Anton Bruckner. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Vienna, 1888. The remains of Beethoven and Schubert are being moved from the Währing cemetery to the new Central Cemetery, and watching the coffins being opened, at his own insistence, is a sixty-four-year-old man with a shaved head and the manner of a village sexton: Anton Bruckner, the greatest living symphonist of the empire. Witnesses, gathered by his biographers Göllerich and Auer, report that he pushed his way forward, took Beethoven’s skull in his hands and held it for a long time, reverently, until they persuaded him to put it back. With Schubert, a moment later, the scene was repeated. It was not the first time: at the exhumation of 1863 he had done everything he could to be there.
It is the most macabre anecdote in nineteenth-century music, and it would be easy to laugh or to recoil. It is more interesting to understand it. Bruckner came from the most devout corner of provincial Austria, where the cult of relics was an everyday religion: for him, touching those skulls was not morbidity but exactly what a pilgrim does with the bones of a saint. Those were his saints. And his psyche, it must be said with the respect it deserves, lived alongside documented obsessions: the compulsion to count, windows, leaves, the bars of his own symphonies; the crises that in 1867 led him to a proper course of treatment; the endless revisions of his scores under other people’s judgment. The man who comforted and supported the young Hans Rott was fragile in a way his century had no word for.
His will closes the story with a coherence no novelist would dare. Bruckner ordered that his body, embalmed, be laid in the crypt of the abbey of Sankt Florian, where he had been a boy chorister: exactly beneath the great organ he had played for twenty years. There he still lies, under tons of pipes, at the spot where the floor shivers when the organ sounds at full power. The man who wanted to touch the relics of his saints became the relic of his own instrument: he asked the dead for the closeness the living gave him so poorly, and in the end he built it for himself for eternity, at the bottom of a church, under the music.