52 Facts About Anton Bruckner

Josef Anton Bruckner was an Austrian composer, organist, and music theorist best known for his symphonies, masses, Te Deum and motets.

Anton Bruckner's compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving harmonies.

Unlike other musical radicals such as Richard Wagner and Hugo Wolf, Anton Bruckner showed extreme humility before other musicians, Wagner in particular.

Anton Bruckner was critical of his own work and often reworked his compositions.

Anton Bruckner was born in Ansfelden on 4 September 1824.

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The ancestors of Anton Bruckner's family were farmers and craftsmen; their history can be traced as far back as the 16th century.

Anton Bruckner was very dedicated to the instrument just as he was later in life in composing, often practising for 12 hours a day.

Anton Bruckner entered school when he was six, proved to be a hard-working student, and was promoted to upper class early.

Anton Bruckner was in awe of the monastery's great organ, which was built during the late baroque era and rebuilt in 1837, and he sometimes played it during church services.

The living standards and pay were appalling and Anton Bruckner was constantly humiliated by his superior, teacher Franz Fuchs.

Anton Bruckner stayed at Windhaag from age 17 to 19, teaching subjects that had nothing to do with music.

In May 1845, Anton Bruckner passed an examination, which allowed him to begin work as an assistant teacher in one of the village schools of Sankt Florian.

Anton Bruckner continued to improve his education by taking further courses, passing an examination giving him permission to teach in higher education institutes, receiving the grade "very good" in all disciplines.

In 1848 Anton Bruckner was appointed an organist in Sankt Florian and in 1851 this was made a regular position.

Later, when Anton Bruckner began teaching music himself, he would base his curriculum on Sechter's book Die Grundsatze der musikalischen Komposition .

Largely self-taught as a composer, Anton Bruckner only started composing seriously at age 37 in 1861.

Anton Bruckner studied further with Otto Kitzler, who was nine years younger than him and who introduced him to the music of Richard Wagner, which Anton Bruckner studied extensively from 1863 onwards.

Anton Bruckner considered the earliest orchestral works, mere school exercises, done under the supervision of Otto Kitzler.

In 1861 he had already made the acquaintance of Franz Liszt who, like Anton Bruckner, had a strong, Catholic religious faith and who first and foremost was a harmonic innovator, initiating the new German school together with Wagner.

Anton Bruckner wished to ensure he knew how to make his music modern, but he wanted to spend time in a more religious setting.

In 1868, after Sechter had died, Anton Bruckner hesitantly accepted Sechter's post as a teacher of music theory at the Vienna Conservatory, during which time he concentrated most of his energy on writing symphonies.

Anton Bruckner later accepted a post at the Vienna University in 1875, where he tried to make music theory a part of the curriculum.

Anton Bruckner was a renowned organist in his day, impressing audiences in France in 1869, and the United Kingdom in 1871, giving six recitals on a new Henry Willis organ at Royal Albert Hall in London and five more at the Crystal Palace.

Anton Bruckner taught organ performance at the Conservatory; among his students were Hans Rott and Franz Schmidt.

Anton Bruckner was a lifelong bachelor who made numerous unsuccessful marriage proposals to teenage girls.

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Anton Bruckner suffered from periodic attacks of depression, with his numerous failed attempts to find a female companion only adding to his unhappiness.

Anton Bruckner wrote a great deal of music that he used to help teach his students.

Anton Bruckner is buried in the crypt of the monastery church at Sankt Florian, immediately below his favorite organ.

Anton Bruckner had always had a morbid fascination with death and dead bodies, and left explicit instructions regarding the embalming of his corpse.

Also, it has been pointed out that Anton Bruckner often started work on a symphony just days after finishing the one before.

Anton Bruckner's symphonies are scored for a fairly standard orchestra of woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two or three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings.

Structure of Anton Bruckner's symphonies is in a way an extension of that of Beethoven's symphonies.

The introduction to the first movement, beginning mysteriously and climbing slowly with fragments of the first theme to the gigantic full statement of that theme, was taken over by Anton Bruckner; so was the awe-inspiring coda of the first movement.

The scherzo and slow movement, with their alternation of melodies, are models for Anton Bruckner's spacious middle movements, while the finale with a grand culminating hymn is a feature of almost every Anton Bruckner symphony.

Anton Bruckner is the first composer since Schubert about whom it is possible to make such generalizations.

Anton Bruckner created a new and monumental type of symphonic organism, which abjured the tense, dynamic continuity of Beethoven, and the broad, fluid continuity of Wagner, in order to express something profoundly different from either composer, something elemental and metaphysical.

Anton Bruckner favored an approach to large-scale form that relied more on large-scale thematic and harmonic juxtaposition.

Anton Bruckner's then proceeded to show how she mapped this musical data into a series of twelve large, painted visualizations.

The term gained currency following the publication of an article dealing with the subject, "The Anton Bruckner Problem Simplified" by musicologist Deryck Cooke, which brought the issue to the attention of English-speaking musicians.

Anton Bruckner was a devoutly religious man, and composed numerous sacred works.

Anton Bruckner wrote a Te Deum, five psalm settings, a Festive cantata, a Magnificat, about forty motets, and at least seven Masses.

The seldom performed Missa solemnis, composed in 1854 for Friedrich Mayer's installation, was the last major work Anton Bruckner composed before he started to study with Simon Sechter, with the possible exception of Psalm 146, a large work, for SATB soloists, double choir and orchestra.

Three Masses which Anton Bruckner wrote in the 1860s and revised later on in his life are more often performed.

Anton Bruckner composed 20 Lieder, of which only a few have been published.

Possibly Anton Bruckner had given a draft-score to his pupil Krzyzanowski, which already contained the string parts and some important lines for woodwind and brass, as an exercise in instrumentation.

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Sixteen other pieces for piano, which Anton Bruckner composed in 1862 during his tuition by Kitzler, have not been WAB classified.

Anton Bruckner was a renowned organist at the St Florian's Priory, where he improvised frequently.

Anton Bruckner never wrote an opera, and as much as he was a fan of Wagner's music dramas, he was uninterested in drama.

Anton Bruckner paid for the Haas collection of Bruckner's works to be published, and himself purchased material for the proposed library.

Approval by Hitler and the Nazis of his music did not hurt Anton Bruckner's standing in the postwar media, and several movies and TV productions in Europe and the United States have used excerpts from his music ever since the 1950s, as they already did in the 1930s.

Life of Anton Bruckner was portrayed in Jan Schmidt-Garre's 1995 film Anton Bruckner's Decision, which focuses on his recovery in an Austrian spa.

Ken Russell's TV movie The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner, starring Peter Mackriel, fictionalizes Bruckner's real-life stay at a sanatorium because of obsessive-compulsive disorder .