I ran across this on YouTube this evening, and have not yet watched all of it (somewhat over two hours).
For the present, I wish simply to note Bruckner's attachment to the pipe organ. It was here, on the organ bench, that he became a musical genius. While organist at the cathedral at Linz, he would improvise after Mass for hours. One can see and hear this instrument, unaltered since Bruckner's time, at about 25 minutes into the film.
Then he would work on his counterpoint, music theory, and compositions well into the night. Repeatedly one encounters notations in his workbooks: “two o'clock in the morning...” “four o'clock in the morning...”
Throughout his life, the organ was his preferred instrument. Later in life, he taught both music theory and organ performance at the conservatory in Vienna. For the last of a series of organ recitals in England, he improvised for an audience of seventy thousand at the Royal Albert Hall to delirious acclaim. And at the last, he was buried under the pipe organ in the chapel of the great monastery of St. Florian, where he had learned to play as a choirboy and returned repeatedly for spiritual solace.
Despite its general debt to Beethoven and Wagner, the "Bruckner Symphony" is a unique conception, not only because of the individuality of its spirit and its materials, but even more because of the absolute originality of its formal processes. At first, these processes seemed so strange and unprecedented that they were taken as evidence of sheer incompetence.... Now it is recognized that Bruckner's unorthodox structural methods were inevitable.... Bruckner created a new and monumental type of symphonic organism, which abjured the tense, dynamic continuity of Beethoven, and the broad, fluid continuity of Wagner, in order to express something profoundly different from either composer, something elemental and metaphysical. (Deryck Cook, s.v. "Bruckner, Anton," in the New Grove Dictionary of Music)
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