If he had expected these to appear in public soon after he passed away, he was mistaken. His wish was to have accurate scores available for posterity.

Realizing that his young editors were not always scrupulous and sometimes even tried to make his music sound more like that of Wagner, he left the autograph manuscripts of most of his major works to the Imperial Library. Wagnerian ideology and contemporary politics controlled Bruckner’s legacy well into this century. Bruckner received much of his contemporary critical acclaim from Wagnerian fundamentalists, many of whom belonged to what Margaret Notley has described as “the most extreme part of the völkisch fringe” of Vienna. Young Wagnerians including Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf, August Göloller, Ferdinand Löwe, and the brothers Franz and Joseph Schalk were among his staunchest supporters and were often responsible for the publication and performance of his music. The Academic Wagner Society of Vienna propped Bruckner up on a pedestal, and he became the darling of the local anti-Brahms, politically conservative, and often anti-Semitic press. Hanslick’s reaction played perfectly into the hands of Viennese Wagnerians. For the next thirty years the critic and his followers, in a segment of the Viennese press representing a strange combination of political liberalism and musical conservatism, vituperatively condemned what they described as the uncontrolled Wagnerians and decadence of Bruckner’s “music of the future.” The composer’s unabashed admiration for Wagner’s music soon turned Hanslick into Bruckner’s most powerful adversary. As early as 1867, when Kapellmeister Johann Herbage and the powerful critic, Eduard Hanslick, fought in the face of heavy odds to bring Bruckner from the provincial capital of Linz to imperial Vienna, they thought they had found the contemporary Austrian symphonies who could serve as a suitable counterweight to the pernicious modernist influence of Richard Wagner. Generations of supporters and adversaries have involved his name in furthering their own political or personal agendas, often coloring and negatively impacting the perception of Bruckner as a person and composer and hindering the dissemination of his music. No composer has suffered more at the hands of special interest groups than Anton Bruckner (1824-96). He died in Vienna at seventy-two.Written for the concert Bruckner and 20 th –Century Politics performed on at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. Yet, devoted to his music, he continued to write, at last acquiring fame at the age of sixty with his ‘Seventh Symphony’. In Vienna, he had to struggle hard to find acceptance, with his first symphonies being dismissed as “wild” and “nonsense.” A simple man and a devout Christian, he rewrote his works many times this habit of his was criticized by his adversaries. At forty-four, he moved to Vienna Conservatory as a professor of theory. It continued even after he was appointed the organist at Linz cathedral at the age of thirty-one, studying first with Simon Sechter and then with Otto Kitzler until the age of forty. Concurrently, he started studying music with different teachers. He was appointed an organist at twenty-four. Three years later, he was enrolled as a chorister in the St Florian monastery, returning to the same monastery as a teacher at twenty-one. Learning to play the organ early in his life, he started deputizing for his schoolmaster father, whose duties included playing the organ, from the age of ten. Josef Anton Bruckner was a renowned 19th century composer and organist from Austria.

Composer bruckner