"Heaven in his heavy heart" (Preview)

From Jonathan Williams’ Strung out with Elgar on a Hill, as reprinted in THE LOCO LOGODAEDALIST IN SITU: Selected Poems 1968-70 (1971). A final essay from the Musikfest Berlin concerts I attended in September: Sofia Gubaidulina, Bruckner, and Hans Werner Henze, with a coda on Rudi Dutschke, bricks, and windows. Preview below, and full post on Substack.In his book Strung out with Elgar on a Hill, the poet Jonathan Williams writes:thinking of Anton Bruckner,the Master of Sentences,an old man in Wien,absolutely alone,alone his whole bleeding lifeThe poem ends:heaven in his heavy heart,loins locked apart by heavenly art . . .laterhe became Hitler’s favorite composerThe ninth has no finale. When Bruckner died, an old man housed in the imperial palace, hangers-on came into his rooms and took what they wanted, so that half the sketches he’d made for the finale vanished. The work becomes modernist by accident as much as by design. Bruckner had apparently planned to use a Te Deum or a fugal,…