4. Vienna, 1868–96.

Bruckner assumed his duties at the conservatory in October 1868 at a starting annual salary of 800 gulden and remained on the faculty until he retired in January 1891. Dürrnberger's harmony book, Sechter's Die Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition, Marpurg's Abhandlung von der Fuge, and E.F. Richter's Lehrbuch der Fuge served as his texts, and Sechter's ‘Fundamentalbasstheorie’ provided the substance for the lectures. Student reminiscences report consistently that his subject matter was textbook harmony and counterpoint, not musical composition. During his conservatory years Bruckner held two other teaching positions: lecturer in harmony and counterpoint at the University of Vienna and piano instructor at St Anna's teacher-training college for women. Despite dogged opposition from the critic Eduard Hanslick, who was also on the faculty, Bruckner was appointed to the university in October 1875 after three unsuccessful applications. At St Anna's Bruckner suffered one of the most humiliating experiences of his career. He began as instructor at the school in autumn 1870 and was cited for disciplinary action in September 1871 after a complaint that he had improperly addressed some of the students. The education minister Carl Stremayr (dedicatee of the Fifth Symphony) ruled in Bruckner's favour and he was able to remain until 1874, when the position was given to Weinwurm in a bureaucratic reorganization.

As well as teaching, Bruckner was one of three organists in the Hofkapelle, where he performed until 1892, and was second singing instructor and vice-archivist between 1875 and 1878. Despite his unquestioned mastery of the organ (his reputation as an international virtuoso was established by highly acclaimed tours to Nancy and Paris in spring 1869 and London in July and August 1871) there are indications that he did not always perform the service music in a manner acceptable to his superiors. Perhaps he was more interested in improvising than in playing the prescribed pieces. Under Herbeck's successor as Hofkapellmeister, Joseph Hellmesberger, Bruckner often found himself demoted from High Mass to afternoon Benediction. The chapel afforded an occasional performance outlet for his compositions. The F minor Mass received its première with the Philharmonic Orchestra and the chapel choir in the Augustinerkirche in June 1872 (at Bruckner's own expense) and was performed in the Burgkapelle itself in 1873; it remained in the repertory along with the D minor Mass until the dissolution of the court in the 20th century.

Throughout Bruckner's years of service in Vienna, the Hofkapelle provided very little stimulus for composition; most of the important motets of the period – Locus iste, Os justi and Virga Jesse floruit, for example – were written for Linz or St Florian (though the last-named was first performed in Vienna). In fact, given the obligations of his various posts and the numerous private students, it is surprising that he found any time to compose. In Vienna the symphony became the focus of his creative activity, starting with the so-called ‘Nullte’ (no.0), which he completed in Linz in September 1869. Speculation in early biographies that its autograph score (dated 24 January – 12 September 1869) is a revised version of the work is incorrect: it was originally entitled ‘no.2’ and composed after the First Symphony (1865–6). The designation ‘Nullte’ or ‘zero’ came to be applied because of the symbol ‘ø’ which Bruckner wrote on the manuscript during the 1890s to indicate that he had withdrawn (‘annulliert’) the work from the corpus of numbered symphonies. It is not known when Bruckner rejected it, although it must have been by the end of December 1873, when he completed the first version of the Third Symphony (which was always ‘no.3’).

The next symphonic effort was an aborted work in B , which survives only in sketches dated 29–31 October 1869. After a hiatus during 1870 and much of 1871, he returned to the genre with renewed vigour and completed a remarkable series of four symphonies in little over four years: no.2, October 1871 to September 1872; no.3, October 1872 to December 1873; no.4, January to November 1874; and no.5, February 1875 to May 1876. A rehearsal of the Second Symphony (originally entitled no.3 because the ‘Nullte’ was still no.2) with the Vienna PO conducted by Otto Dessoff in 1872 produced the verdict that it was too long, with the result that the performance was aborted. Once again Herbeck intervened, and the première took place a year later under the composer's direction on 26 October 1873. Reaction to this first Viennese performance of a Bruckner symphony was mixed.

In August 1873 Bruckner went to Marienbad (now Mariánské Lázně) for a vacation, taking advantage of the opportunity to visit Wagner in Bayreuth and secure his acceptance of the dedication of either the Second or the Third Symphony; Wagner chose the latter. Bruckner's continued allegiance to Wagner drew him painfully and irrevocably into the musical-political maelstrom that raged in Vienna for the remainder of the century. In Linz Bruckner had had a powerful ally in Hanslick, who thought he had found the contemporary symphonist so long absent from the Austrian scene. However, by the middle of the 1870s Bruckner's unabashed admiration for Wagner (and perhaps his repeated attempts to obtain a position at the university) turned Hanslick and his followers, Max Kalbeck and Gustav Dömpke, into vicious adversaries. In a segment of the press representing a combination of political liberalism and musical conservatism with Brahms as its idol, they vituperatively condemned what they described as the uncontrolled Wagnerism and decadence of Bruckner's ‘music of the future’.

A revival of the Second Symphony on 20 February 1876 and a disastrous première of the ‘Wagner’ Symphony (no.3) in the Grosser Musikvereinssaal on 16 December 1877 acted as catalysts. Herbeck, who had arranged for the performance of the Third Symphony after the Philharmonic had rejected the work three times, was scheduled to conduct. He died on 28 October 1877, and Bruckner, never a successful orchestral conductor, was forced to take the podium. The orchestra was rebellious; the audience streamed out of the hall during the finale; and Hanslick wrote a blistering review. The only redeeming aspect of the evening for the composer was the presence in the audience of the publisher Theodor Rättig, who agreed, in spite of the débâcle, to print the work. Mahler (possibly with Rudolf Kryzanowsky) made the four-hand piano arrangement. Herbeck's death and the ill-fated Third Symphony performance were the culmination of a series of personal setbacks for Bruckner that began with the loss of his position at St Anna's. His letters from the middle of the decade contain the refrain familiar from his days at St Florian and Linz: he was alone in the face of adversity and misunderstanding. One mitigating factor was his promotion to paid membership in the Hofkapelle in January 1878.

The completion of the Fifth Symphony has been cited as the culmination of a major chapter in Bruckner's compositional history. In 1876 he entered a period in which he became preoccupied with revising earlier scores. Some pieces, such as the masses in D minor and F minor, were subject to a process of subtle ‘fine tuning’ with adjustments in part-writing and hypermetrical structures on the basis of analyses he had made of Beethoven symphonies and music by Mozart (especially the Requiem). The First Symphony underwent a similar ‘rhythmic adjustment’ in 1877. The Second, Third and Fourth were subject to more sweeping changes. In 1876 and again in 1877 Bruckner revised the Second in preparation for and probably as a consequence of the February 1876 performance. A series of rejections in Vienna and Berlin combined with the December 1877 disaster in the Musikvereinssaal prompted a dramatic series of alterations to Symphonies nos.3 and 4 between 1876 and 1878, including the composition of a new finale for the Fourth. He made further changes in the Third in preparation for the 1879 publication and continued reworking the Fourth during 1880. These and subsequent alterations obscured, until the publication of the first versions in Leopold Nowak's collected works edition, the gradual evolution of Bruckner's conception of the genre up to 1876.

In December 1878 Bruckner began his only mature chamber music composition: the String Quintet commissioned by Joseph Hellmesberger, who requested that its original scherzo be replaced by the Intermezzo (wab113). The Quintet was the first of another remarkable series of works including the Sixth Symphony (September 1879 – September 1881), the Seventh (September 1881 – September 1883) and the Eighth (first version, July 1884 – August 1887), and the Te Deum, which he began in 1881 and, after an extended diversion for work on the Seventh Symphony, completed in March 1884. On 14 February 1883 work on the end of the Adagio of the Seventh was interrupted by news of Wagner's death. The closing bars with their magnificent horn outcry were his ‘lamentatio’ on the passing of the ‘Meister aller Meister’. Bruckner had last seen Wagner in summer 1882 at the première of Parsifal in Bayreuth.

He made his final tour as an organ virtuoso in spring 1884, this time to Prague. The same year he was spurned by Liszt, to whom he offered to dedicate the Second Symphony during the latter's visit to Vienna in October. Bruckner was mollified a few months later when Liszt invited him in May 1885 to a performance of the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony in Karlsruhe. August Stradal reported that the relationship remained cool, in part because of Bruckner's outmoded dress and unsophisticated manners on the occasion. Yet when Liszt died in July 1886 Bruckner and August Göllerich attended the funeral in Bayreuth and, at the request of Cosima Wagner, on 4 August Bruckner performed at a Requiem in Liszt's honour, improvising on themes from Parsifal.

The middle 1880s began to bring Bruckner some of the renown as a composer which had so long eluded him. His Seventh Symphony was an overwhelming success conducted by Arthur Nikisch at its première in Leipzig (30 December 1884) and again in Munich under Hermann Levi (10 March 1885). Also in 1885 the String Quintet was performed in Munich and Cologne, and the Third Symphony in Amsterdam, Dresden, Frankfurt and The Hague and at the Metropolitan Opera House (conducted by Walter Damrosch) in New York. Despite Bruckner's fear that Hanslick would undo the accomplishments abroad, Hans Richter conducted the Seventh Symphony in Vienna on 21 March 1886. Hanslick's criticism notwithstanding, the performance was Bruckner's first success in the imperial city. Richter was able to report ‘a radical about-face on the part of the entire Philharmonic Society regarding Bruckner’.

The socio-political climate had become more receptive to Bruckner, in part because Hanslick's musical conservatism and the political circles to which it appealed had come to be counterbalanced by the expanding Viennese Wagnerian movement and the pro-German groups where it found fertile ground. In the Academic Wagner Society Bruckner became something of a cultural cause célèbre. Young Wagnerites including Mahler, Wolf, Göllerich, Ferdinand Löwe and the brothers Franz and Josef Schalk became his staunchest supporters and were often responsible for the performance and promotion of his music. In large part through their efforts, more of his music appeared in print: the String Quintet in 1884, the Seventh Symphony and Te Deum in 1885, and the Third and Fourth symphonies in 1890 and 1889 respectively. With increased fame came honours: in July 1886 Bruckner was appointed a member of the Order of Franz Joseph and in November 1891 a lifelong objective was achieved when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna. Professor Anton Bruckner revised the First Symphony between March 1890 and April 1891 and dedicated it to the university as a token of his gratitude.

One major disappointment was the rejection of the Eighth Symphony by Hermann Levi in 1887. Levi had been one of Bruckner's most active and devoted supporters; among other things he arranged for the dedication of the Seventh Symphony – which he had conducted so successfully – to King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Bruckner's hopes for a Munich première of his new symphony were dashed when the conductor declined on the grounds that he did not understand the work. There is no truth in the story that Levi did not have the courage to tell the composer and asked Franz Schalk to inform Bruckner of his decision. Levi conveyed the news himself in what must have been a difficult letter to write on 7 October 1887. Bruckner recomposed the symphony between 1887 and 1890.

His final burst of compositional energy was focussed on the Ninth Symphony, which he had begun in 1887. He broke off in 1892 to compose his last motet, Vexilla regis (wab51), Das deutsche Lied (wab63) and Psalm cl (wab38), and completed Helgoland (wab71) in August 1893. He finished the first movement of the Ninth on 14 October 1892, the Scherzo on 15 February 1894 and the Adagio in November the same year. In 1895 he was given a small apartment in the Belvedere Palace, where he spent his remaining days wrestling with the finale. His maid reported that he was still trying to complete it on the day he died (11 October 1896).

In 1891 he had suffered a stomach disorder, the first in a series of debilitating ailments which, with few respites, rendered the last years of his life a constant struggle. By 1894 it was almost impossible for him to play the organ because of swelling in his feet; in April that year he was too ill to travel to Graz to hear the long-awaited first performance of the Fifth Symphony conducted by his pupil Franz Schalk. His lifelong religious fervour manifested itself at the end in the dedication of the Ninth Symphony to ‘Almighty God’ as well as in a regimen of prayer carefully recorded in his diaries. His funeral took place in the Karlskirche on 14 October and the following day, in accordance with his will, his remains were placed in the crypt under the great organ in St Florian. Thousands attended the procession to the Westbahnhof, among them Brahms, himself extremely ill, with whom something of a reconciliation had been effected after years of rivalry. At the entombment ceremony the organist Josef Gruber improvised on themes from Parsifal.

Bruckner, Anton