Replies

For the Eighth, try Herbert Von Karajan's second-last recording, from the late 1980's with the Vienna Philharmonic. (The conductor Franz-Paul Decker, when asked if he was about to die, which music would he like to conduct last, indicated the slow movement of Bruckner's 8th.) I really enjoyed Bruckner's 9th with Bruno Walter on it's old CBS Odyssey incarnation, but for some reason I haven't been quite as nuts about it on it's various CD appearances forCBS Masterworks/Sony. Those interested in the choral music might want to try Eugen Jochum's recordings, also on Deutsche Grammophon.

And now a humourous story about ol' Anton:

The following incident is from Jan Swafford's 1997 biography of Brahms, page 500 of the original hardcover:

Outlandish stories about Bruckner went the rounds in Vienna, many of them true. Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop. There were, for instance, the incidents regarding the Beethoven and Schubert remains. Both composers were exhumed in 1888 for reburial in "Graves of Honor" in Vienna's Central Cemetery. Before reburial the coffins were opened for the inspection of doctors and scientists. Bruckner, then sixty-four, showed up uninvited on both occasions. When he saw Beethoven's open casket, he shoved past the horrified doctors and seized the skull in both his hands, staring into the empty sockets as if he were trying to divine the sublime riddle of genius, and declaimed in his Upper Austrian drawl,"Now ain't it true, dear Beethoven, that if you were alive today you'd allow me to touch you? And now them strange gentlemen here want to forbid me that!" He had to be forcibly removed. Beethoven's bones may be decorated to this day by a lens from Bruckner's spectacles, which fell out during the ruckus. He pulled the same stunt at Schubert's exhumation, refusing to release the skull until they allowed him to place it in the coffin himself.

Just don't ask me what "Upper Austrian drawl" for "ain't" was.