the monastery Klosterneuburg. Here, Bruckner had sat on the
organ bench and had let the church organ peal out, stronger and
stronger--verily a "musician of God" and perhaps the last of his
kind.

After the coffin had been consecrated according to the rites of
the Catholic Church, it was carried to the hearse by students who,
with drawn sabres, had stood guard around the catafalque. Then,
as was his wish, Bruckner was brought to his home in Upper
Austria. The autumn mists were already hovering over the fields
and meadows and the crows sang their gloomy song that had
always put him in a mournful mood when he traveled from the
city to the country in the fall.

In the church of the St. Florian Convent, where Bruckner's
coffin was brought, the "De profundis" sounded while the bier
was placed under the organ that had been Anton Bruckner's organ
and that had first taught him to elevate himself with music to the
heavens and to the Halo of God, as heralded to the world by the
radiant timbre in the finales of his symphonies.

It was but half a year later--on April 6, 1897--that we accom-
panied Johannes Brahms to his last resting place in the Protestant
Cemetery of Vienna.

If Bruckner was familiar with the glory of Heaven, Brahms
was intimate with the bitterness of death. His last composition sings
movingly: "Oh, Death, how bitter art thou." His "Deutches
Requiem" had preached with the gloomy tones of a funeral march:
"For all flesh is like the grass." Even as a young man Brahms had
intoned, strictly and austerely, the serious melody "Nun wollen
wir den Leib begraben" ( "Now will we bury the body").

A strong, simple, homely man was now being lowered into the
earth, a man who had known the bitterness of life and whose
favorite book was the Lutheran Bible. A life that had been filled
with work was ended; what remained were the mighty works
written by the man who now had passed on to the Great Beyond.

Both composers belonged to the Vienna in which we grew up.
Going for a walk, we met Brahms and Bruckner almost daily.
When we attended a concert they were both there, too. When
new compositions of Brahms and Bruckner were performed, they

-2-