Bruckner owes naught to the opera stage nor to the civic choral society.
He understands the mystery of ritual
and the essential otherness of the encounter that flows from it.

I'm fine with Bruckner and play/sing from the works of many composers for mass. I use everything from Stanley, to Franck, to Boellmann, to Dupre, and have even played some Sweelinck. All wrote some good music.

I tend to get comments from two sides. Either the purists who want only chant and nothing more, or the aged hippies who want Haugen/Haas. The purists I tell to shut up and the hippies to go to mass at St. Butthurt north of us. I can't tailor music to the interests of small groups who would alienate the majority.

Locus iste and Christus factus est!

How could you not love a composer who is so appreciative of a performance of his work that he gives the conductor a gold piece and tells him "have a drink on me"?

You forgot the organ required for the Te Deum.

OK, then. How about his Ave Maria?

The difference, of course, is that Bruckner was from Upper Austria, and Mozart was from Salzburg.

I know that this thread is about Bruckner, however, I have an observation regarding the "operatic" style of the Masses of the 18th and early 19th century.

I have been doing some research into the performance tradition of the Sistine Choir (prior to the pontificate of Pius X), and this has led to research into the castrato tradition (if that's the right word).

What that has led me to believe, is that the so-called "operatic" elements in the Masses of Mozart, Haydn, Cherubini, Vivaldi, et al., are really not "operatic" at all in themselves. The style is really what ought to be called "castrato style": the ornaments and expressive gestures are little more than the stock and trade of the castrati and those trained by them (both men and women). A perfect example is the Christe solo from Mozart's Great C minor Mass: the ornaments, particularly the large leaps, are almost right out of the singing tutors published by castrati. Some of the more florid ornaments are really no more than written-out versions of the kinds of divisions employed by chapel singers in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Could perhaps the anti-castrato mentality of the Caecilianist movement have had an effect on Bruckner and his style of ecclesiastical composition?

Your comments, gentlemen, reminds me of a discussion I heard on a recent episode of Harmonia or Sunday Baroque (I forget which) where they were discussing how the castrati were the 'rock stars' of their day, as much in admiration for their musical expertise as for their, ahem, escapades of a more intimate kind. Perhaps it was more than just the music ruffling the Caecilians' feathers.

Os Justi, then?

Still my favourite, and the one which I will always hold to be of the highest quality, is Virga Jesse.

Os justi is like Palestrina's Sicut cervus in that it's just so pure and simple but so powerful at the same time. Deceptively simple-sounding counterpoint.

Bruckner at Mass? Sure, why not, if you have the forces to pull it off?

I'm hip-deep in the music of Eugeniusz Walkiewicz right now (which WILL be an article, when I collect enough information), and I had an insight about him, and about the better church music composers of the late 19th c (including Bruckner). The problem with most Caecilians was that they confused means with ends, and believed that one wrote sacred music by imitating music approved as sacred. The masters used Romantic means to Caecilian ends (beauty, non-drama, measure and decorum). That didn't exclude Renaissance means, by any means. Often in Walkiewicz one will find contrapuntally-driven "retrograde" (V-IV) progressions that show he knew his Lassus well, yet they're approached with chromatic passing-tones in a way Lassus wouldn't have done.

As we are discussing Bruckner, we sing his setting Locus Iste... Now does anyone know if this was written as a motet, or was it intended to be sung as a Proper?

For the last couple of years we have been singing this as the Gradual at an EF Mass, the problem is that it is missing the verse, which we sing as chant directly afterwards. We have plenty of pedants and they have not complained...

Being a pedant merely means, in my opinion, that one has found one's own 'niche' in life. According to Tommy Aquinas, coming to terms with such is a true sign of humility.