Anton Bruckner – Fantasy In G Major WAB 118 sheet music, Noten, partitura, partition, spartiti

Anton Bruckner

(Ansfelden, Austria, 1824-Vienna, 1896) Austrian composer and organist. Born into a family of school teachers, he seemed destined to follow the same profession, to which he dedicated himself between 1841 and 1855, combining it with the role of organist. His skill as a performer earned him the appointment of organ master of Linz Cathedral in 1856.

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In this city he discovered the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner , which revealed an unsuspected expressive universe. His Symphony No. 1 (1866) was the fruit of this revelation. From there, Bruckner forged a defined and personal style, after some early compositions influenced by the antiquated classical tradition in which he had been educated.

Eight new symphonies, the last unfinished, followed this one. Misunderstood in their time, they express the composer’s love of nature and deep faith, while constituting an original synthesis between the most daring romantic harmony and the most severe contrapuntal tradition. His work had a great influence on Gustav Mahler.

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Together with Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner was the most important German-language symphonist of the second half of the 19th century. Both composers cultivated the classical symphony model, in four movements. The fact that Bruckner was a devout Catholic led his contemporaries to describe his monumental symphonies as “cathedrals” of sound. Furthermore, Bruckner was pigeonholed ─without being asked about it─ by the music press within the progressive camp of Richard Wagner, which rivaled the conservative camp around Johannes Brahms.

The truth is that Bruckner openly venerated Wagner: his Third Symphony is dedicated to him and the Adagio of the Seventh is considered funeral music, for whom Bruckner himself described as “the most sacred, ardently loved, immortal teacher.”

Anton Bruckner, born in 1824 near Linz, was the son of a teacher: a profession to which he initially devoted himself. In parallel to his activity as a teacher at St. Florian’s and as organist at the Linz Cathedral, he studied music theory. Bruckner continued his studies even after having brilliantly passed his final exams before ─at a very late stage─ he achieved public notoriety as a composer: his nominally First Symphony was premiered when the composer was already forty-one years old. From 1868 until his death Bruckner lived in Vienna, where, however, he was long denied the recognition he deserved.

Most of Bruckner’s nine numbered symphonies are available in various versions: the perfectionist composer sometimes worked on the same work for years. They provide us with exciting perspectives on the work of an artist who had a decisive influence on the symphonic genre.

The last one he composed, the incomplete and harmonically daring Ninth Symphony, belongs to the prehistory of musical modernism. While Hans von Bülow, also the chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, distanced himself from Bruckner, his successor Arthur Nikisch introduced his music into the orchestra’s programs.

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