Anton Bruckner

Happy birthday, Anton Bruckner! On 4 September, the Austrian composer would have celebrated his 200th birthday – a good reason to perform some of his most important works. After all, few composers have posed as many riddles to posterity as Anton Bruckner. He was often described by his contemporaries as an awkward and indecisive loner, who could sometimes offend his fellow composers with his lack of tact. When composing, he was often plagued by self-doubt and often reworked his works until the enormous masses of sound were balanced down to the finest detail. And it was worth it: Bruckner’s symphonies in particular are among the most monumental and sonorous that the genre has to offer – it was not for nothing that the conductor Lorin Maazel once described them as »cathedrals of never-before-heard sounds«.