And he recalled Anton Bruckner, who loved to refresh himself at the organ or piano with simple, long series of triads. 'swept with the besom,' to be brought to that state of perfect emptiness and readiness that mystic instruction says is a condition for receiving God. 'In order to prove receptive for the utter and unprecedented uniqueness of this creation-the lecturer told us from the piano, which he used to verify his words-the heart needed to be, as Scripture says, Zeitblom recalls Kretzschmar speaking of Beethoven and Bach before moving to Bruckner: In any case, the idea of the elemental, the primitive, of primal beginnings, played a decisive role in it, as did the notion that of all the arts, music in particular (however highly complex, richly and subtly developed that marvelous structure created by history over the course of centuries might be) had never cast aside the devout habit of reverently recalling its first beginnings and solemnly conjuring them up-in short, of celebrating its elemental forces.' It was called 'The Elemental in Music' or 'Music and the Elemental' or 'The Elements of Music' or maybe even something else. 'I can no longer recall the title exactly.

In chapter 8 of Thomas Mann's DOCTOR FAUSTUS (1948), the narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, recalls a lecture given by Wendell Kretzschmar, the teacher of Adrian Leverkuehn (Mann's Faustus-figure):

Dr faustus mann