What you should know about Anton Bruckner

Explore the music, life and legacy of Austrian composer Anton Bruckner, whose symphonies came to be dubbed ‘cathedrals of sound’.

The Austrian composer, organist and teacher Anton Bruckner was a late bloomer who composed all his major works after the age of 39. Born in Ansfelden, he studied violin and organ from a young age with his father, the village schoolmaster. After his father’s death in 1837, he became a chorister at the monastery-school of St Florian. His family’s poverty made a musical career impossible; instead, he trained as a school teacher. Following positions in Windhaag and Kronstorf, he returned to St Florian, where he taught from 1845 and was organist from 1848.

In 1855 he became organist at Linz Cathedral, and embarked on a five-year course in harmony and counterpoint with the Viennese pedagogue Simon Sechter. Later, he studied orchestration with Otto Kitzler, who in 1863 introduced him to Wagner’s music. This proved an enormous creative inspiration and led to his first significant compositions.

Moving to Vienna in 1868, Bruckner took up Sechter’s old post at the Conservatory. (From 1875 he also taught at the University of Vienna.) During the next 28 years he composed most of his greatest works, though for years he struggled to get his orchestral music performed, particularly after the 1877 premiere of the Third Symphony, which had proved disastrous.

Only after the 1884 premiere of the Seventh Symphony in Leipzig did he receive the acclaim he deserved. He continued to compose – and to revise his works obsessively – until his death from heart failure on 11 October 1896. He is buried in the crypt of St Florian.

[Bruckner’s symphonies offer] a sense of the awe-inspiring, born of the naked wonder, fear and delight of elemental humanity, confronted by the mysterious beauty and power of nature and the vast riddle of the cosmos. – Deryck Cooke, musicologist

Bruckner’s structural, harmonic and rhythmic invention makes every one of his mature compositions an epic adventure. And his music has an emotional depth and honesty that evokes a profound response in many listeners, whether or not they share his religious beliefs.

His best-known works are his Symphonies Nos 3 to 9. Although each of them has a distinctive character, all have common features. These include thematic material structured in huge blocks, long passages of intensification (Steigerung), adventurous chromaticism, and use of fugues, chorales and Austrian dance rhythms.

Other than the unfinished Ninth Symphony, they all comprise an extensive opening movement that explores three contrasting themes, a lyrical slow movement, an energetic folk-like Scherzo and a large-scale finale that usually recalls earlier music. The symphonies’ massive structures have led them to be nicknamed ‘cathedrals of sound’.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, J S Bach and the First Viennese School were among Bruckner’s heroes. Of his contemporaries, it was Richard Wagner whom he admired most. Bruckner dedicated his Third Symphony to him after they spent a convivial (and drunken) evening together. For his part, Wagner considered Bruckner the greatest symphonist since Beethoven.

In Vienna, musical loyalties were split between Wagner and Johannes Brahms, and Bruckner’s championship of the former made him enemies. Chief among them was the critic Eduard Hanslick, who repeatedly trashed Bruckner’s symphonies. Brahms himself referred to the compositions as ‘symphonic boa-constrictors’ and to Bruckner as ‘the bumpkin’ – though he admired his work ethic and religious music, and was seen weeping at his funeral.

Bruckner has made his presence felt in cinema and literature. Two biopics include Ken Russell’s The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner (1990) and Jan Schmidt-Garre’s Bruckner’s Decision (1995).

His music is used to powerful effect in films such as Luchino Visconti’s historical melodrama Senso (1954) and Ingmar Bergman’s valedictory Saraband (2003). Writers as varied as Gabriel García Márquez, Elfriede Jelinek, Stan Barstow, Rabih Alameddine and Douglas Kennedy refer to his life and works in their fiction – Kennedy’s description of the impact of the Ninth Symphony in his novel Leaving the World is particularly powerful.

Explore more Bruckner recordings on LSO Live

Bruckner on LSO Live

Kate Hopkins writes on classical music and on literature. Her work has featured in publications including The Wagner Journal, NB Magazine and programme books for The Royal Opera, ENO and WNO.