As with his Seventh symphony, Bruckner began his Eighth without a commission and without any specific promise that it would be performed. Nowadays, it’s one of his most often performed symphonies. It also happens to be his longest symphony – one, with its sheer breath of scope, asks for the listener to adjust his or […]

Today, Anton Bruckner, the son of a village schoolmaster, is recognised as one of the most important (albeit late-blooming) symphonists of the nineteenth century. During his lifetime, however, he was the subject of incomprehension and ridicule – that is, when critics and musicians paid him and his music any attention at all. Even in modern […]