Bruckner began the 2nd movement a few weeks before Wagner’s death, which he probably anticipated. He wrote to Felix Mottl:

“Once I came home and was very sad; I thought to myself that the master couldn’t live much longer. Then I remembered the C sharp minor Adagio.”

Although not initially planned at the beginning of the composition of the 7th Symphony, Bruckner uses the Wagner tubas constructed by Richard Wagner for the Ring of the Nibelung in this Adagio movement of the work, for which Bruckner altered the score considerably. They lend the orchestral sound an enormous additional depth effect. Three weeks after the draft of the 2nd movement, on February 13, 1883, Wagner died. Bruckner had just composed the climax in the course of this Adagio and the following coda (a funeral melody played by the Wagner tubas, first alone, then with accompaniment in the horns) forms the actual funeral music for the revered master. The 2nd movement is, next to the funeral march from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (Eroica) and the funeral march for the dead Siegfried from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, one of the most stirring pieces of funeral music of the 19th century.