Anton Bruckner (German: [?ant?n ?b??kn?]�( listen); 4 September 1824�� 11 October 1896) was an Austrian composer known for his symphonies, masses, and motets. The first are considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich harmonic language, strongly polyphonic character, and considerable length.[1] Bruckner's compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving harmonies.
Unlike other musical radicals, such as Richard Wagner or Hugo Wolf who fit the enfant terrible mould, Bruckner showed extreme humility before other musicians, Wagner in particular. This apparent dichotomy between Bruckner the man and Bruckner the composer hampers efforts to describe his life in a way that gives a straightforward context for his music.
His works, the symphonies in particular, had detractors, most notably the influential Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick, and other supporters of Johannes Brahms (and detractors of Wagner), who pointed to their large size, use of repetition,[2] and Bruckner's propensity to revise many of his works, often with the assistance of colleagues, and his apparent indecision about which versions he preferred. On the other hand, Bruckner was greatly admired by subsequent composers, including his friend Gustav Mahler, who described him as "half simpleton, half God".[3]

Anton�n Leopold Dvo?�k (/?dv?r???k/ dvor-zhahk or /d??v?r?�k/ di-vor-zhak; Czech:�[?anto?i?n ?l?opolt ?dvor?a?k]�( listen); September 8, 1841�� May�1, 1904) was a Czech composer. Following the nationalist example of Bed?ich Smetana, Dvo?�k frequently employed features of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia (then parts of the Austrian Empire and now constituting the Czech Republic). Dvo?�k's own style has been described as 'the fullest recreation of a national idiom with that of the symphonic tradition, absorbing folk influences and finding effective ways of using them'.[1]
In 1892, Dvo?�k moved to the United States and became the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York City, where he also composed. However, a salary dispute, along with increasing recognition in Europe and an onset of homesickness made him decide to return to Bohemia. From 1895 until his death, he composed mainly operatic and chamber music. At his death, he left several unfinished works.
Dvo?�k's main goal in America was to discover "American Music" and engage in it, much as he had used Czech folk idioms within his music. Shortly after his arrival in America in 1892, Dvo?�k wrote a series of newspaper articles reflecting on the state of American music. He supported the concept that African-American and Native American music should be used as a foundation for the growth of American music. He felt that through the music of Native Americans and African-Americans, Americans would find their own national style of music.[37] Here Dvo?�k met Harry Burleigh, his pupil at the time and one of the earliest African-American composers. Burleigh introduced Dvo?�k to traditional American spirituals.[38]
In the winter and spring of 1893, Dvo?�k was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to write Symphony No.9, "From the New World", which was premiered under the baton of Anton Seidl.

C�sar-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck (10 December 1822 � 8 November 1890) was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life.
He was born at Li�ge, in what is now Belgium (though at the time of his birth it was under the Netherlands' control). In that city he gave his first concerts in 1834. He studied privately in Paris from 1835, where his teachers included Anton Reicha. After a brief return to Belgium, and a disastrous reception to an early oratorio Ruth, he moved to Paris, where he married and embarked on a career as teacher and organist. He gained a reputation as a formidable improviser, and travelled widely in France to demonstrate new instruments built by Aristide Cavaill�-Coll.
In 1858 he became organist at Sainte-Clotilde, a position he retained for the rest of his life. He became professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1872; he took French nationality, a requirement of the appointment. His pupils included Vincent d'Indy, Ernest Chausson, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, Guillaume Lekeu, and Henri Duparc. After acquiring the professorship Franck wrote several pieces that have entered the standard classical repertoire, including symphonic, chamber, and keyboard works.
Some controversy arose with the publication of Franck's only symphony, that in D minor (1888). The work was badly received: the Conservatoire orchestra opposed,[49] the audience "ice-cold", the critics bewildered (the reactions ranged from "unreserved enthusiasm" to "systematic disparagement"), and many of Franck's fellow composers completely out of countenance towards a work "which by its general style and even certain details" (for example, use of an English horn) "outraged the formalist rules and habits of the stricter professionals and amateurs."[50] Franck himself, on being asked whether the symphony had any basis in a poetic idea, told Louis de Serres, a pupil, that "no, it is just music, nothing but pure music.".[51] According to Vallas, much of its style and technique (both good and not so good) can be attributed directly to the centrality of the organ in Franck's thinking and artistic life, and Franck profited from the experience. "He confided in his pupils that from thence on he would never write like that again."[52]


Gustav Mahler (German pronunciation: [???staf ?ma?l?]; 7�July 1860 � 18�May 1911) was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. A Jew, he was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then the Austrian Empire, now Kali?t? in the Czech Republic. His family later moved to nearby Iglau (now Jihlava), where Mahler grew up.
As a composer, Mahler acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 the music was discovered and championed by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became a frequently performed and recorded composer, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.
Born in humble circumstances, Mahler displayed his musical gifts at an early age. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper). During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press. Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner and Mozart. Late in his life he was briefly director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
Mahler's �uvre is relatively small; for much of his life composing was necessarily a part-time activity while he earned his living as a conductor, but he devoted as much time as he could to his compositions, faithfully reserving his summer months for intense periods of creative concentration, supplemented as time permitted during his active concert seasons with the tasks of editing and orchestrating his expansive works. Aside from early works such as a movement from a piano quartet composed when he was a student in Vienna, Mahler's works are designed for large orchestral forces, symphonic choruses and operatic soloists. Most of his twelve symphonic scores are very large-scale works, often employing vocal soloists and choruses in addition to augmented orchestral forces. These works were often controversial when first performed, and several were slow to receive critical and popular approval; exceptions included his Symphony No. 2, Symphony No. 3, and the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony in 1910. Some of Mahler's immediate musical successors included the composers of the Second Viennese School, notably Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten are among later 20th-century composers who admired and were influenced by Mahler. The International Gustav Mahler Institute was established in 1955, to honour the composer's life and work.

Three creative periods


The opening of Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, published 1897 in a version for voice and piano
Deryck Cooke and other analysts have divided Mahler's composing life into three distinct phases: a long "first period", extending from Das klagende Lied in 1880 to the end of the Wunderhorn phase in 1901; a "middle period" of more concentrated composition ending with Mahler's departure for New York in 1907; and a brief "late period" of elegiac works before his death in 1911.[120]
The main works of the first period are the first four symphonies, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen song cycle and various song collections in which the Wunderhorn songs predominate.[30] In this period songs and symphonies are closely related and the symphonic works are programmatic. Mahler initially gave the first three symphonies full descriptive programmes, all of which he later repudiated.[121] He devised, but did not publish, titles for each of the movements for the Fourth Symphony; from these titles the German music critic Paul Bekker conjectured a programme in which Death appears in the Scherzo "in the friendly, legendary guise of the fiddler tempting his flock to follow him out of this world".[122]
The middle period comprises a triptych of purely instrumental symphonies (the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh), the R�ckert songs and the Kindertotenlieder, two final Wunderhorn settings and, in some reckonings, Mahler's last great affirmative statement, the choral Eighth Symphony.[83] Cooke believes that the Eighth stands on its own, between the middle and final periods.[123] Mahler had by now abandoned all explicit programmes and descriptive titles; he wanted to write "absolute" music that spoke for itself.[124] Cooke refers to "a new granite-like hardness of orchestration" in the middle-period symphonies,[83] while the songs have lost most of their folk character, and cease to fertilise the symphonies as explicitly as before.[125]
The works of the brief final period�Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth and (incomplete) Tenth Symphonies�are expressions of personal experience, as Mahler faced death.[126] Each of the pieces ends quietly, signifying that aspiration has now given way to resignation.[127] Cooke considers these works to be a loving (rather than a bitter) farewell to life;[128] the composer Alban Berg called the Ninth "the most marvellous thing that Mahler ever wrote".[126] None of these final works was performed in Mahler's lifetime.[129]


Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (/?pj??t?r ??li?t? t?a??k?fski/; Russian:[a 1] tr. Pyotr Ilyich Chaykovsky; 7 May 1840�� 6 November 1893),[a 2] anglicised as Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky /?pi?t?r .../, was a Russian composer whose works included symphonies, concertos, operas, ballets, chamber music, and a choral setting of the Russian Orthodox Divine Liturgy. Some of these are among the most popular theatrical music in the classical repertoire. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally, which he bolstered with appearances as a guest conductor later in his career in Europe and the United States. One of these appearances was at the inaugural concert of Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1891. Tchaikovsky was honored in 1884 by Emperor Alexander III, and awarded a lifetime pension in the late 1880s.
Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant. There was scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at that time, and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865. The formal Western-oriented teaching he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five, with whom his professional relationship was mixed. Tchaikovsky's training set him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood. From this reconciliation, he forged a personal but unmistakably Russian style�a task that did not prove easy. The principles that governed melody, harmony and other fundamentals of Russian music ran completely counter to those that governed Western European music; this seemed to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or from forming a composite style, and it caused personal antipathies that dented Tchaikovsky's self-confidence. Russian culture exhibited a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great, and this resulted in uncertainty among the intelligentsia of the country's national identity.
Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky's life was punctuated by personal crises and depression. Contributory factors included his leaving his mother for boarding school, his mother's early death and the collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck. His homosexuality, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor, though some musicologists now downplay its importance. His sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera; there is an ongoing debate as to whether it was accidental or self-inflicted.
While his music has remained popular among audiences, critical opinions were initially mixed. Some Russians did not feel it sufficiently representative of native musical values and were suspicious that Europeans accepted it for its Western elements. In apparent reinforcement of the latter claim, some Europeans lauded Tchaikovsky for offering music more substantive than base exoticism, and thus transcending stereotypes of Russian classical music. Tchaikovsky's music was dismissed as "lacking in elevated thought," according to longtime New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, and its formal workings were derided as deficient for not following Western principles stringently.
Structure[edit]
Tchaikovsky struggled with sonata form. Its principle of organic growth through the interplay of musical themes was alien to Russian practice, which placed themes into a series of self-contained sections with no interaction or clear transition from one section to the next. Without organic growth, building a large-scale, evolving musical structure would be daunting, if not impossible.[182] Nor did sonata form take into account the heightened emotional statements that many Romantic-era composers were inclined to make since it was designed to operate on a logical, intellectual level, not an emotive one.[192][a 12]


Sonata form as a dramatic pyramid showing the three main sections�exposition, development and recapitulation
According to Brown and musicologists Hans Keller and Daniel Zhitomirsky, Tchaikovsky found his solution to large-scale structure, while composing the Fourth Symphony, by sidestepping thematic interaction and keep sonata form only as an "outline," as Zhitomirsky phrases it, containing two contrasting themes.[193] Within this outline, the focus now centered on periodic alternation and juxtaposition. Instead of offering what Brown calls "a rich and well-ordered argument," Tchaikovsky integrates what Keller calls "new and violent contrasts" between musical themes, keys and harmonies by placing blocks of dissimilar tonal and thematic material alongside one another.[194] The block containing the main theme, Zhitomirsky writes, alternates with the one containing the second theme, with the former "steadily enlivened in reiteration with the result that the very contrast of the two blocks is consistently sharpened."[193] These themes, he explains, are demarcated by their distinct contrast in musical material and "by the fact that each theme usually constitutes an independent and structurally complete episode."[195]
Repetition is commonly cited as an integral part of Russian music�many of its folk songs are essentially a series of variations on one basic shape or pattern of a few notes, "using similar intervals and phrases with an almost ritual insistence," according to Warrack.[201] It is also a natural part of Tchaikovsky's music. His use of sequences within melodies (repeating a tune at a higher or lower pitch in the same voice)[202] could go on for extreme length.[174] The problem with repetition is that, over a period of time, the melody being repeated remains static, even when there is a surface level of rhythmic activity added to it. Beneath that surface, nothing really moves or goes anywhere; the effect of that rhythm is decorative, not organic, because no true progress has taken place.[203] Sonata form, on the other hand, operates by progression. Two contrasting themes interact like people in a conversation or an argument. They discuss an issue, agree, disagree, but the conversation goes somewhere; it grows and builds toward some conclusion. If a conversation, and by extension a musical work in sonata form, becomes static, everything stalls.[204]
Like other late Romantic composers, Tchaikovsky relied heavily on orchestration for musical effects.[216] Tchaikovsky, however, became noted for the "sensual opulence" and "voluptuous timbrel virtuosity" of his scoring.[217] Like Glinka, Tchaikovsky tended toward bright primary colors and sharply delineated contrasts of texture.[218] However, beginning with the Third Symphony, Tchaikovsky experimented with an increased range of timbres[219] He continued further along this path with the Fourth Symphony and the orchestral suites, especially the Second. By the time he scored the scherzo of the Manfred symphony, Tchaikovsky was able to conjure what Brown calls "a kaleidoscopic web of delicate sound of remarkable virtuosity." Tchaikovsky tends to balance timbral extremes, matching high, delicate tones with darker, sometimes gloomier ones. The most familiar example of his extreme range of sound is in The Nutcracker.[174]
Tchaikovsky's scoring was noted and admired by some of his peers. Rimsky-Korsakov, for instance, regularly referred his students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to it as a model of how to orchestrate. He felt his own style of orchestral writing "too highly peppered," in his words, for his pupils to emulate. He considered Tchaikovsky's scores, again in his own words, "devoid of all striving after effect, [to] give a healthy, beautiful sonority."[220] This sonority, musicologist Richard Taruskin points out, is essentially Germanic in effect. Tchaikovsky's expert use of having two or more instruments play a melody simultaneously (a practice called doubling) and his ear for uncanny combinations of instruments resulted in "a generalized orchestral sonority in which the individual timbres of the instruments, being thoroughly mixed, would vanish."[221]