WATCH: Scottish Chamber Orchestra 2026 Digital Season - Jay Capperauld on Bruckner's Skull
Composer Jay Capperauld explains how, in his piece Bruckner’s Skull, he has tried to understand some of the Austrian’s darker fascinations
“They want me to write differently. Certainly I could, but I must not. God has chosen me from thousands and given me, of all people, this talent. How then would I stand there before Almighty God, if I followed the others and not Him?”
This is a variation on a quote attributed to the late-Romantic Austrian composer Anton Bruckner (1824 -1896), whose reason for writing music is captured dramatically in this passionate and fervent mission statement… allegedly. I use the word “allegedly” advisedly here, as much of Bruckner’s life and lore is mired in anecdote, speculation and potentially unreliable accounts. In terms of understanding a composer’s musical intentions, the life and times of Bruckner prove a curious case when trying to pair and/or separate the art from the artist. This led me to investigate further, and to compose my own music written specially for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra - a piece called Bruckner’s Skull.
Written as a death-mask homage to Bruckner in 2024, the 200th anniversary of his birth, Bruckner’s Skull is inspired by Bruckner’s obsession with death, and in particular by the two alleged occasions when Bruckner cradled the skulls of both Beethoven and Schubert when their bodies were exhumed and moved to Vienna’s Central Cemetery in 1888.
The many quirks, morbid fixations and zealous eccentricities of Bruckner have been reported anecdotally throughout the centuries. These reports include the commissioning of a photograph of his late-mother after her death; requests to exhume and see the body of a late-cousin; specific instructions on his own burial under the organ that he played at St Florian Monastery; the keeping of lists of his female students to whom he would continually propose to well into his old age; the duality in his hyper-religious grandiose sense of divine musical purpose coupled with his extreme shyness and debilitating low self-esteem; and the relentless counting of bricks on walls, blades of grass, pearls on dresses, leaves on trees and bars in his own music.
Bruckner spent a year in a sanatorium where his fixations were classed as numeromania, which is now known as obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. The symptoms of OCD manifest in a way in which an individual might experience overpowering, intrusive, distressing and relentless thoughts and mental imagery which are alleviated by taking part in cyclical physical behaviours and actions that are attributed to a specific fear of grave ramifications (for themselves or others) if those behaviours and actions are not completed to a perceived satisfactory degree.
Bruckner’s Skull is intended as a psychological-musical exploration of the great composer’s character and the stories that surround his life, death, passions and obsessions. The focus of the piece is to delve into Bruckner’s mind through the lens of his morbid fixations as a kind of musical post-mortem to find out why he was driven to act in the societally unacceptable - and by modern standards immoral and potentially criminal - ways that he allegedly did.
Therefore, the musical material in this work is directly derived from fragments of Bruckner’s compositions and altered to an obsessional degree. The way in which I generated this material was to hyper fixate on short phrases that come from Bruckner’s Symphonies 2, 4 and 8. Each short gesture is put through various compositional processes like textural, harmonic and inversional alterations, so they retain their core essence while becoming something new. Those with a keen ear for Bruckner’s music will recognise those short gestures but will soon realise that they become stuck in action like ticking mechanisms that persist in Bruckner’s mind.
The work includes some hidden and overt references to both Schubert and Beethoven’s music as well. Schubert’s String Quartet No.14 in D minor, also known as Death and the Maiden, and the first movement from Beethoven’s Moonlight Piano Sonata No.14 in C sharp minor, represent the presence of each composer’s skull in the hands of Bruckner. Certain short passages and harmonic progressions are treated to a ghostly re-imagining while translucent high string harmonics reconstitute Schubert and Beethoven’s sound worlds to create a sense of hearing their music from beyond the veil. Their music is warped and transformed by Bruckner’s obsessive qualities which merge with his own hyper-religious, austere romanticism as though Schubert and Beethoven are being viewed through Bruckner’s fanatical eyes. A significant quotation also comes from Beethoven’s String Quartet No.14 in C sharp minor, which was performed to Schubert at his request upon his own deathbed; perhaps the last piece of music he ever heard. All of which is intend to show the more human and musical connections that these three composers shared in their lives and deaths.
The stories of Bruckner’s life may never be fully confirmed beyond anecdote and speculation, meaning that he may never be fully understood on his own terms and in his own way. Therefore, my piece Bruckner’s Skull endeavours to take those stories at face value and tries to understand a flawed man while attempting to find the humanity at the centre of such dark fascinations. As the psychologist Carl Jung put it: “In the end, man is an event which cannot judge itself, but, for better or worse, is left to the judgment of others”.
A video performance of Bruckner’s Skull will be free to watch on scotsman.com from 12 February. The SCO’s Digital Season 2025-26 is co-presented by The Scotsman and supported by the William Grant Foundation.
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