Bruckner's Symphonies

Description:
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.

Review:
Review of the hardback: 'Julian Horton has painstakingly explored Bruckner's symphonic output from assorted perspectives - historical, political and psychobiographical. The result is a fascinating reassessment of a unique musical universe. Horton's conclusions - that Bruckner's symphonies embody the conflicts between subjectivity and faith, artifice and innovation, bourgeois secularity and religious authority - are stimulatingly controversial. This is an important and provocative piece of scholarship.' Link Review of the hardback: 'Horton's comprehensive grasp contrasts sharply with the dismissive, patronising or misguided comments of many previous writers' Classical Music Review of the hardback: 'This is an impressive book and at times an inspiring one. The Bruckner Journal Review of the hardback: ' ... important and fascinating ...Horton presents his evidence carefully and skilfully ...the presentation of the books is immaculate and up to CUP's very high standards ... Julian Horton has made a most impressive contribution to what he rightly describers as the 'considerable scholarly impetus that has built up behind Bruckner in recent transatlantic musicology.' Music and Letters Review of the hardback: '... a highly valuable contribution to Bruckner scholarship ...' Nineteenth-Century Music Review

Table of 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.

Author Biography:
Julian Horton is Lecturer in Music at University College Dublin. He contributed an essay to The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner (2003) and has also published articles and reviews on Brucknerian topics in Music and Letters and Music Analysis.