[Music:  (1st violins) (Lower reeds with strings tremolo in all but basses)]

with a note above the chord (the common mark and manner of the later school of harmonists[A]) and a new ascent on a literal ladder of subtlest progress, while hollow intervals are intermingled in the pinch of close harmonies.  The bewildering maze here begins of multitudinous design, enriched with modern devices.

[Footnote A:  See Vol.  II, note, page 104.]

A clash of all the instruments acclaims the climax before the unison stroke of fullest chorus on the solemn note of the beginning.  A favorite device of Bruckner, a measured tread of pizzicato strings with interspersed themal motives, precedes the romantic episode.  Throughout the movement is this alternation of liturgic chorale with tender melody.

[Music:  Molto tranquillo (Strings) espressivo (Oboes and horns)]

Bruckner’s pristine polyphonic manner ever appears in the double strain of melodies, where each complements, though not completes the other.  However multiple the plan, we cannot feel more than the quality of unusual in the motives themselves, of some interval of ascent or descent.  Yet as the melody grows to larger utterance, the fulness of polyphonic art brings a beauty of tender sentiment, rising to a moving climax, where the horns lead the song in the heart of the madrigal chorus, and the strings alone sing the expressive answer.

[Music:  (Violins doubled in 8ve.) (Strings, woods and horns)]

A third phrase now appears, where lies the main poetry of the movement.  Gentle swaying calls of

[Music:  Tranquillo (Wood and violins) (4 horns in 8ve.) (Horns) (Strings with bassoons)]

soft horns and wood, echoed and answered in close pursuit, lead to a mood of placid, elemental rhythm, with something of “Rheingold,” of “Ossian” ballad, of the lapping waves of Cherubini’s “Anacreon.”  In the midst the horns blow a line of sonorous melody, where the cadence has a breath of primal legend.  On the song runs, ever mid the elemental motion, to a resonant height and dies away as before.  The intimate, romantic melody now returns, but it is rocked on the continuing pelagic pulse; indeed, we hear anon a faint phrase of the legend, in distant trumpet, till we reach a joint rhapsody of both moods; and in the never resting motion, mid vanishing echoes, we dream of some romance of the sea.

Against descending harmonies return the hollow, sombre phrases of the beginning, with the full cadence of chorale in the brass; and beyond, the whole prelude has a full, extended verse.  In the alternation of solemn and sweet episode returns the tender melody, with pretty inversions, rising again to an ardent height.  The renewed clash of acclaiming chorus ushers again the awful phrase of unison (now in octave descent), in towering majesty.  But now it rises in the ever increasing vehemence where the final blast is lit up with a flash of serene sonority.