Bruckner's Symphonies
Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics

An important 2004 study of Bruckner's symphonies from a comparative, inter-disciplinary perspective.

Julian Horton (Author)

9780521081856, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 September 2008

296 pages, 57 music examples
24.4 x 17 x 1.6 cm, 0.48 kg

Review of the hardback: '… a highly valuable contribution to Bruckner scholarship …' Nineteenth-Century Music Review

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. In this 2004 book, 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups [AVH], Romantic music [c 1830 to c 1900 AVGC5], Music [AV]