# One aspect about Bruckners music



## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

One thing that is really important about Bruckner, and that for me let him stand about every other composer is the following:

Bruckner does not try to entertain. Other composers like Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovski, basically everyone else tries to entertain, they wrote music for people. Bruckner wrote music for god. 

Other composers care about the listeners, they try to convey their music, they try to impress the listeners. And they are really good at it, Bruckner sound dull compared to it. But Bruckners music is different. Bruckners music is like a rock. Rocks are immobile. They don't come to the listeners. The listeners have to come to the rock. But if they climb it, it is they best feeling, no music can be compared to this. Bruckner wrote his music for god, he knew he would understand everything, he had to make no compromises for people.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

Aries said:


> Bruckner doesn't not try to entertain. Other composers like Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovski, basically everyone else tries to entertain, they wrote music for people. Bruckner wrote music for god.


I once saw somebody describe Palestrina like that: Other music is about you, Palestrina is about God.

Well, maybe, maybe not, but Palestrina did it without being boring, as Bruckner generally is. (The intermezzo for string quintet is pretty yummy, though. I wish he'd written more short, small scale, secular things. 



)

Somewhat related, a telling thing about Bruckner to me is how much the scherzo from his symphony 8 sounds like "The Ride of Valkyries." Maybe an approximately apt way to summarize Bruckner would be, he was dumb enough (a) to think God wasn't dead in late 19th century Europe, and (b) to think Wagner was on God's side.


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

_Bruckner doesn't not try to entertain._

"Doesn't not" or "doesn't"?

Regardless, it's interesting that many 20c composers are criticized for being "academic" and disdaining audiences, but many were religious.

E.g., Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles or Mass. It's hard to argue that he's not doing the same thing you say Bruckner is doing: writing for God and not entertainment.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

Though, if so, Stravinsky is writing for an abstract concept of "God," while Bruckner actually believes in God.


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

Harold in Columbia said:


> Though, if so, Stravinsky is writing for an abstract concept of "God," while Bruckner actually believes in God.


Stravinksy believed in God in the same way Bruckner did.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I like the use of the word "rock." I have often thought that listening to a Bruckner symphony was like watching 500 Egyptian slaves dragging a pyramid stone from the banks of the Nile to the base of a pyramid under construction: You are aware of a great deal of effort being expended to move a significant object a long distance, but the place it wound up wasn't fundamentally more interesting than where is started, and journey itself was rather ponderous and uninteresting. 

Also, listening to a Bruckner scherzo (the Fourth and Seventh come to mind) is not unlike watching Sisyphus.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Bruckner tried to do many good things with his symphonies in particular but I think he over-wrote in many instances resulting in passages of the symphonies being too lengthy.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

What if I find Bruckner entertaining? But then I like rocks too, so not so surprising I guess.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

I feel similar about Nikolai Medtner.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

ArtMusic said:


> Bruckner tried to do many good things with his symphonies in particular but I think he over-wrote in many instances resulting in passages of the symphonies being too lengthy.


hallelujah to this :tiphat:


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## helenora (Sep 13, 2015)

Aries said:


> One thing that is really important about Bruckner, and that for me let him stand about every other composer is the following:
> 
> Bruckner does not try to entertain. Other composers like Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovski, basically everyone else tries to entertain, they wrote music for people. Bruckner wrote music for god.
> 
> Other composers care about the listeners, they try to convey their music, they try to impress the listeners. And they are really good at it, Bruckner sound dull compared to it. But Bruckners music is different. Bruckners music is like a rock. Rocks are immobile. They don't come to the listeners. The listeners have to come to the rock. But if they climb it, it is they best feeling, no music can be compared to this. Bruckner wrote his music for god, he knew he would understand everything, he had to make no compromises for people.


agree , whatever others say about other "rocks" :lol: Palestrina or before him - then they all where rocks  I mean their music. Love his music. Very unusual among other composers! and still underestimated or/and not understood properly ....


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## Bruckner Anton (Mar 10, 2016)

Mostly agree. Serious music does not necessarily need to entertain people. I dont think anyone will find Beethoven's Grosse Fugue "entertaining". but it is one of the most technically advanced and refined piece in the history of music. And for most part of Bruckner's symphonies, it is made with utmost solemnity and craftmanship. Just as Brahms said: A symphony is no joke.


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## jcofer (Jan 23, 2016)

I've heard his symphonies called "cathedrals in sound"; static, but imposing in their structure.


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

Bruckner Anton said:


> Mostly agree. Serious music does not necessarily need to entertain people. I dont think anyone will find Beethoven's Grosse Fugue "entertaining". but it is one of the most technically advanced and refined piece in the history of music. And for most part of Bruckner's symphonies, it is made with utmost solemnity and craftmanship. *Just as Brahms said: A symphony is no joke.*


Brahms also described Bruckner's music as symphonic boa-constrictors. Which is about how I feel about most (not all) of the symphonies. I like the choral music more.


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## Orfeo (Nov 14, 2013)

I would not categorize Wagner as one who tried to entertain (or an entertainer). If anything, there's deeper meaning in Wagner's music in all things human (matters of life, death, love, yearning, etc.). And while there are funny, lighter moments (Die Meistersinger), his music is essentially philosophical. So, his music is not far from Bruckner (and vice-versa) in elevating the art beyond the superficial or the trivial. In many ways, so is the music of Tchaikovsky.


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## KRoad (Jun 1, 2012)

Harold in Columbia said:


> Maybe an approximately apt way to summarize Bruckner would be, he was dumb enough (a) to think God wasn't dead in late 19th century Europe, and (b) to think Wagner was on God's side.


Harold in Columbia, again, as with your Mahler post, I couldn't agree more.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Harold in Columbia said:


> Somewhat related, a telling thing about Bruckner to me is how much the scherzo from his symphony 8 sounds like "The Ride of Valkyries." Maybe an approximately apt way to summarize Bruckner would be, he was dumb enough (a) to think God wasn't dead in late 19th century Europe, and (b) to think Wagner was on God's side.


Pity you don't appreciate Bruckner. I thought it was generally accepted he was a genius.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

I didn't say he wasn't a genius, I said he was dumb. The one doesn't necessitate the other.

I don't think he was much of a genius, though.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Harold in Columbia said:


> I didn't say he wasn't a genius, I said he was dumb. The one doesn't necessitate the other.
> 
> I don't think he was much of a genius, though.


Kind of a weird opinion, in my opinion, but we all have our dislikes. I used to be puzzled by Bruckner myself, but I really feel his form and development is incredibly consistent and ingenious in it's own terms, and I enjoy his counterpoint. He's like a classicist at core, but from another planet.

As for being religious, I think it is wrong to say that corresponds with being stupid, and also I don't find Bruckner to be fundamentally Wagnerian, though it is no secret how much he admired Wagner's music.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

I didn't say being religious corresponds with being stupid. I said being religious in the late 19th century, in a way that fails to acknowledge that the religion you're practicing is already dead, corresponds with being stupid.

I wouldn't willingly sit through a long Bruckner work and am slightly annoyed by his getting more attention than I think he deserves, but other than that I don't care enough about Bruckner to dislike him.


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## bz3 (Oct 15, 2015)

Harold in Columbia said:


> I didn't say being religious corresponds with being stupid. I said being religious in the late 19th century, in a way that fails to acknowledge that the religion you're practicing is already dead, corresponds with being stupid.
> 
> I wouldn't willingly sit through a long Bruckner work and am slightly annoyed by his getting more attention than I think he deserves, but other than that I don't care enough about Bruckner to dislike him.


**Tips fedora**


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

Leaving aside Bruckner's qualities as a composer, I find the proposition that a composer deserves more credit for being motivated by belief in the supernatural over being motivated by the desire to bring pleasure to his fellow beings, wholly unreasonable!


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## dieter (Feb 26, 2016)

clavichorder said:


> Pity you don't appreciate Bruckner. I thought it was generally accepted he was a genius.


I love Bruckner's music very much. He's one of the musical gods for me. I have come to accept,however, that there are people who love Bruckner, there are people who hate his music. There are people who love oysters, people who hate them.
The twain hardly ever meets.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

ArtMusic said:


> Bruckner tried to do many good things with his symphonies in particular but I think he over-wrote in many instances resulting in passages of the symphonies being too lengthy.


That's what Franz Schalk and others thought only in their attempts to shorten the works, they made them worse. Strange as it may seem, Bruckner did know what he was doing.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Such frivolous disparagements of one of music's great originals!

I think the "rock" analogy has something to it. There is a stasis beneath Bruckner's motion, analogous to the "stasis" we can experience in a meditative state: movement we observe around us and inside us is experienced from a place of stillness which is deeply satisfying. Bruckner's music transpires in time because that's what music does, yet his peculiar structures, which alternate between different planes of motion and affect, slowly accumulating size, depth, and wholeness, defy the ordinary tensions of time - the sense of progression typical of Western harmonic music - and finally suggest something permanent beneath the phenomena of existence and perception.

Not everyone responds positively to this; Bruckner tries people's patience as he breaks off paragraphs in midstream where other composers would continue the argument. But those who love him hear in his own patient deliberation - why be impatient when you're fixed upon the eternal? - something transcendent and sublime. One doesn't need to be Christian, or even religious, to understand this. We all live in time, yet transcend it. Bruckner speaks explicitly to this duality, taking consolation in that deeper consciousness (in God, or in ourselves) which transcends the transient and the accidental, and offers us peace.


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## Richard8655 (Feb 19, 2016)

As someone into history, Wagner and Bruckner were both favorites of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Their music was played continuously on the radio in Germany then. Both were fervent German nationalists, especially Wagner and the regime considered them as the perfect composers in expressing the essence of the German volk or national heritage. 

Although I don't think this should detract from their deserved recognition as first rate composers, it always made it an interesting point for me when listening to their music in that light. Maybe that's why I think their works come across as somewhat pompous and self-indulgent. And I do think their works can be excruciatingly long for these same reasons. But that's maybe unfair and showing a bias from history.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

Richard8655 said:


> As someone into history, Wagner and Bruckner were both favorites of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Their music was played continuously on the radio in Germany then.


Same goes for Beethoven on all counts, so all that means exactly nothing.

The fact that Wagner was himself a proto-Nazi who wrote a great epic about how the German gods have to die and take the whole world with them because they allowed themselves to be polluted by Jewish influence is, of course, more significant.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Harold in Columbia said:


> The fact that Wagner was himself a proto-Nazi who wrote a great epic about how the German gods have to die and take the whole world with them because they allowed themselves to be polluted by Jewish influence is, of course, more significant.


There is no "of course" about it. That interpretation of the _Ring_ - and for that matter of Wagner's antisemitism as "proto-Nazism" - can't be supported by objective evidence. People keep trying, but their case is convincing only to those predisposed to believe it, and who understand neither Wagner nor the _Ring_.

But then you also say that _"Maybe an approximately apt way to summarize Bruckner would be, he was dumb enough (a) to think God wasn't dead in late 19th century Europe, and (b) to think Wagner was on God's side."_

Which is in no sense a "summary" of anything.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Richard8655 said:


> As someone into history, Wagner and Bruckner were both favorites of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Their music was played continuously on the radio in Germany then. Both were fervent German nationalists, especially Wagner and the regime considered them as the perfect composers in expressing the essence of the German volk or national heritage.
> 
> Although I don't think this should detract from their deserved recognition as first rate composers, it always made it an interesting point for me when listening to their music in that light. Maybe that's why I think their works come across as somewhat pompous and self-indulgent. And I do think their works can be excruciatingly long for these same reasons. But that's maybe unfair and showing a bias from history.


What does German nationalism sound like, if it isn't some Mannerchor belting out "Deutschland uber Alles"? I hope you will be able to discard that ideological filter - unfortunately shared by many - when listening to these composers. You may always find them pompous, self-indulgent, and overlong (though I don't, except occasionally overlong), but it need have nothing to do with the cultural associations accreted since their deaths. Like all great artists, they speak powerfully to our humanity. That I can hear. I can't hear German nationalism.

By the way, Hitler loved the operettas of Lehar, probably more than Wagner, and Verdi was more frequently performed than Wagner in German opera houses during the Reich.


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## Fugue Meister (Jul 5, 2014)

Personally I don't care much for Bruckner but his artistry has stood the test of time and he certainly deserves all the attention he gets for writing a wealth of music that uplifts and comforts those who do enjoy his work.


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## dieter (Feb 26, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> Such frivolous disparagements of one of music's great originals!
> 
> I think the "rock" analogy has something to it. There is a stasis beneath Bruckner's motion, analogous to the "stasis" we can experience in a meditative state: movement we observe around us and inside us is experienced from a place of stillness which is deeply satisfying. Bruckner's music transpires in time because that's what music does, yet his peculiar structures, which alternate between different planes of motion and affect, slowly accumulating size, depth, and wholeness, defy the ordinary tensions of time - the sense of progression typical of Western harmonic music - and finally suggest something permanent beneath the phenomena of existence and perception.
> 
> Not everyone responds positively to this; Bruckner tries people's patience as he breaks off paragraphs in midstream where other composers would continue the argument. But those who love him hear in his own patient deliberation - why be impatient when you're fixed upon the eternal? - something transcendent and sublime. One doesn't need to be Christian, or even religious, to understand this. We all live in time, yet transcend it. Bruckner speaks explicitly to this duality, taking consolation in that deeper consciousness (in God, or in ourselves) which transcends the transient and the accidental, and offers us peace.


This is the most beautiful post on music on any site I've read in my life. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I find it as uplifting as a story by Alice Munro.


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## Richard8655 (Feb 19, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> What does German nationalism sound like, if it isn't some Mannerchor belting out "Deutschland uber Alles"? I hope you will be able to discard that ideological filter - unfortunately shared by many - when listening to these composers. You may always find them pompous, self-indulgent, and overlong (though I don't, except occasionally overlong), but it need have nothing to do with the cultural associations accreted since their deaths. Like all great artists, they speak powerfully to our humanity. That I can hear. I can't hear German nationalism.
> 
> By the way, Hitler loved the operettas of Lehar, probably more than Wagner, and Verdi was more frequently performed than Wagner in German opera houses during the Reich.


I think there are cultural connections between music and historical events. I also think to say Wagner and Bruckner were purely into composing for the sake of humanity is a bit naive. Both saw German nationalism as a driving force, although Wagner much more so. As mentioned, the Ring is a prime example. This had repercussions later on.

I'd also add that Verdi and Beethoven were interested in other themes and stories, and not that kind of nationalism per se. I think Mahler is a better representation of what is meant by music and humanity and doesn't come with the baggage of a national destiny theme.

I guess I've had enough of flag waving as seen in our current local politics from a certain quarter, so this may be affecting my views of classical music these days, fairly or unfairly.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

Absence of a "national destiny theme" is as bad as any baggage that can come with it, because then you're just abdicating an important political question to other people. And then you end up writing phrases like this:



Woodduck said:


> ...they speak powerfully to our humanity.


Which means exactly nothing.

Verdi, maybe the most politically admirable great composer, has a national destiny theme.


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## SilenceIsGolden (May 5, 2013)

Harold in Columbia said:


> Same goes for Beethoven on all counts, so all that means exactly nothing.
> 
> The fact that Wagner was himself a proto-Nazi who wrote a great epic about how the German gods have to die and take the whole world with them because they allowed themselves to be polluted by Jewish influence is, of course, more significant.


Even if such a component does exist in the work, claiming that it is self-evident is quite the exaggeration. One simply has to look at the responses it has evoked and continues to elicit from a majority of it's audiences to see that this isn't something that most people are even conscious of in their experience of _The Ring_. It's certainly worth noting that even someone as critical of both antisemitism and work of Wagner as Nietzsche, who knew Wagner and discussed his life, works, and personal philosophy at length, never attacked the drama on that front. It's also noteworthy that in the history of Wagner reception, only in the last few decades have there been extensive claims about the racist subtexts of his works, and that Nazi commentators on Wagner didn't produce antisemitic interpretations, which they clearly would have done if they felt they would be persuasive.

Besides, such an obvious meaning is curiously coded and esoteric, given that there is no overt racism in the work. It doesn't contain any Jewish characters, like a Fagin, or a Shylock. Indeed, it's so well hidden that Wagner himself appears to have been unaware of it. There is no single example, in all of Wagner's voluminous writings and correspondence, nor in recorded conversation, of his discussion of an antisemitic message in any of his works. If Wagner had really intended subtexts of antisemitic caricature and allegory in the music dramas, this seems highly improbable. I mean we are talking about the most tactlessly explicit of men here. Moreover, Wagner was far too self-conscious an artist to remain oblivious to such a dimension in his work, even if we were to suppose it had somehow developed unconsciously at first.

But the bigger point that is that while any such meaning may seem reasonable and sounds plausible, such a shallow summary of what the tetralogy is supposedly about could never even begin to encompass all the nuances and complexities of the work, or even communicate anything the least bit illuminating about it at all. If you look at the narrative it's clear that the gods aren't "polluted" by any external influence, but that the corruption comes from within, and are a direct consequence of Wotan's own actions. Despite a writer like Adorno's mistaken belief that in _Das Rheingold_ Wotan is meant to be straightforwardly sympathetic, it is quite obvious that he is depicted as anything but perfect. Before the action has began, Wotan has pursued power to the point of practically losing his capacity to love. His own appetite for world-domination through his attempt to build up and control an ordered civilization in an authoritarian manner has led him to seek it at the possible price of the love-goddess Freia, who is offered as payment to the Giants for the building of Valhalla. During Wotan's theft of Alberich's ring in Scene 4, Wotan stands in the worst possible light: as a figure of hypocrisy, arrogance, and brutality. Going back even further, as we learn from the Norns in _Götterdämmerung_, the pollution can be traced to Wotan's act of cutting off a branch from the World-Ash Tree to make his spear, causing the tree to wither and the Well of Wisdom to dry up, and Wotan to lose an eye, which symbolizes his blindness to the claims of love.

On the other side, all the antagonists in the work, from Alberich and Mime, Falsot and Fafner, to Hunding and Hagen, are marvelously ambiguous with unique characteristics and and motivations, that there isn't really one central driving force of evil that can be equated to some kind of Jewish influence. If it is not only obvious, but true, that Alberich and Mime are redolent of Jewishness in some way or other, then how does this modify our feelings about Alberich? No doubt he is ugly, and the Rhinemaidens, with their purely aesthetic reactions, find him loathsome; he is prepared to forgo love for power, but the love involved in his case is really only a kind of lust. He is shockingly treated by Loge and Wotan, and his indictment of them, Wotan in particular, is devastating in the passage leading up to the curse. When he and the Wanderer meet in Act II of _Siegfried_ he annihilates Wotan with his arguments. In the astonishing scene at the beginning of Act II of _Götterdämmerung_, he is a strange figure of pathos and anguish. And this is the "villain" of _The Ring_? It seems to me Wagner's operas consist partly in showing us how much more complicated his characters are, almost all of them, than just "villains", or for the matter "heroes".


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## SilenceIsGolden (May 5, 2013)

Richard8655 said:


> I think there are cultural connections between music and historical events. I also think to say Wagner and Bruckner were purely into composing for the sake of humanity is a bit naive. Both saw German nationalism as a driving force, although Wagner much more so. As mentioned, the Ring is a prime example. This had repercussions later on.
> 
> I'd also add that Verdi and Beethoven were interested in other themes and stories, and not that kind of nationalism per se. I think Mahler is a better representation of what is meant by music and humanity and doesn't come with the baggage of a national destiny theme.
> 
> I guess I've had enough of flag waving as seen in our current local politics from a certain quarter, so this may be affecting my views of classical music these days, fairly or unfairly.


Of course there are strands of nationalism embedded in Wagner's works, but interpretations of them that focus solely on these aspects ignore many other themes and that are so much more prevalent. Yes, _Die Meistersinger_ can in one sense be seen as an attempt to create an embodiment of a collective, cultural memory of the German nation. But as a work of art, it's not necessarily any more compromised than Verdi, whose arias were sung in the streets, and who it is said wrote the soundtrack to Italy's liberal-nationalist unification. "Va, pensiero", the slaves chorus from _Nabucco_, is a people's lament for a homeland that became a rallying cry against Austrian occupation after the opera's first performances.


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## Bruckner Anton (Mar 10, 2016)

jegreenwood said:


> Brahms also described Bruckner's music as symphonic boa-constrictors. Which is about how I feel about most (not all) of the symphonies. I like the choral music more.


Musicians sometimes use harsh words to degrade other musicians of a different group. I never treat them seriously. Tchaikovsy said Brahms is an giftless Bast**d, but I found Brahms' musical ideas developed in a much more genious way. What I believe is the notes composers wrote on the scores which keep us away from meaningless rumours.


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## Alfacharger (Dec 6, 2013)

Aries said:


> One thing that is really important about Bruckner, and that for me let him stand about every other composer is the following:
> 
> Bruckner does not try to entertain. Other composers like Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovski, basically everyone else tries to entertain, they wrote music for people. Bruckner wrote music for god.
> 
> Other composers care about the listeners, they try to convey their music, they try to impress the listeners. And they are really good at it, Bruckner sound dull compared to it. But Bruckners music is different. Bruckners music is like a rock. Rocks are immobile. They don't come to the listeners. The listeners have to come to the rock. But if they climb it, it is they best feeling, no music can be compared to this. Bruckner wrote his music for god, he knew he would understand everything, he had to make no compromises for people.


I have to disagree with your premise that Bruckner did not want to entertain. There are about 30 versions of the symphonies that he or others reworked during Bruckner's lifetime, with or without Bruckner's permission. [I'm not talking about Haas and Nowak's editions] All were done with the wish that the audience would except his work. Bruckner was not Havergal Brian!


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## Alydon (May 16, 2012)

Whether Bruckner wanted to entertain or not he certainly was very self-conscious about his work keeping in mind how many times he re-wrote pieces, and he had several periods of terrible self-doubt about how his work was to be received. Bruckner comes across as a very sincere artist who isn't out to prove anything, but of course he doesn't need to either. This composer's strength or maybe longevity, is the same as all great composers, in the fact their work has always seemed to exist and you become unaware when listening that the music was actually conjured out of another human being's brain. Bruckner was apparently a very humble man who I'm sure would have been mildly amused that his creations (choral music as well) were so highly regarded so long after his death.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Alydon said:


> Bruckner comes across as a very sincere artist who isn't out to prove anything, but of course he doesn't need to either.


Here is an interesting statement by him about why he wrote what he did: "Working is better for me than doing nothing. I am not the type of madman who likes to have everything which I've composed performed on stage right away; I compose for myself and for the rest of humanity in order to build, so that, when God one day would call me forward asking. 'What did you do with the talent that I gave you?' I can show him."


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