Bruckner's Symphonies

Julian Horton

Few works in the nineteenth-century repertoire have aroused such extremes of hostility and admiration, or have generated so many scholarly problems, as Anton Bruckner’s symphonies. Julian Horton seeks fresh ways of understanding the symphonies and the problems they have accrued by treating them as the focus for a variety of inter-disciplinary debates and methodological controversies. He isolates problematic areas in the works analysis and reception, and approaches them from a range of analytical, historical, philosophical, literary, critical and psychoanalytical viewpoints. The symphonies are thus explored in the context of a number of crucial and sometimes provocative themes, including the political circumstances of the works production, Bruckner and post-war musical analysis, issues of musical influence, the problem of editions, Bruckner and psychobiography, and the composer’s controversial relationship to the Nazis.

Bibliographic Details

57 music examples

Contents

• 1. Introduction: the critical problem
• 2. Bruckner and nineteenth-century Vienna: analysis and historical context
• 3. Right-wing cultural politics and the Nazi appropriation of Bruckner
• 4. Bruckner and musical analysis
• 5. Bruckner and the construction of musical influence
• 6. Analysis and the problem of the editions
• 7. Psychobiography and analysis
• 8. Epilogue: Bruckner and his contexts.