The great Austrian composer Anton Bruckner (1824–1896) was a music scholar
and an educator. A school-teacher profession, inherited from his father, was
tightly connected with his personality development in Austrian St. Florian
monastery, which was his spiritual homeland and where he obtained his unsur-
passed skills as an organ improviser. Then he moved to Linz where he ceased
to be a school-teacher and began to be a council organist and a student of the
famous Viennese theorist Simon Sechter. He took over Sechter’s professorship in
the conservatoire of Vienna and became a professor at Vienna university where
he was awarded the status of Doctor Honoris Causa. His scientifi c ideas of the
so-called “musical architecture” can be compared with typical concepts and
formal structures of his mature symphonies from the Third to the Ninth. When
he became a world’s famous composer, who was well supported by the govern-
ment, he didn’t stop giving lectures to students because his devotion to music
science and pedagogy was deeply rooted in his indestructible Christian faith
and his creative power as a composer.
Keywords: historiography of Brucknerian research, organ improvisation, musical architecture, epic scherzo, genres of equal, Mass, and symphony.
REFERENCES
1. Auer M. Anton Bruckner. Sein Leben und Werk. Wien: Musikwissenschaftlicher
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2. Bruckner A. Vorlesungen ueber Harmonielehre und Kontrapunkt an der Universi-
taet Wien / A. Bruckner [Hrgb. von E. Schwanzara]. Wien: Oesterreichischer Bundes-
verlag fuer Unterricht, Wissenschaft und Kunst, 1950. 288 S.
3. Cook Deryck, Becker Heinz, Clapham John, Sams Eric. The New Grove Late
Romantic Masters Bruckner Brahms Dvorak Wolf /The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians / Editor: Stanly Sadie /The Composer Biography Series. New
York-London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985. 401 p.
4. Decsey E. Bruckner. Versuch eines Lebens. Stuttgart-Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt vereinigt mit Schuster & Loeffl er, 1922. 234 S.
