Ecce sacerdos magnus

Composition and premiere: Bruckner wrote his motet Ecce sacerdos magnus to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the Linz diocese. He completed the piece in April 1885, and it may have been performed in October of that year. First Tanglewood performance: July 1959 in the Theatre-Concert Hall by a Tanglewood Music Center chorus. 

Anton Bruckner, the great Austrian symphonist, was deeply Catholic and a mighty cathedral organist. Born near Linz, Austria, where he was a provincial teacher and organist for nearly half his life, he was extraordinarily prolific as a choral composer, and even today his music for accompanied and unaccompanied chorus is performed far more often than any of his other work, including his symphonies. He was educated by the Catholic Church at St. Florian, where he was trained to become a teacher. After starting his career, he returned to teach at St. Florian, remaining until he took up a position as organist at the Linz Cathedral in late 1855. Choral music, both sacred and secular, continued to be an important facet of his output, even as he moved definitively into the symphonic world after his relocation to Vienna in 1868 to take up a prestigious post at the Conservatory. For years he worked obsessively through puzzles and challenges of traditional counterpoint modeled on Renaissance practices, an exercise that profoundly influenced his work. 

Bruckner’s symphonies are infamously vast edifices, “cathedrals in sound” that reflected Bruckner’s deep study of and adoration for Wagner’s innovations in structure and harmony. In Vienna, though, his lack of social sophistication and experience left him ill-prepared for the petty, but often serious, political sniping that pitted the Brahmsians against the Wagnerians. A perfectionist, he fell prey to the endless need to revise his work. 

Bruckner maintained ties with his colleagues in Linz while in Vienna, and many of his choral works were composed for the cathedral even after his move, including the motet Ecce sacerdos magnus, a setting of a standard text of praise taken from the Biblical book of Ecclesiasticus. 

The motet’s character reflects the same expressive power that he brought to his symphonic music; the addition of trombones and organ is in keeping with a slightly archaic sound-world. The piece is a responsorial, in which a smaller group replies to the pronouncement of a larger one, creating an inherent alternation of textures. The musical idea of the opening unison phrase returns to bind the setting together. Bruckner underlines the ancient origin of the text and his own practice by including a bare plainchant passage within the piece. 

ROBERT KIRZINGER 

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.