On January 18, 1868, Anton Bruckner renewed his appointment as the conductor of "Liedertafel Frohsinn," an amateur choral society with which he had long been associated. For most of the preceding year, he had been actively involved in the creation of liturgical music, and indeed his Mass No. 3 in F minor was to be the last great work commenced during his Linz period.

But Bruckner had always practiced smaller scale forms of church music, and his four-part setting in the Phrygian mode "Pange, lingua" ("Praise, my tongue, the mystery of the glorious body and of the precious blood, which the fruit of the glorious woman, the King of Nations, sent forth to redeem the World ... "), the devotional text attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, composed in 1868, generally typified the composer's creative approach to reductive vocal idioms.

But this particular work (and the offertory "Inveni David") also brought Bruckner into conflict with the so-called "Cecilian" movement, founded by the musicologist and publisher of church music Franz Xaver Witt. This reformist movement aimed to restore church music as a field of special compositional technique based on the ancient church modes, and its historical precedent could be traced back to the days of Palestrina and the Council of Trent. Although Bruckner frequently composed works such as the one considered here in that deliberately modal style, he did not concur fully with Witt's desire to completely eliminate the orchestra from the liturgical music of the Roman Catholic Church. Both Bruckner and Liszt progressively distanced themselves from Cecilianism, but no doubt one factor which certainly hastened Bruckner's decision was the attitude that Witt himself showed over the publication in 1885 of this setting of the Pange Lingua.

Witt felt that aspects of the music did not conform to his own extremely conservative views, and so without consulting Bruckner first, he took it upon himself to make damaging alterations to the score prior to publication. When Bruckner finally discovered that Witt had deliberately removed many of the most poignant dissonances and suspensions from his score, this normally compliant and obliging composer became unusually indignant, though he was no doubt happy that the work had found its way to publication. In this work, as in a number of Bruckner's remaining small-scale ecclesiastical settings, writes Dietmar Holland, "Bruckner expressly set himself apart—and indeed productively—from the reform efforts of Cecilianism as a source of inspiration. From his own compositional strength he converted the call for older vocal polyphony and Gregorian plainchant as basis of the melody, to an inner artistic concern, and refrained from all stylistic copies ... historical depth and genuine piety are both constituents of Bruckner's originality."

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.