Anton Bruckner

Anton Bruckner worked as a schoolteacher and organist before turning to symphonic composition. A choirboy at St Florian, then a village schoolmaster and a church organist, he was still studying counterpoint with Simon Sechter in his late thirties and form and orchestration with Otto Kitzler in Linz after that, and Europe knew him as an improviser at the organ — in Nancy, in Paris, in London — well before it knew him as a composer. His symphonies draw on Wagnerian harmony and contrapuntal traditions, with chorales, extended crescendos and prominent pauses. Recognition arrived late and from outside Vienna, with the Seventh Symphony given in Leipzig in 1884. He revised his scores continually, pupils and conductors revised them further, and the resulting editorial tangle is still being untied. The Ninth was unfinished when he died in Vienna in 1896. He worked as a teacher and organist at St Florian, writing some forty choral and organ works for the services there, and was organist at the cathedral in Linz from 1855 to 1868, taking his organ examination at the Vienna Conservatory in 1861 and joining its staff as a teacher in 1868. Arthur Nikisch was among the conductors who brought the large scores before the public. The Sofia Philharmonic under Emil Tabakov played the complete symphonic works in the late 1980s, in a cycle devoted to Bruckner and Mahler.