Anton Bruckner

Anton Bruckner (* September 4, 1824, Ansfelden; † October 11, 1896, Vienna) did not have an easy life. Throughout his life, the Austrian composer was plagued by self-doubt. Anton Bruckner came from humble, rural beginnings. After the death of his father, he was admitted as a choirboy to St. Florian Monastery in 1837. After several years as a teaching assistant and self-taught organ and piano studies, he first worked as an organist in St. Florian, then from 1855 as cathedral organist in Linz. Introduced to music theory and instrumentation by Simon Sechter and Otto Kitzler, he discovered Richard Wagner as an artistic role model, whom he admired throughout his life and visited several times in Bayreuth. In 1868, Anton Bruckner became professor of thoroughbass, counterpoint, and organ at the Vienna Conservatory, ten years later court organist, and finally, in 1891, an honorary doctor of the University of Vienna. He was considered an important organ virtuoso of an era but had to wait a long time for recognition as a composer. It was only the "Symphony No. 7, E major," composed between 1881 and 1883, with its famous "Adagio" created under the impression of Wagner's death, that brought the hoped-for recognition, even if he was unwilling to acknowledge it given his tendency towards skepticism and self-criticism. Anton Bruckner was a loner who did not want to join any school or doctrine. He composed numerous sacred vocal works such as his three masses, the "Missa Solemnis in B-flat minor" (1854), the "Te Deum" (1881–84), and numerous motets. As a symphonist, he wrote a total of nine symphonies and many symphonic studies from 1863 onwards, tending to revise finished versions multiple times. Bruckner's orchestral works were long considered unplayable but were merely unusually bold sound monuments for the musical language of their time, combining traditions from Beethoven to Wagner to folk music, at the boundary of late Romanticism and Modernism.