Active Years: 1845-1896 (Born 1824)

Position: Austrian composer and organist

Career Highlights: Nine gigantic symphonies

Career Totals: Eleven symphonies, four masses, six chamber works, over forty cantatas, over fifty psalms, many choruses and songs.

Scouting Report: Bruckner is a composer who arouses fanatical support and intense dislike. To his detractors, he’s a bore who wrote elephantine symphonies with long, dull slow movements. To his fans, he’s a great master who deserves more acclaim. His music bears the stamp of his religious piety so it is not surprising that he made a living as a church organist. His symphonies evoke the solemn grandeur of the great cathedrals and the sonic mass of the great organ works. Wagner and Beethoven also influenced his music. He and Wagner were polar opposites philosophically, but Bruckner adapted many of Wagner’s innovations. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony gave him a model and challenged him to create symphonies that would move beyond Beethoven’s achievement. His slow movements are huge exaggerations of the monumental slow movement in the Ninth. Bruckner has been a popular composer in Germany since the end of the 19th century but he is still accumulating a following in the United States.

Teammates and Contemporaries: One of the great conflicts of Bruckner’s era was the clash between Wagner and Brahms. Bruckner played on the Wagner team.

Fun Fact: Bruckner’s symphonies are numbered one through nine and the ninth was left unfinished. His total hits eleven because he wrote two early symphonies that are known as the “student symphonies.” His first student symphony may be the only piece in the record books that’s listed as Symphony No. O.