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Ninth and Last. Just how this character could have produced music of coherence, let alone greatness, has long puzzled even the case-hardened musical historians. An important wellspring was certainly his peasant piety. He was a Roman Catholic (like Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert before him). He talked about God as if He were an intimate acquaintance, even dedicated his last symphony to Him. With the resolution of the saints, Bruckner clung to his own musical manner despite a lifetime of disfavor and ridicule.
Long obscured by the tampering efforts of editors and rearranges, Bruckner's work is only now becoming familiar to the public as he wrote it. It consists of nine gigantic symphonies, a sheaf of religious music, and a few odd songs and chamber compositions. Because he admired Wagner's music and loved to write for huge orchestras with extra contingents of brass Bruckner has long had a reputation as a Wagnerian" symphonist. But Bruckner's clear, naive, Austrian melodic style and his love of heaping counterpoint owe far more to Schubert and Bach than they do to Wagner. And Bruckner's pietistic musical world is completely foreign to Wagner's erotic emotionalism.
Before he started on his Ninth Symphony in 1891, Bruckner worried a good deal. At least three previous composers (Beethoven, Schubert, Spohr) had written nine symphonies and then died. Steeling himself with frequent prayer, Bruckner turned out three gigantic movements that many critics now regard as his masterpiece. He died a few months later. His body was interred in a glass coffin in the Augustinian monastery of St. Florian in Upper Austria, where he had once played the organ.