Bruckner panned

Synopsis

On this day in the year 1886, critic Gustav Dompke wrote these lines in the “German Times” of Vienna, after attending a performance of one of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies: “We recoil in horror before this rotting odor which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive counterpoint... Bruckner composes like a drunkard!”

Today, with Bruckner’s symphonies performed and recorded so often, it’s doubtful many listeners “recoil in horror” from his rich Romantic harmonies, but he’s always been a little controversial. Bruckner’s European contemporaries and his early American audiences found his approach to symphonic composition puzzling, bizarre, or, more often than not, simply boring.

The vogue for Bruckner symphonies in America had to wait until the latter part of the 20th century, a full century after many of them received their premiere performances in Europe.

In 1941, for example, when Bruno Walter conducted Bruckner’s giant Eighth Symphony at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic, music critic Olin Downes lamented that Walter hadn’t chosen a “more interesting” program and noted that the Bruckner symphony “sent a number from the hall before it had finished.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Anton Bruckner (1824 - 1896) — Symphony No. 8 (Concergebouw Orchestra; Riccardo Chailly, cond.) London 466 653

On This Day

Births

• 1930 - American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, in New York City;

• 1868 - Scottish composer and conductor Hamisch MacCunn, in Greenock;

• 1943 - American composer Joseph Schwantner, in Chicago;

• 1948 - British composer Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, in London;

Deaths

• 1687 - Italian-born French composer Jean Baptiste Lully, age 54, in Paris, following an inadvertent self-inflicted injury to his foot (by a staff with which he would beat time for his musicians) which developed gangrene;

Premieres

• 1963 - William Kraft: "Concerto grosso," in San Diego, Calif.;

• 1973 - Ginastera: Piano Concerto No. 2, in Indianapolis, with Hilde Somer as soloist;

• 1984 - John Harbison: Symphony No. 1, in Boston, with the Boston Symphony, Seiji Ozawa conducting;

• 1985 - John Harbison: "Twilight Music" for horn, violin and piano, at Alice Tully Hall, by members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (David Jolley, horn; James Buswell, violin; Richard Goode, piano);

• 1997 - Zwilich: "Peanuts Gallery" (after the "Peanuts" comic strip characters by Charles Schultz) for piano and chamber orchestra, at Carnegie Hall in New York by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with soloist Albert Kim.