumental quality of his symphonies as well as his religiosity.

It is well-known that Bruckner furthered the late Romantic tendency to adapt sonata design in the direction of continuous development. The recapitulation is not so much a return home after the development as it is yet another development section. Insofar as there is a sense of a return home, it is a relative matter. One has drawn closer to the themes as they were first presented. Bruckner tends to achieve a close organic unity over the four movements of a symphony, usually with a close interrelation between themes, a technique particularly notable in the Fourth Symphony (the "Romantic"), but particularly effective, on the whole, in the Eighth Symphony.

It is, perhaps, the central paradox of Bruckner's music that, in spite of his use of continuous development, there is little sense of movement in his symphonies. In the course of an hour or longer, the music has moved very little, or not at all. The image of a vast cathedral catches something of what I mean here. If one enters a cathedral so large that one cannot take all of it in with the first look, there is a progression in which the visitor becomes aware of what fills this large amount of space. But all this time, the visitor is inside the same building and therefore does not have a feeling of having gone anywhere. With a Bruckner symphony, one enters the whole musical space with the opening theme and then wanders through this space for the duration of the work. It is not so much the length as the quality of the music that makes it so spacious. The motet Virga Jesse Floruit is not a miniature cathedral. Rather, Bruckner has built as vast a cathedral in a four-minute work as he has in his seventy-minute symphonies.

A musicological friend of mine once suggestion that there are two fundamental ways in which a composer handles time in musical composition. Either the composer generates time in the course of the music, or the composer appropriates a certain amount of space which then needs to be filled. Beethoven, for example generates his own time while Schubert fills allotted amounts of space. Insofar as these categories interest the reader, one may wish to place some composers somewhere in the middle of this polarity. Bruckner, however, definitely belongs to the extreme end of those who allot themselves space to fill. It is this polarity that offers one of the explanations as to why Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner, while twins in the sense of being contemporary Austrian composers of the late romantic mega-symphony, make such a contrasting pair. In contrast to Bruckner, Mahler generates his musical time as he goes along. The result of this contrast is that, although Mahler's symphonies are at least as rich as Bruckner's, and the contrast of musical materials used as building blocks is much greater, the space in a Mahler symphony tends to be quite narrow. By the end of a Mahler symphony, the listener may have traveled through as much space as in a Bruckner symphony, but usually not very much space at a time. With Mahler, it is more like moving through the narrow corridors of a vast labyrinth from which one emerges from a very different place than from which one began. With Bruckner, the listener is in the totality of the space all the time.

Another way to look at the movement in Bruckner (or its lack), is to note how the circularity of musical thought in Bruckner contrasts with composers who generate their time. The Finale of the Fourth Symphony in particular tries to re-capture and develop the thematic material of the first movement. On the other hand, the finale of the Eighth symphony begins with a bold statement of the troubled opening theme that makes it clear that a transformation of mood is in progress. Indeed, this progression has been well under way since the latter half of the third movement as the anguished expressions of the Adagio had moved to a state of almost reconciled resignation. However, even with this symphony, where the listener has been taken to a very different place by the end, there is still a sense of having moved very little. The cathedral of sound is so large that there is room for it all. It is surprisingly easy for the listener to fail to realize what has happened, so gradual is this progression. By contrast, the B Minor Sonata by Franz Liszt returns to the first theme, presented in much the way it was presented in the beginning, so that one has the feeling of having returned home. In the intervening half hour, however, much water has flowed under the bridge. One has traveled to distant musical spaces before returning. Again, as with the Mahler symphonies, the sense of space at any given time is rather narrow. There is much ground to cover, but one can be in only a small amount of it at a time.

Another reason for the mostly static effect of Bruckner's symphonies is their slow pace. Although the first and last movements are marked Allegro, though perhaps qualified with adjectives such as Moderato, only the scherzos move quickly. This gives the effect of a symphony consisting of three slow movements with one contrasting fast one. For this reason, the unfinished Ninth Symphony still feels rounded off as a three movement symphony where two slow-paced movements sandwich the scherzo. The pace is also slowed by the length of Bruckner's themes. In fact, many of the themes are so long that they are easily be subdivided into smaller elements so that some critics speak of theme clusters. Bruckner takes his time presenting each musical idea and sustains the same leisurely pace each time he returns to that idea to develop it.

The slow pace is heightened by the relatively narrow range of musical material. Here is another interesting polarity in the way contrasting composers operate. Some composers apply their style to a broad range of musical expressions, and others to a small range. Beethoven, for example, has a much broader range than Mozart. Likewise Mahler's range is much greater than Bruckner's. This does not mean that a small range impoverishes a composer's music. When the range is small, many different nuances within that range are explored. Mozart and Bruckner are just as rich as Beethoven and Mahler, just as the number of integers between five and five hundred are just as infinite as the integers between five and 5.40. In any case, by using a relatively narrow range of expression, the contrasts between themes, though clear enough, are not all that great. One does not usually have to travel very far emotionally from one theme to the next. This quality is especially noticeable in the final movement of the Eighth Symphony. The musical ideas from the first three movements return for further development and a conclusion. Basically, Bruckner has lined up these ideas one after the other like sheets hung on a clothesline. This makes the movement rather episodic and, frankly, a bit tenuous (Bruckner never did have an easy time holding up the finale of his symphonies), but the family resemblance of the themes is such that the string remains a coherent one.

The slow pace of Bruckner's symphonies also imbues the emotional content with a dignified solemnity. Neither joyful, even lively rising theme in the finale of the Seventh Symphony nor the brooding Adagio of the Eighth escapes the pall of this solemnity. Only in the scherzos does Bruckner become a little unbuttoned, either in the form of hunting horns in the Fourth symphony or the spritely magic in the Seventh. With a large brass-infested orchestra as a medium, there is a lot of emotional punch to the music, especially at the climaxes, but the slow unfolding of joyful and brooding figures lays a heavy restraint on their emotional quality. The solemnity of the bright, affirmative Seventh Symphony and the disturbed Eighth lays a heavy restraint on the emotions expressed in both of these symphonies. Bruckner's pace gives the listener the space to absorb these emotions slowly and contemplate them at length. In one of his most powerful thematic transformations, the energetic main theme of the scherzo in the Eighth Symphony concludes the finale in a much slower and majestic outburst of glory.

It is well-known that Anton Bruckner was a devout Roman Catholic and it would stand to reason that his religious attitude would have some affect on his music, even if he did not self-consciously try to make his symphonies statements of faith. The compositional techniques Bruckner used were taken most directly from his mentor Richard Wagner, although the whole Austrian symphonic tradition is very much present in this music. Bruckner lacked the skill at orchestration and the overall musical imagination that Wagner had, but it was Bruckner who had the spiritual vision to fill the same techniques with divine light. It was probably this same spiritual vision that led Bruckner to treat Wagner with reverence bordering on idolatry while Wagner comes across as a little condescending in his dealings with his worshipful follower.

In my essay on "religious" music, I noted that the chorale is a convention in western music that is heard as an expression of a religious attitude. There are, in fact, many chorale-type passages in Bruckner's symphonies, often warmly played by the brass choir. However, it is the overall pacing of the symphonies and the building blocks consisting of rich, thick chords that give the impression of each symphony being a gigantic chorale. It doesn't take Bruckner very many specifically chorale-type passages to cement this overall effect. The religiosity of the chorale comes across primarily through inference and is all the more effective for that.

Typically, a Bruckner symphony opens quietly, even silently. There is a murmur, usually a tremolo somewhere in the string section, and then the first theme makes a hushed entry. Its as if Bruckner felt that a symphony should begin the way the universe began. In the beginning was the Void, Nothingness. Out of this void, God brought forth creation. Likewise, the symphony emerges out of the primordial silence, out of the darkness before time began. As the first musical idea emerges and gathers strength, it explodes into the Light God brought forth on the first day to the sound of the full orchestra led by the brass. On a much smaller scale, but with an equally powerful effect, the 1861 Ave Maria opens with a near-silent entry of the upper voices that, likewise, seem to have been called out of the Void. This typical beginning sets the tone for the whole symphony so that there is the constant feeling of fragile life is slipping away and is then being recreated anew with each thrust of energy that follows. It is because the effect of the openings of the symphonies cannot be forgotten that Bruckner has little need for overt religious trappings in his symphonies to convey his deep reverence to God. Once the pregnant darkness has been sounded, the music naturally takes wing from the Holy Spirit.