While Bruckner is known chiefly as one of the most important symphonists in music history, he was equally adept in the field of sacred music. The later Te Deum and Psalm 150 show the composer applying his mature symphonic language to the religious medium, yielding works of striking passion and originality. However, Bruckner's earlier sacred works, especially the masses, are fascinating in that they show the amount of expertise he had amassed as a church musician and organist, that skill in turn coming to terms with his newly discovered influences in secular music. The E minor Mass of 1866 was wrought as Bruckner was cutting a path through the revelatory world of Richard Wagner. Thus it is a work which straddles both worlds, yet is fully integrated. It elicits admiration from even those who are otherwise lukewarm to Bruckner's oeuvre. Many have cited this and the other two masses as among the most important sacred works of the Romantic era. Also, the number of themes from the E minor Mass which will reappear in Bruckner's later works provide another vein of fascination as a glimpse into the composer's creative processes.

The opening Kyrie is in E minor and reflects Bruckner's grounding in the Italian Renaissance masters; almost totally a cappella, the brass enters periodically to punctuate the climaxes. If the Kyrie looks back, the succeeding Gloria in C major is ablaze with flashes of the later Bruckner, featuring a melisma by the horns which would appear in the trio of the Sixth Symphony. Similarly, the Credo yields material which would emerge again in Bruckner's later years, specifically in the Te Deum and the scherzo of the Eighth Symphony; in three sections, the two outer ones in C major flank the repose of the second in F major. The following Sanctus in G major begins a cappella. The subsequent grinding entry of the brass as it joins the chorus produces a remarkable passage of great intensity which foreshadows much sacred music of the twentieth century. This resolves to the more reflective mood of the Benedictus, cast in sonata form, which moves with gentle animation; the blaze-up of the coda is almost frightening in its suddenness. The closing Agnus Dei in E minor is ethereal in character and alternates the Renaissance tradition with Wagner-Liszt chromaticism. Its final measures anticipate those of the Seventh Symphony's slow movement, bringing the Mass to a correspondingly serene close.

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